Why We and They Do It...

Patrick Appel while blogging for Andrew Sullivan in The Daily Dish posted this about "The Religion of Art" quoting Michael Lewis from The New Republic 1994.

“The religion of art has been appropriated from artists by collectors and dealers. How and when I do not know; but at some point the idealist and the consumer began to walk hand in hand. The idea that works of art confer nobility upon those who trade them is simply an extension of the notion that works of art are a repository of terminal values. And the comical pretensions of the art market are simply a response to the idealists’ prejudice that things done for their own sake are more noble or “fine” than things done for a concrete purpose (say, money or prestige).”
Appel goes on to say “Art’s belief structure is part of why Damien Hirst could sell a formaldehyded shark for a cool $12 million. While such a purchase might not make sense to ordinary person, to an art affectionado [sic] the price is affirmed by a belief in the nobility and the near sacredness of art-making.”

So on reading this and thinking about on how the likes of Warhol, Hirst and Koons seemingly dominate the high-end art market because of their appeal to collectors whose skill is in recognizing their art as commodities that then celebrate their own terminal values of acquisition and shuffling of monied instruments, would there be a justifiable reaction by a Marxist leaning artist to want jump off screaming “I want nothing to do with this!”

Knowing how far most artists are from making this kind of commodity art, knowing that we can never crack this market, why do we keep on making art? Also knowing how many artists seemingly espouse left-of-center values, it poses the question of why artists want rich people to buy what we produce.

In an interview with Chuck Close, Phong Bui in The Brooklyn Rail. . . .”when I was 11. I saw this Jackson Pollock drip painting with aluminum paint, tar, gravel and all that stuff. I was absolutely outraged, disturbed. It was so far removed from what I thought art was. However, within 2 or 3 days, I was dripping paint all over my old paintings. In a way I’ve been chasing that experience ever since. That’s the reason why I’ve been going to see shows in different galleries, and trying to look at the work of emerging artists as much as I can, in an attempt to recreate or re-live that sensation of being shocked. That’s the greatest moment in an artist’s life. Whatever you hold true to art is being challenged; you sort of recoil and it gets under your skin and just keeps bothering you until you understand what the issues are. After all, painting is just colored dirt smeared on flat surface, on wood panels, canvases. It makes space where it doesn’t exist, but you relate to it through life experience. Anyway, after Pollock it was Frank Stella’s black stripes paintings, and the first time I saw Andy Warhol’s Brillo boxes at Stable gallery my reaction was the same. That kind of wonderful freshness that challenges one’s previous perception. I think that the art world at any given time is like a huge amoeba shape, and someone eventually comes along and operates outside of that shape. They make work that doesn’t fit anywhere and nobody’s quite sure whether it’s art or not. And very quickly the amoeba goes out and encapsulate that isolated island outside the mainstream and sort of moves it into the body of the art world. And as a result, the art world is modified because that artist was there; they digested and brought new insight and ways of seeing art. I love the fact that there’re no agreed upon standards of judgment, and no yardstick that applied to every work of art.”

Close goes on to further say, “Painters drop crumbs along the trail. . .for others to pick up if they want to.”

Thus to paraphrase Simon Schama in naming the artists who picked up Vincent Van Gogh’s bread crumbs, Oskar Kokoschka, Howard Hodgkin, Villem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock.

This is what we artists want and need to do. We want to see into the unknown, have that shock of wonderful freshness that Close refers to, we want to modify the world somehow, to pick up those breadcrumbs that have been left for us, to drop a few for others to find.

At some level, it becomes a religious, transcendental experience to smear paint onto those surfaces, to create new spaces and new realities, as well as for those patrons, who no matter how well-heeled, can perhaps share in the experience by buying and selling it (to each other), owning it, donating it to the high temples of art museums.

This is the only explanation I can come up with so far in my short life for this odd, yet enduring partnership, relationships, symbiosis between artists and patrons. How can unique objects such as artwork become commodities and playthings for the wealthy? We are of course most familiar with the phenomenon as it was well documented starting in the Renaissance. The clichéd answer as to how the flowering of art in Renaissance Italy came about was that there was an expansion of the human spirit, an idealist answer. And yet, Florence and Venice, where double entry bookkeeping was invented, were huge, crass commercial centers, intensely interested in the constant toting up of value and money. The Florentines and the Venetians were consumers, of paintings, sculpture, Persian rugs, furniture, they were monstrously acquisitive to the point of terrorizing their neighbors by land and sea with their conquests, and their looting. They brought the stuff home as the spoils of war. Then they paid artists to make more.

Leonardo and Michelangelo had various patrons, various relationships with them, and they made the greatest art of the age.

Clearly, the painters and sculptors of ancient Egypt were supported by their patrons. It makes me wonder if in looking at the Lascaux cave art, if there was a social system and hierarchy there as well. I come to the conclusion that they were humans, therefore they had defined relationships and rules and taboos on how to relate to each other. I now wonder how the cave artists were paid, as they had to have been rewarded somehow. I want to know who assisted them, who built the scaffolds that supported them while they worked high up on the walls. I am certain that like Rembrandt, Rafael they had assistants who mixed the paint for them? I want to know about them too. We know that the Lascaux people did not live in the cave, so what was the function of the art in the cave, a high-temple of art for sure, secular or religious?