The auction house, Christie’s, sold more than a billion dollars’-worth of art last night.
To be precise, $1.1 billion.
Even in this era of wartime, post-pandemic inflation, that’s a lot of scratch.
If you spend, for instance, an average of $225 a week on groceries, $1.1 billion’ll keep you rolling in potato chips, bananas, Black Forest ham, and frozen peas for the next 94,000-plus years. That is, you, your children, your grandchildren, your great-grandchildren, and what the hell ever humanity evolves into following our species’ inevitable nuclear holocausts, climate disasters, the Trump presidency, and other horrifyingly adverse developments in store for us.
The artists whose works were peddled last night include Jackson Pollock, Constantin Brancusi, Pablo Picasso, Piet Mondrian, Henri Matisse, Joan Miró, Jasper Johns, Andy Warhol, and Robert Rauschenberg. Of that list, eight won’t see a penny of the take because they’re dead. Only Johns remains alive but he’s 96 as of today, so I don’t think another few zeroes added to his savings account total would mean terribly much to him.
Then again, at least one artist’ll see a payday.
The art world is full of shit. We’ve known that for at least a half century. In 1975, the “New Journalism” author Tom Wolfe’s book, The Painted Word was published by Farrar, Straus. In it, Wolfe revealed and lambasted the kings of “Cultureburg,” the tight-knit little bunch of art critics who told the world what was good and what was not in the realms of painting, sculpture, and other creative pastimes.
Pastimes being the operative word here inasmuch as artists rarely make enough money to purchase even a ten-year old car but their artwork sometimes can enrich the already rich by millions, hundreds of millions, or, like last night, billions.
It’s a racket, I tell you.
Wolfe wrote that 20th century art had devolved from the representational — that is, pictures of things — to a lawyerly brief arguing nuances of Art Theory. In other words, bullshit.
In fact, a 2021 essay in the venerable British journal ArtReview was entitled, “Why We Tolerate the Art World’s Bullshit.”
Pollock, by the way, most specifically embodied the art world’s bullshit with his dribs-and-drabs, streaks-and-splotches canvases that resembled the colorfully oil-splattered jeans and smocks of countless painters, pros and hobbyists alike. A plumber viewing any of Pollock’s works might be ridiculed for commenting, “My kindergarten kid coulda done that,” even though that critique was more true and astute than a thousand reviews penned by the habitués of Cultureburg.
A woman contemplates a Pollock.
It puzzles me that some enterprising artist has yet to offer up her rainbowed blue jeans as an actual work of art and made scads of dough on them. Proof positive that artists, by and large, are lousy businesspeople. The greed monkeys who excel in business ought to have come up with this idea themselves but so far have not. Just wait.
As for Pollock, at least he did something, as infantile and pretentiously pointless as his work was, as opposed to the moneyed art collectors who bid obscene amounts for his painting at Christie’s last night. People cheered for and congratulated the winning bid as if the painting’s new owner had, y’know, actually made something.
Yeah, the art world’s full of shit.