Purple Magazine
— The 30YRS Issue #38 F/W 2022

glenn o’brien (part 14)

part 14

glenn o’brien

In 1971, Glenn O’Brien became the first editor of Andy Warhol’s Interview magazine, which turned him into the voice of downtown New York. Known for his acid-sharp wit, impeccable style, way with words, and great charm, he was constantly uncovering new faces, new talents, and new art, including graffiti art. On his late-night cable show TV Party — the place to be seen — he interviewed Jean-Michel Basquiat, David Bowie, Keith Haring, Klaus Nomi, Debbie Harry, David Byrne, Iggy Pop… He always had an essay to write, a book he was working on, and somebody he wanted to interview. Forever young, he fit easily into every generation without even trying.

2012 purple diary glenn o’brien and olivier zahm at the opening of the club chez andré new york photo by stéphane feugère

When we met him in early 2000, he immediately offered to contribute to Purple. He brought a lot to the magazine and never  stopped writing for us. He died in 2017. We miss him.

 

MASTERPIECE THEATER
What is art, and why is it so expensive?
An extract from an unpublished book by Glenn O’Brien

 

I love art

I believe in art. It works miracles. It can change the way we see. It can make you think, it can change your mind and give you weird, wild ideas. It can make you quit your job, leave your husband, or move to Mallorca. It makes you think that whether or not there is progress, whether or not the world is going to hell, well, at least there’s something new.

Art needs belief and has nothing to do with religion. There may be a God, someplace or everyplace, but he’s probably out expanding a universe or tidying up distant nebulae. God implies intelligence unlikely to be monitoring thoughts or intervening in illnesses or football games or wars. According to a Gallup poll, 42% of Americans believe that God created humans in their present form 10,000 years ago. I don’t think so. I think democracy is getting dicey. You should have a choice between church and voting. I think that 11,000 years ago, there were guys in caves, making rather good paintings and getting better fast.

I am a Deist, sort of like the founders of the United States were be- fore the Enlightenment foundered. Nobody calls it Deism anymore, but that’s what religiously observant atheists are properly called. I find philosophy more interesting and, let’s face it, more tasteful than faith. I love painting, but also words and music and dancing, that kind of thing. Cooking. Tailoring. Culture is what got us here and has a history of making life worth living. So I am stuck being a huge art fan.

I would like to believe in the gods, but those states of mind seem to have grown largely inaccessible. See a god, and an exorcist or shrink will be all over you. The mysteries have closed up shop. Of course, I haven’t started watching Game of Thrones yet. But in the meantime, art gives us some things to believe in that don’t disappoint. Beauty, intelligence, the sublime, really engineered ironies.

The history of art is the history of ideas rendered into images. This not only made ideas to some extent immune to prosecution, but it also created many things of great beauty that enriched life.

Art is the sum of human work that wasn’t necessary. Lack of necessity is art’s privilege and what gives it its sacred aura. But art should be pro- fane and sacred simultaneously. It is the last refuge of bolts from the blue, of game changers, of dissenting ideas, and of human things that may be, in our time, discontinued, discarnate, unincorporated, or up to now unsought…

I grew up thinking an artist was the best thing that you could be. John Adams said, “I am a revolutionary so my son can be a farmer and his son can be a poet.” I guess in an ideal world the poet’s son would then be an artist. After all, Brion Gysin said writing is 50 years behind paint- ing. Besides, who can live on a poet’s earnings? Or a farmer’s, for that matter?

At best, art has altered human perception, altered consensus, and held out for higher standards, often involving risk-taking by the artist and his or her supporters.

Today art is valued more highly than ever. Financially. It probably occupies a smaller part of the consciousness of the average person, but as art has grown immensely pricey, is it my imagination or has art gone

soft? Big-stakes art seems to be- come superficial. It’s tentative and lacks consequence and goes to extraordinary lengths to avoid a point of view.

Art threatens to become fashion and vice versa. Novelty and production values are everything. And originality, of course! Ironically, it was the means of reproducing works of art that created the cult of the original, and now we have unlimited reproducibility, instant and worldwide.

The image was no longer the

source of power; it was its provenance and, as Walter Benjamin noted, its presence in time and space. He wrote, “The presence of the original is the prerequisite to the concept of authenticity.”

Everything is about authenticity now. It is the ultimate quest because ours is an age that has outlived authenticity. We walk around in costumes, tattooed and pierced, saying little but mostly sticking to the script. What, if anything today, is real? How would you know? Do you have a certificate of authenticity, a chain of title? If it’s real, how much do you want for it?

Art seems to have possibly priced itself out of the meaning business. Art’s job now is to keep them guessing. Yet art persists as what many of the smartest, most sensitive, and most complicated people in the world do to make a living, and to delight themselves and one another, and to intrigue and confuse the rest.

The Catholic Church touts something called the communion of saints; on another planet, this might be called the art world. It’s all the people who get the same idea at the same time. It’s like, “Okay, who really gets it?”

But this common knowledge doesn’t produce art movements anymore, any collaboration or solidarity or conspiracy; it produces a marketplace. It is bought and paid for. It punishes the best and rewards their friends. Oy! But still, I can’t avert my eyes.

Artists are imprisoned in the art world, many of them paid handsomely. But 300 artists can’t hold out against the hordes — a vast army of ravening collectors, desperate dealers, contriving curators, insatiable investors. Tension mounts. But maybe there are hundreds, thousands more artists out there who can conduct themselves properly. Perhaps they are angry. I’m told Spartacus is painting again.

 

luxury is not enough

You can have a penthouse atop the metropolis, a mansion at the beach, a horse farm in Greenwich, a super-yacht waiting in Capri, supercars, and super-watches. You can have a Gulfstream V and closets of couture and Italian bespoke suits and shoes, a trophy wife (husband) and her (his) understudy, you can have it all — but what have you got? A bunch of stuff. Anybody can have a bunch of what Fela Ransome Kuti called expensive shit.

But to really be somebody, you have to have gravitas. You have to have power. You have to have it! It is je ne sais quoi. It is mystique. It is mojo. You may be able to buy it, but it is going to cost you.

There’s nothing today that shows that you’ve really got it, that you’ve got mojo, that you’ve got it going on, and that you really get it like having a wild and crazy contemporary art collection. Especially a collection composed of works by the artists who make headlines the morn- ing after every auction evening, a museum-quality collection that is appreciating as it is appreciated. Blue-chip shit.

In the pecking order of this fast-warming world of the third millennium, art is the real shit. It’s heating up more than the North Pole in July. Art is the social currency of now and the profits of tomorrow. Art is the status symbol supreme.

Like fashion, art helps establish your personal brand, and it can help you lay claim to a lofty position in the social food chain, but anybody can play the fashion game. Art is for serious players only; it takes a big- time ante just to get in the game. To play this game you must belong to the masters of the universe class. This is the world of the masterpiece — a world of magic. It’s not just the hand being quicker than the eye — it’s about real magic. Alchemy. Making gold with a lead pencil or an oil stick.

 

the new masterpieces

In The Dehumanization of Art (1925), José Ortega y Gasset wrote, “Modern art … will always have the masses against it. It is essentially unpopular; moreover it is anti-popular. Any of its works automatically produces a curious effect on the general public. It divides the public into two groups: one very small, formed by those who are favorably inclined toward it; another very large — the hostile majority… Thus the work of art acts like a social agent which segregates from the shapeless mass of the many two different castes of men.”

To be avant-garde, to be the next thing, is to be deliberately problematic. If you’re not baffling them, you’re not advancing the standard. The history of modernism is littered with defunct standards of beauty. Beauty has been replaced in art by attitude and irony, by codified meanings. Of course, it may still be regarded as beautiful by its creator and by its dealers and collectors, even if it’s a gilded turd, but all the better if it serves to simultaneously “épater la bourgeoisie”, offending common, non-elite tastes. Think of Jackson Pollock’s drips, Yves Klein’s naked models in blue paint lying on the canvas, Piero Manzoni’s canned shit, and Andy Warhol’s piss paintings. Today beautiful art is suspect art — it might turn out to be purely decorative.

To be great, art can’t be easy. It is a problem for you to solve or to think you have solved. What is it about this painting? You can’t real- ly put your finger on it; it’s just awesome. Naturally the greatness of a masterpiece has been acknowledged and explained by the experts, but old masterworks are usually too valuable to be in private hands today. They belong to the world now, and to the past. That’s why we need new masters, to be collected by the masters of the present uni- verse. We need new art that speaks to the spirits of trending tycoons, to the atheist achievers, to the existentialists, the gamblers, the keepers of the hedge, the captains of code, and the wolves of the marketplace. The new masterpiece, too, has been acknowledged and explained by experts, but it’s fresh out of the studio, and it’s ready to go. Big-league art collecting is the ultimate in conspicuous consumption. What Thor- stein Veblen, back in the first Gilded Age, called the Leisure Class has found many ways to flaunt its wealth — real estate, fashion, yachts, jets, even generosity — but nothing comes with as much cachet as art. Art is the ultimate signifier of wealth combined with taste and a certain intellectual if not spiritual aura.

 

smart money

Critic and art historian Leo Steinberg said in a 1968 MoMA lecture (The Art Market Explained, James Panero, New Criterion): “Avant- garde art … is for the first time associated with big money. And this is because its occult aims and uncertain future have been successfully translated into homely terms. For far-out modernism, we can now read ‘speculative growth stock’; for apparent quality, ‘market attractiveness’; and for an adverse change of taste, ‘technical obsolescence.’ A feat of language to absolve a change of attitude. Art is not, after all, what we thought it was; in the broadest sense, it is hard cash… Another decade, and we shall have mutual funds based on securities in the form of pictures held in bank vaults.” …

Essentially and at the highest level, art is the last market, the final fron- tier of finance. Art is inscrutable, and therefore its market is beyond any possible regulation. Art is inherently a conspiracy, open to limitless speculation.

Art has become a veritable bank, creating currency out of nothing more than wit and craft. It is ephemeral, elusive, and undiscoverable in action; it is a form of trading where insider information can never be prevented or outlawed. It is bitcoin for billionaires and a financial forum where one can multiply money on a far grander scale than in any conventional market or gaming enterprise.

Art is also cool. It makes collectors look cool while the prices heat up, rising like bread in the oven. Hey, my Hirst dot painting is cooler than your Koons. It’s bigger, but also I paid more.

Fine art is the ultimate example of a Veblen good. Named after Thor- stein Veblen, the great theorist of the leisure class and its practices of conspicuous consumption. Veblen goods are commodities the values of which are immune to the laws of supply and demand. Price de- creases will decrease the demand for such goods, while price increases increase their status and thus demand.

In Icons of Capitalism, Wolfgang Ullrich writes: “Something with a price tag attached is evaluated in the universal language of money. It en- ters into relations with all the other things that have prices. The more something costs, the greater its distance from everyday goods and its proximity to others, to those with very high prices.”

Maybe this is why greed is good. …

 

everybody loves bacon

… There is not much of a connection between connoisseurship and price. The artist’s brand, the provenance of the work, and its size seem to trump considerations of quality, although certain things are prized in the work of some highly marketable artists. Basquiats with a lot go- ing on in them, lots of words and cross-outs and the artist’s signature elements, crowns for instance, seem to drive value up. But in the end, there is no formula, no algorithm to determine the value of an art- work. It’s what someone will pay for whatever reason.

Collecting Bacon or any artist at a high level is a validation of his vision, his values, or his philosophy. Every collectible artist is a cult of personality that it costs to join. To collect Warhol is to [applaud] his unapologetic commercialism and his post-Buddhist acceptance of the state of things. To collect Hirst is to go for broke, to dare to test the limits. To collect Koons is to conflate innocence and simplicity with anesthesia and structure.

Other reasons for art collecting may include:

Social urgency leading to a high-profile pissing contest.
Coveting his neighbor’s goods: I want one like his.Coveting his neighbor’s wife: I want to pay more than he paid.
Needing something for the Pool House.
To give the Picasso something to look at.

What is the most valuable painting in the world? It is the one that the person with the most spending money buys, believing “this must be it!” And then: “I own the greatest artwork in the world!” At least until next time. …

 

capo a gogo

Fast-forward 40 years from that Rauschenberg punch to Bob Scull’s gut. The Sculls, now legendary figures in Pop Art history, look like old money, classy compared to many of the current class of collectors. The vulgarians have breached the gate. But look at all the money they brought with them! Let them in, and let’s sell them something.

The transubstantiation of magical objects, things that actually changed the way we look at the world, into negotiable tender is another form of magic. Money is magic, too. There’s no gold standard today. It is backed by the trust and good faith of the people. Faith! Money is worth what we believe it to be, and that’s why we believe so hard in money. Money conquered the world. There are no more commies today. Everybody’s in business today, and it’s all about mad money. Somebody had to in- vent a new way to sell art in this new, money-infused market. Enter Larry Gagosian, the super-dealer, the greatest art salesman of all time, a man who has said, “I am entirely self-taught.”

The imposing building across from the Carlyle Hotel that was once Sotheby’s Parke-Bernet, scene of Scull’s succès de scandale, is now the headquarters of Larry Gagosian, the ultimate art dealer, the guy who reframed the business for the 21st century. Gagosian now has six locations in Manhattan, one in Beverly Hills, two in London and in Paris, one each in Rome, Athens, Geneva, and Hong Kong. In 2011, The Wall

When you get used to it, when it gets “used,” it becomes art. When it changes hands, it become art. Then it sits there. People look at it. They think about it or not. Sometimes it still works, but mostly it just sits there, proof that it once worked. When they can’t stand to look anymore, they put it in storage. Maybe they sell it. Maybe the magic will work for somebody else.

“Art is not the spiritual side of business,” says Joseph Kosuth, the pioneer conceptual artist. He’s quoting Ad Reinhardt, who also said: “The ugliest spectacle is that of artists selling themselves. Art as a commodity is an ugly idea. The artist as businessman is uglier than the businessman as artist.” Kosuth believes that the market has come to dictate the meaning of the work, when meaning should dictate mean- ing. Kosuth explains: “We’ve always had art history, and it was a history of who did what, when, and what was influenced, part of the history of ideas. And then 10, 15, years ago, maybe more … there came a new art history competing with the classic one, and this is the history of the art market.”

Art might not be spiritual anymore, but it can be so intensely cryptic and coded that it feels spiritual to the customers. We all know that old- time feeling. Once, not so very long ago, there was something really spiritual about art — the hush of the museum and gallery, the reverence for rare talents and profound inspiration, the awe at sublime invention, and not least of all a sense of profound value, a sort of eternal non-negotiable value. Even today, some of that lingers on around fine art as a kind of tentative aura, perhaps out of nostalgia for beauty and belief.

Somehow people still believe that just being in the presence of art magically transfers knowledge, feeling, or even healing to the beholder. And that belief in art still makes sense today. Art is religion for atheists and for the secular, the people who are just pretending to be religious. Art allows high-mindedness and mystery that you can’t find in the ta- bles of The Wall Street Journal. Art is the genie. Publicity is the lamp. The market is the alchemist.

Consider the miraculousness art creates in the marketplace.

You see when something that once cost four or five figures suddenly brings seven, eight, nine figures; well, that’s a sort of a miracle, isn’t it! You have to believe in something with that kind of power. The artist becomes something like a hero or a god — a thaumaturge at the very least. An alchemist in the arts of conspicuous consumption and the sanctification of leisure. The artists are creating enormous value out of virtually nothing!

There are artists who are trophy makers; there are painters who dress, address, and redress that four-side window on the white wall; there are con artists, stunt men with ideas. All of them have a certain idea of what they are doing and what art is.

Are there toxic effects of money on art? Does something rub off from that money. Does it matter if it’s blood money, drug money, carbon money, buyout money, borrowed money, hedge money, the people’s money. It’s all funny. Everything is negotiable.

We look around, and we see that many of our leading artists seem to have become role models that can be subscribed to by HNWIs [high- net-worth individuals]. If I had the brains and the balls, I’d be Damien Hirst. My Tracey Emin tells the world, “I fuck around” and maybe suggests, “I had her, too.” My Jeff Koons validates me; it means that what I do for myself is damn good for the people, too. Richard Prince validates my adolescence and my collecting! For a tycoon, owning a Julian Schnabel can be like if Tony Robbins and Tony Duquette really understood one another. …

Art is older than what we call civilization. Art is loved and trusted. It has a history that is identified with magic, devotion, intelligence, progress, and idealism. Art is an external component of human evolution, like tools and language. We see painting from 100 years ago as a reaction to photography and mechanized technology. We can see Abstract Expressionism as a reaction to global war, nuclear weapons, and alienation. We might see Pop Art as a reaction to the corporatization of the world and corporate branding. So what explains the art of today?

There is no salient movement in the early 21st century. We see trends such as process art and appropriation, but these seem to be strategies

convenient to a fatalistic time overloaded with irrelevant information. Art might be seen as post-Pop because it is a panoply of individualized brands, each with its own shtick. The one remarkable characteristic of art today is its perceived worth.

Perhaps it is worth considering that art itself has been appropriated by finance. The boom in art value, and coincidentally the definition of “contemporary art” used by the major auction houses, coincides almost perfectly with the adoption of fiat money when the United States unilaterally ended the gold standard in what became known as the “Nixon shock” in 1971.

What we were left with was a system administered by central banks in which financial industry produces profits for itself and certain clients, but it does not produce wealth in the general sense. The art market offers a system as convoluted and opaque as the financial system but with a lingering aura of idealism, altruism, and creativity. Art doesn’t produce wealth, except for a handful of artists and collectors. As an industry, art exists well within the confines of the 1%.

Perhaps, in the new age of deregulated finance, where financial institutions resemble casinos more than the banking institutions of old, art itself has been appropriated by the system set up to sell it. Trading in art at a high level offers the same benefits as trading in stocks, options, commodities, or derivatives, but under the cover of something culturally meaningful and socially productive. In art we have a currency that is backed by a more tangible, credible belief system than the fiat money of the Fed and its ilk.

Jeff Koons has said, “Art to me is a humanitarian act, and I believe that there is a responsibility that art should somehow be able to affect man- kind, to make the world a better place.”

Like, presumably, Versailles.

END

MASTERPIECE THEATER

What is art, and why is it so expensive?

An extract from an unpublished book by Glenn O’Brien

 

I love art

I believe in art. It works miracles. It can change the way we see. It can make you think, it can change your mind and give you weird, wild ideas. It can make you quit your job, leave your husband, or move to Mallorca. It makes you think that whether or not there is progress, whether or not the world is going to hell, well, at least there’s something new.

Art needs belief and has nothing to do with religion. There may be a God, someplace or everyplace, but he’s probably out expanding a universe or tidying up distant nebulae. God implies intelligence unlikely to be monitoring thoughts or intervening in illnesses or football games or wars. According to a Gallup poll, 42% of Americans believe that God created humans in their present form 10,000 years ago. I don’t think so. I think democracy is getting dicey. You should have a choice between church and voting. I think that 11,000 years ago, there were guys in caves, making rather good paintings and getting better fast.

I am a Deist, sort of like the founders of the United States were before the Enlightenment foundered. Nobody calls it Deism anymore, but that’s what religiously observant atheists are properly called. I find philosophy more interesting and, let’s face it, more tasteful than faith. I love painting, but also words and music and dancing, that kind of thing. Cooking. Tailoring. Culture is what got us here and has a history of making life worth living. So I am stuck being a huge art fan.

I would like to believe in the gods, but those states of mind seem to have grown largely inaccessible. See a god, and an exorcist or shrink will be all over you. The mysteries have closed up shop. Of course, I haven’t started watching Game of Thrones yet. But in the meantime, art gives us some things to believe in that don’t disappoint. Beauty, intelligence, the sublime, really engineered ironies.

The history of art is the history of ideas rendered into images. This not only made ideas to some extent immune to prosecution, but it also created many things of great beauty that enriched life.

Art is the sum of human work that wasn’t necessary. Lack of necessity is art’s privilege and what gives it its sacred aura. But art should be profane and sacred simultaneously. It is the last refuge of bolts from the blue, of game changers, of dissenting ideas, and of human things that may be, in our time, discontinued, discarnate, unincorporated, or up to now unsought…

I grew up thinking an artist was the best thing that you could be. John Adams said, “I am a revolutionary so my son can be a farmer and his son can be a poet.” I guess in an ideal world the poet’s son would then be an artist. After all, Brion Gysin said writing is 50 years behind painting. Besides, who can live on a poet’s earnings? Or a farmer’s, for that matter?

At best, art has altered human perception, altered consensus, and held out for higher standards, often involving risk-taking by the artist and his or her supporters.

Today art is valued more highly than ever. Financially. It probably occupies a smaller part of the consciousness of the average person, but as art has grown immensely pricey, is it my imagination or has art gone soft? Big-stakes art seems to become superficial. It’s tentative and lacks consequence and goes to extraordinary lengths to avoid a point of view.

Art threatens to become fashion and vice versa. Novelty and production values are everything. And originality, of course! Ironically, it was the means of reproducing works of art that created the cult of the original, and now we have unlimited reproducibility, instant and worldwide.

The image was no longer the source of power; it was its provenance and, as Walter Benjamin noted, its presence in time and space. He wrote, “The presence of the original is the prerequisite to the concept of authenticity.”

Everything is about authenticity now. It is the ultimate quest because ours is an age that has outlived authenticity. We walk around in costumes, tattooed and pierced, saying little but mostly sticking to the script. What, if anything today, is real? How would you know? Do you have a certificate of authenticity, a chain of title? If it’s real, how much do you want for it?

Art seems to have possibly priced itself out of the meaning business. Art’s job now is to keep them guessing. Yet art persists as what many of the smartest, most sensitive, and most complicated people in the world do to make a living, and to delight themselves and one another, and to intrigue and confuse the rest.

The Catholic Church touts something called the communion of saints; on another planet, this might be called the art world. It’s all the people who get the same idea at the same time. It’s like, “Okay, who really gets it?”

But this common knowledge doesn’t produce art movements anymore, any collaboration or solidarity or conspiracy; it produces a marketplace. It is bought and paid for. It punishes the best and rewards their friends. Oy! But still, I can’t avert my eyes.

Artists are imprisoned in the art world, many of them paid handsomely. But 300 artists can’t hold out against the hordes — a vast army of ravening collectors, desperate dealers, contriving curators, insatiable investors. Tension mounts. But maybe there are hundreds, thousands more artists out there who can conduct themselves properly. Perhaps they are angry. I’m told Spartacus is painting again.

 

luxury is not enough

You can have a penthouse atop the metropolis, a mansion at the beach, a horse farm in Greenwich, a super-yacht waiting in Capri, supercars, and super-watches. You can have a Gulfstream V and closets of couture and Italian bespoke suits and shoes, a trophy wife (husband) and her (his) understudy, you can have it all — but what have you got? A bunch of stuff. Anybody can have a bunch of what Fela Ransome-Kuti called expensive shit.

But to really be somebody, you have to have gravitas. You have to have power. You have to have it! It is je ne sais quoi. It is mystique. It is mojo. You may be able to buy it, but it is going to cost you.

There’s nothing today that shows that you’ve really got it, that you’ve got mojo, that you’ve got it going on, and that you really get it like having a wild and crazy contemporary art collection. Especially a collection composed of works by the artists who make headlines the morning after every auction evening, a museum-quality collection that is appreciating as it is appreciated. Blue-chip shit.

In the pecking order of this fast-warming world of the third millennium, art is the real shit. It’s heating up more than the North Pole in July. Art is the social currency of now and the profits of tomorrow. Art is the status symbol supreme.

Like fashion, art helps establish your personal brand, and it can help you lay claim to a lofty position in the social food chain, but anybody can play the fashion game. Art is for serious players only; it takes a big-time ante just to get in the game. To play this game you must belong to the masters of the universe class. This is the world of the masterpiece — a world of magic. It’s not just the hand being quicker than the eye — it’s about real magic. Alchemy. Making gold with a lead pencil or an oil stick.

 

the new masterpieces

In The Dehumanization of Art (1925), José Ortega y Gasset wrote, “Modern art … will always have the masses against it. It is essentially unpopular; moreover it is anti-popular. Any of its works automatically produces a curious effect on the general public. It divides the public into two groups: one very small, formed by those who are favorably inclined toward it; another very large — the hostile majority… Thus the work of art acts like a social agent which segregates from the shapeless mass of the many two different castes of men.”

To be avant-garde, to be the next thing, is to be deliberately problematic. If you’re not baffling them, you’re not advancing the standard. The history of modernism is littered with defunct standards of beauty. Beauty has been replaced in art by attitude and irony, by codified meanings. Of course, it may still be regarded as beautiful by its creator and by its dealers and collectors, even if it’s a gilded turd, but all the better if it serves to simultaneously “épater la bourgeoisie,” offending common, non-elite tastes. Think of Jackson Pollock’s drips, Yves Klein’s naked models in blue paint lying on the canvas, Piero Manzoni’s canned shit, and Andy Warhol’s piss paintings. Today beautiful art is suspect art — it might turn out to be purely decorative.

To be great, art can’t be easy. It is a problem for you to solve or to think you have solved. What is it about this painting? You can’t really put your finger on it; it’s just awesome. Naturally the greatness of a masterpiece has been acknowledged and explained by the experts, but old masterworks are usually too valuable to be in private hands today. They belong to the world now, and to the past. That’s why we need new masters, to be collected by the masters of the present universe. We need new art that speaks to the spirits of trending tycoons, to the atheist achievers, to the existentialists, the gamblers, the keepers of the hedge, the captains of code, and the wolves of the marketplace. The new masterpiece, too, has been acknowledged and explained by experts, but it’s fresh out of the studio, and it’s ready to go. Big-league art collecting is the ultimate in conspicuous consumption. What Thorstein Veblen, back in the first Gilded Age, called the Leisure Class has found many ways to flaunt its wealth — real estate, fashion, yachts, jets, even generosity — but nothing comes with as much cachet as art. Art is the ultimate signifier of wealth combined with taste and a certain intellectual if not spiritual aura.

 

smart money

Critic and art historian Leo Steinberg said in a 1968 MoMA lecture (The Art Market Explained, James Panero, New Criterion): “Avantgarde art … is for the first time associated with big money. And this is because its occult aims and uncertain future have been successfully translated into homely terms. For far-out modernism, we can now read ‘speculative growth stock’; for apparent quality, ‘market attractiveness’; and for an adverse change of taste, ‘technical obsolescence.’ A feat of language to absolve a change of attitude. Art is not, after all, what we thought it was; in the broadest sense, it is hard cash… Another decade, and we shall have mutual funds based on securities in the form of pictures held in bank vaults.” …

Essentially and at the highest level, art is the last market, the final frontier of finance. Art is inscrutable, and therefore its market is beyond any possible regulation. Art is inherently a conspiracy, open to limitless speculation.

Art has become a veritable bank, creating currency out of nothing more than wit and craft. It is ephemeral, elusive, and undiscoverable in action; it is a form of trading where insider information can never be prevented or outlawed. It is bitcoin for billionaires and a financial forum where one can multiply money on a far grander scale than in any conventional market or gaming enterprise.

Art is also cool. It makes collectors look cool while the prices heat up, rising like bread in the oven. Hey, my Hirst dot painting is cooler than your Koons. It’s bigger, but also I paid more.

Fine art is the ultimate example of a Veblen good. Named after Thor- stein Veblen, the great theorist of the leisure class and its practices of conspicuous consumption. Veblen goods are commodities the values of which are immune to the laws of supply and demand. Price decreases will decrease the demand for such goods, while price increases increase their status and thus demand.

In Icons of Capitalism, Wolfgang Ullrich writes: “Something with a price tag attached is evaluated in the universal language of money. It enters into relations with all the other things that have prices. The more something costs, the greater its distance from everyday goods and its proximity to others, to those with very high prices.”

Maybe this is why greed is good. …

 

everybody loves bacon

… There is not much of a connection between connoisseurship and price. The artist’s brand, the provenance of the work, and its size seem to trump considerations of quality, although certain things are prized in the work of some highly marketable artists. Basquiats with a lot going on in them, lots of words and cross-outs and the artist’s signature elements, crowns for instance, seem to drive value up. But in the end, there is no formula, no algorithm to determine the value of an artwork. It’s what someone will pay for whatever reason.

Collecting Bacon or any artist at a high level is a validation of his vision, his values, or his philosophy. Every collectible artist is a cult of personality that it costs to join. To collect Warhol is to [applaud] his unapologetic commercialism and his post-Buddhist acceptance of the state of things. To collect Hirst is to go for broke, to dare to test the limits. To collect Koons is to conflate innocence and simplicity with anesthesia and structure.

Other reasons for art collecting may include:

Social urgency leading to a high-profile pissing contest.

Coveting his neighbor’s goods: I want one like his.

Coveting his neighbor’s wife: I want to pay more than he paid.

Needing something for the Pool House.

To give the Picasso something to look at.

What is the most valuable painting in the world? It is the one that the person with the most spending money buys, believing “this must be it!” And then: “I own the greatest artwork in the world!” At least until next time. …

 

capo a gogo

Fast-forward 40 years from that Rauschenberg punch to Bob Scull’s gut. The Sculls, now legendary figures in Pop Art history, look like old money, classy compared to many of the current class of collectors. The vulgarians have breached the gate. But look at all the money they brought with them! Let them in, and let’s sell them something.

The transubstantiation of magical objects, things that actually changed the way we look at the world, into negotiable tender is another form of magic. Money is magic, too. There’s no gold standard today. It is backed by the trust and good faith of the people. Faith! Money is worth what we believe it to be, and that’s why we believe so hard in money. Money conquered the world. There are no more commies today. Everybody’s in business today, and it’s all about mad money. Somebody had to invent a new way to sell art in this new, money-infused market. Enter Larry Gagosian, the super-dealer, the greatest art salesman of all time, a man who has said, “I am entirely self-taught.”

The imposing building across from the Carlyle Hotel that was once Sotheby’s Parke-Bernet, scene of Scull’s succès de scandale, is now the headquarters of Larry Gagosian, the ultimate art dealer, the guy who reframed the business for the 21st century. Gagosian now has six locations in Manhattan, one in Beverly Hills, two in London and in Paris, one each in Rome, Athens, Geneva, and Hong Kong. In 2011, The Wall Street Journal reported: “Dealers who track how he prices his gallery shows estimate he sells upwards of $1 billion worth of art a year. Sotheby’s, by comparison, auctioned off $870 million worth of contemporary art last year.” Meanwhile, Christie’s sells a triptych by Francis Bacon for $142 million, to polite applause, no real cheering. By now, such prices are art business as usual. The art world has gone as dead-pan as Larry Gagosian.

Larry Gagosian changed the art business. It’s not that he invented the change; he simply figured it out. He intuited and then channeled the forces of the market and the forces of finance and accomplished what was probably inevitable. Somebody had to be Larry. Otherwise, like God, we would have had to invent him.

Larry is not the Art Market. Just like Jesus isn’t Christianity and Moses isn’t the Jews and Obama isn’t the Democrats. But it’s easy to confuse Larry and the Market because Larry made the Market, and he knows the Market better than it knows itself. He is its prophet and its exemplary profiteer, too, but since the Market is Art, and as Art is higher-minded activity, how can that be a bad thing? Larry is not bad. He is not bad at all. Well, he’s “good-bad, but not evil” as the Shangri-Las sang about “The Leader of the Pack.” Yes, he is a bad dude, as Shaft would say. But not evil. Larry Gagosian is not the devil.

Look at him. Larry looks exactly like what he is. A successful, rich, tasteful white guy who has seen it all. He radiates power. If he weren’t an art dealer — the art dealer — you could picture his face in a Cardinal’s habit in 1450, or a Field Marshall’s uniform in 1916. He is white haired — you cannot find a photo of Larry where he was not at least salt and pepper — but he is young faced, like Steve Martin. Since he has been gray for his adult life, he has a kind of ageless, maybe even immortal quality. He smiles a lot, but it’s almost a Warhol deadpan. The New York Times called him “unreadable.” He looks a bit inscruta- ble perhaps, but you really notice it when he doesn’t smile. He sort of turns to stone, which makes him even more art-like. A statue of Larry would likely be a very good statue.

Harry Goshen, the art dealer in Tom Wolfe’s new novel, has “eerie pale gray eyes like the slanted eyes of a husky.” But as is the case with many extraordinary men, people see what they want in Larry. Some people saw Andy Warhol as the man who painted Campbell’s Soup cans, some as the man who made the films Sleep and Blow Job, others as the artist who dined regularly at the White House. It’s the same with Larry. Michael Craig-Martin, a Gagosian artist, said: “He has an alert and eager look, but it’s also blank. He’s one of those people that you project on to.”

Andy Warhol prophesied the coming of Larry in his “Business Art” chapter in The Philosophy of Andy Warhol: From (A to B and Back Again). He wrote: “Being good in business is the most fascinating kind of art. During the hippie era people put down the idea of business — they’d say, ‘Money is bad,’ and ‘Working is bad,’ but making money is art and working is art and good business is the best art.”

Warhol seemed to be the first artist, indeed the first person in the art world, to recognize that the world of corporations needed a new model artist, a corporate artist. How could the old-fashioned painter, daubing alone in his garret, compete in a world ruled by titanic corporate persons who were theoretically immortal? Artists needed to adopt the techniques of the big companies that dominated virtually every other industry.

If Andy Warhol were alive today, he might drop dead of jealousy at what is going on in Jeff ’s painting and sculpture factories, all those talented people, the cream of the art schools, working so diligently, precisely and quietly painting Jeff’s paintings. Koons’ factories make the old Warhol Factory look like cottage industry. Jeff Koons works in a suit and tie. There is no paint on his shoes.

I can picture Andy counting heads at the Damien Hirst operation in London. Now that’s a company! “I think becoming a brand name is a really important part of life,” declared Hirst. And Takashi Murakami not only has over 100 employees, but he has his own gallery, manages other artists, and has his own art fair. But I have no doubt that the person the boss would be most jealous of, the one he would single out as the best business artist alive, would be Larry Gagosian. Now there’s an artist!

Larry is a photographer, although he doesn’t exhibit. He gets invited everywhere, and apparently when he sees something he likes, a painting or maybe even some furniture, he photographs it. Like the artist Louise Lawler, Larry likes to document art in situ. Besides, you never know when your host might want to sell it, especially if the offer is a nice surprise. Collector Douglas Cramer told The New York Times, “I was in Larry’s office once, and I saw Polaroids of pieces that were in my home.” He is polite enough to wait until his host goes to the bathroom, but he has to keep his wish list or mental catalog in order. …

Gagosian Gallery artists, according to figures available on Artprice.com, accounted for 47 of the top 500 artists by auction revenue in 2011. That’s even more impressive when one considers that 174 of the top 500 were Chinese artists, little known in the West. (Number one and two were Daqian Zhang and Qi Baishi, who accounted for more than a billion in sales.)

Larry rewrote the book. Everybody makes a big deal out of the fact that Gagosian had a poster gallery by the beach in L.A. When it came to real art, he learned from the best — Leo Castelli (1907-1999), who began dealing in New York in 1957, first showing European Surrealists, then American Abstract Expressionists, but who is best known as the king of contemporary art, as the dealer behind Pop (Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein, James Rosenquist, Andy Warhol, and Claes Oldenburg), Minimalism (Donald Judd, Dan Flavin, Robert Morris, Richard Serra, Ellsworth Kelly, Frank Stella, Keith Sonnier), and Conceptual Art (Joseph Kosuth, Douglas Huebler, and Lawrence Weiner) as well as Cy Twombly, Bruce Nauman, and Ed Ruscha.

Larry arrived in New York in 1979, and he managed to get next to the godfather of SoHo dealers who found him a very useful youth. They partnered in Castelli’s 65 Thompson Street Gallery, which became the Gagosian Gallery. Part of Larry’s genius was dealing with the things he felt Leo neglected, like Warhol’s dollar signs and piss paintings, and Cy Twombly.

Larry Gagosian has never been one to discover artists. His closest rival, David Zwirner, said: “I think he never wanted to be known as a talent finder. He wanted to be known as the guy who could really maximize the career.” Few if any of his many artists debuted at Gagosian. According to art consultant Sandy Heller, “For an artist, going to Gagosian is like playing for the Yankees. He has the most money and the best players, and he seems to pick up talent whenever he puts his mind to it.” The Independent reported on “his unorthodox techniques, including photocopying pages from magazines to offer works which may not actually be his to sell — and luring artists from other galleries by making them offers they can’t refuse.”

Larry has it all now. He has houses in St. Barth’s, East Hampton, Holmby Hills in L.A. Picassos hang over his dining room table in New York. They are not for sale. His Upper East Side townhouse is splendid, filled with exquisite modern furnishings, but it’s nothing compared to his next home, the Harkness Mansion, a fifty-foot-wide French-Renaissance-style home built in 1896 for a shipping magnate, which he purchased for $36.4 million. The total cost will be far more as it is being entirely renovated after a $4 million interior demolition. But who’s counting? Larry may be counting, but it’s art that he’s counting. Contemporary art posted its first billion-dollar auction season in 2013. What happens in the galleries and their backrooms is anybody’s guess, but it’s big business, bigger than ever.

Larry Gagosian isn’t just a big deal. He is THE big deal, the greatest art dealer ever. He makes Joseph Duveen, dealer to Morgan, Frick, Mellon, Rockefeller, and Hearst, look like small potatoes. His transformation of the art business is almost preternatural. Maybe it came from the stars. Let’s check his chart!

“Larry Gagosian, Fire is dominant in your natal chart and endows you with intuition, energy, courage, self-confidence, and enthusiasm! You are inclined to be passionate, you assert your willpower, you move forward, and come hell or high water, you achieve your dreams and your goals.” …

 

wait, what is art again?

Art starts out as magic. Hey, watch this. Did you ever see anything like this before?

The artist is trying to work something out. It’s a trick, but it’s not. If it works, then it’s a real work. But it’s only magic when it’s new. When you get used to it, when it gets “used,” it becomes art. When it changes hands, it become art. Then it sits there. People look at it. They think about it or not. Sometimes it still works, but mostly it just sits there, proof that it once worked. When they can’t stand to look anymore, they put it in storage. Maybe they sell it. Maybe the magic will work for somebody else.

“Art is not the spiritual side of business,” says Joseph Kosuth, the pioneer conceptual artist. He’s quoting Ad Reinhardt, who also said: “The ugliest spectacle is that of artists selling themselves. Art as a commodity is an ugly idea. The artist as businessman is uglier than the businessman as artist.” Kosuth believes that the market has come to dictate the meaning of the work, when meaning should dictate meaning. Kosuth explains: “We’ve always had art history, and it was a history of who did what, when, and what was influenced, part of the history of ideas. And then 10, 15, years ago, maybe more … there came a new art history competing with the classic one, and this is the history of the art market.”

Art might not be spiritual anymore, but it can be so intensely cryptic and coded that it feels spiritual to the customers. We all know that old-time feeling. Once, not so very long ago, there was something really spiritual about art — the hush of the museum and gallery, the reverence for rare talents and profound inspiration, the awe at sublime invention, and not least of all a sense of profound value, a sort of eternal non-negotiable value. Even today, some of that lingers on around fine art as a kind of tentative aura, perhaps out of nostalgia for beauty and belief.

Somehow people still believe that just being in the presence of art magically transfers knowledge, feeling, or even healing to the beholder. And that belief in art still makes sense today. Art is religion for atheists and for the secular, the people who are just pretending to be religious. Art allows high-mindedness and mystery that you can’t find in the tables of The Wall Street Journal. Art is the genie. Publicity is the lamp. The market is the alchemist.

Consider the miraculousness art creates in the marketplace.

You see when something that once cost four or five figures suddenly brings seven, eight, nine figures; well, that’s a sort of a miracle, isn’t it! You have to believe in something with that kind of power. The artist becomes something like a hero or a god — a thaumaturge at the very least. An alchemist in the arts of conspicuous consumption and the sanctification of leisure. The artists are creating enormous value out of virtually nothing!

There are artists who are trophy makers; there are painters who dress, address, and redress that four-side window on the white wall; there are con artists, stunt men with ideas. All of them have a certain idea of what they are doing and what art is.

Are there toxic effects of money on art? Does something rub off from that money. Does it matter if it’s blood money, drug money, carbon money, buyout money, borrowed money, hedge money, the people’s money. It’s all funny. Everything is negotiable.

We look around, and we see that many of our leading artists seem to have become role models that can be subscribed to by HNWIs [high-net-worth individuals]. If I had the brains and the balls, I’d be Damien Hirst. My Tracey Emin tells the world, “I fuck around” and maybe suggests, “I had her, too.” My Jeff Koons validates me; it means that what I do for myself is damn good for the people, too. Richard Prince validates my adolescence and my collecting! For a tycoon, owning a Julian Schnabel can be like if Tony Robbins and Tony Duquette really understood one another. …

Art is older than what we call civilization. Art is loved and trusted. It has a history that is identified with magic, devotion, intelligence, progress, and idealism. Art is an external component of human evolution, like tools and language. We see painting from 100 years ago as a reaction to photography and mechanized technology. We can see Abstract Expressionism as a reaction to global war, nuclear weapons, and alienation. We might see Pop Art as a reaction to the corporatization of the world and corporate branding. So what explains the art of today?

There is no salient movement in the early 21st century. We see trends such as process art and appropriation, but these seem to be strategies convenient to a fatalistic time overloaded with irrelevant information. Art might be seen as post-Pop because it is a panoply of individualized brands, each with its own shtick. The one remarkable characteristic of art today is its perceived worth.

Perhaps it is worth considering that art itself has been appropriated by finance. The boom in art value, and coincidentally the definition of “contemporary art” used by the major auction houses, coincides almost perfectly with the adoption of fiat money when the United States unilaterally ended the gold standard in what became known as the “Nixon shock” in 1971.

What we were left with was a system administered by central banks in which financial industry produces profits for itself and certain clients, but it does not produce wealth in the general sense. The art market offers a system as convoluted and opaque as the financial system but with a lingering aura of idealism, altruism, and creativity. Art doesn’t produce wealth, except for a handful of artists and collectors. As an industry, art exists well within the confines of the 1%.

Perhaps, in the new age of deregulated finance, where financial institutions resemble casinos more than the banking institutions of old, art itself has been appropriated by the system set up to sell it. Trading in art at a high level offers the same benefits as trading in stocks, options, commodities, or derivatives, but under the cover of something culturally meaningful and socially productive. In art we have a currency that is backed by a more tangible, credible belief system than the fiat money of the Fed and its ilk.

Jeff Koons has said, “Art to me is a humanitarian act, and I believe that there is a responsibility that art should somehow be able to affect mankind, to make the world a better place.”

Like, presumably, Versailles.

END

[Table of contents]

The 30YRS Issue #38 F/W 2022

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