These are people who buy art only to put it in storage for ten years, intending to bring it out again when the price has quadrupled, prices pumped ever higher at widely publicized fake auctions, convicted and time served. These collectors don’t care what's on the front -- colors, talent, craft, or vision. What they do care about is celebrity and favor, trends and revivals, all based on the name, the trademark, the brand. Well, it can’t go on forever. Like a cartoon coyote, big-time art can only stay up in the thin air so long as it doesn’t look down, and then it’s spiraling free-fall to a little puff miles below.
New money and old envy could keep their autograph business going for a while, raw petroleum transmuted into a magazine’s fashionable living room, but they won’t produce significant art. Google Damien Hirst, Jeff Koons, and Richard Serra to see why. At some point society’s gaze will shift, a culture in crises reexamines, higher fuel prices will bring about a new seriousness, a deeper introspection, and a new respect for the clarity and immediacy of visual art. Sometime, in not that many years, Warhol’s entire output will suddenly appear tawdry and tattered as an abandoned carnival, all smeary posters and sloppy plagiarisms, and people won’t admit to owning any of it. One ugly auction without enough "clients" and the rest of big-time art starts to leak, hissing and sagging, turning all that warehoused ‘buy and hold’ art into rotten cantaloupes.
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