I sounded a word of warning* but who listens? Panama papers reveal big time art as shameless money laundering right out in public. Gigantic piles of play money are moved from one stack to another while real money stays in the pocket, beats the tax code, as brand-name art fills warehouses, there to mature like bogus banknotes. Drug cartels, gun runners, and hedge-fund executives, anyone with excess profits, indulge in these oversight avoidances, hiding their loot in phony foundations while real live people line up for charity backpacks, razors and soap and such, but that’s for someone else to figure out. Political injustices are beyond my jurisdiction and considerably above my pay grade, but we could talk about the art.
What’s the face of corruption look like? Oscar Wilde wrote a story about this ‘insanely handsome and absolutely ruined by wealth’ kind of guy who remains presentable while his portrait degrades over decades revealing his less than savory escapades, his insensitive attitudes. Such an amusing idea. It does seem to be the case that the character of art rather abruptly started making right angle turns about the middle of the last century, and as a reflection of the current culture at the time Warhol sure seemed spot on looking back, sorta sad. Anyway, after all that reckless driving, fender crunching and crashes in the rearview mirror, art finds itself zipping around in a desert with no landmarks, no trees, no hills, no standards of any kind. Big time critics are always bumping into each other, not sure who or what to tout. Is it art -- not known until someone says it is. By now it’s stupid (Hirst, Koons, et al), a food fight for billionaires, and there’s a cost.
As for the lost revenue, a meager share of the world’s tremendous productivity would be nice. It would be less burden on the rest of us if this fantasy, that squares of fabric are worth millions upon millions based only on the autograph on the back, was forever debunked. In the big museum on the hill, they measure success by how much money they pretend to pull out of circulation each year, acquiring those Rothkos and Judds for storage, and not by how many commoners come through the door -- let’s make it free so we don’t have to count them.
Then there’s the art. Does corruption spoil the portrait of Dorian Grey? Has the art in national magazines, at international art fairs, in teaching institutions almost everywhere been influenced by these money drenched orgies of artificial acclaim, living off tax incentives and the gullibility of glamour seeking rubes? You be the judge, art is very democratic. After decades in which the expression of local artists has been demeaned and disregarded unless they emulated fashion from far away, common folk are seeing art they can relate to on vacant walls all over town. They’re still strangers, artists in studios and fellow citizens, having been kept apart so long, but each is trying to find the other. Art from around here is about to start replacing the department store sailing ships in all those houses.
*from jan 16, 14 -- also note comment
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