Who buys art and why? There are the investors, they get the press. Here’s a Rothko and a Van Gogh in the same auction estimated to bring about the same price, around twenty seven million, immediately to be re-crated and sent back to storage hoping they bring fifty the next time they see daylight. So much alike. ‘Art accrues value faster than the stock market,’ becomes the boilerplate refrain for almost any hustle chasing big discretionary bankrolls. It was housing equities before the crash of 2008, just as the dutch once went crazy for tulips, the classic case of market mania and the frenetic psychology of auction. As art appreciators the ultra-wealthy don’t count since they don’t look, only interested in outbidding their ‘friends’ and bragging about the big return, just another form of gaming to them. Pretend you ‘get it’ if you must.
Big corporations buy art to gain prestige among peers, and in an attempt to infuse some color into their cost efficient, steel and glass architecture. They favor abstraction, open-ended, non-committal, big splashy patches in the chrome and grey conference room, behind the receptionist. Existential questioning isn’t their bag, and they purchase through agencies, hire a curator, don’t really care. The large public institutions, museums and such, favor big ticket units, doing an indecent tango with the donor class as the tax burden trickles down, and they measure their success in bucks transferred.
Turns out the ones who generally like art best are poor people, those who can least afford it, an irony passing itself off as a law of the universe. Economics aside, maybe it’s life experience, the grind of physical work, learning a trade, doing home repairs that makes the common citizen receptive to art’s physical presence. Could be they can better conceive of process and practice, and what it takes to turn pure thought into a material object. It’s also possible they live in less than glamourous circumstances and feel a desire to own something of value they can see everyday, unlike their retirement fund. Might even turn out some of them are thoughtful and well read, dropouts, too skeptical of cultural politics to believe in soup cans but willing to consider actual accomplishment. Pushed aside in a rigged system, blue collars are not disinterested in art.
You can see art like them without giving away your stuff, scuffing up the hands. Art will help you -- try going back the other direction. When you look at art consider how it was made and what it tells you. You can squint at the explanation posted on the wall, or attempt to see and comprehend what’s actually in the frame, the way the less culturally sophisticated, more-grounded poor person might. You can bet the cavalier looking out at you there among the gawkers at the corner of the painting is the artist himself, just as he looked the day he delivered it, wearing that same sly smile, never to be noticed by his rich patron and finally to be seen by you this morning, he winks at you across a couple of centuries. Such as that.
Big corporations buy art to gain prestige among peers, and in an attempt to infuse some color into their cost efficient, steel and glass architecture. They favor abstraction, open-ended, non-committal, big splashy patches in the chrome and grey conference room, behind the receptionist. Existential questioning isn’t their bag, and they purchase through agencies, hire a curator, don’t really care. The large public institutions, museums and such, favor big ticket units, doing an indecent tango with the donor class as the tax burden trickles down, and they measure their success in bucks transferred.
Turns out the ones who generally like art best are poor people, those who can least afford it, an irony passing itself off as a law of the universe. Economics aside, maybe it’s life experience, the grind of physical work, learning a trade, doing home repairs that makes the common citizen receptive to art’s physical presence. Could be they can better conceive of process and practice, and what it takes to turn pure thought into a material object. It’s also possible they live in less than glamourous circumstances and feel a desire to own something of value they can see everyday, unlike their retirement fund. Might even turn out some of them are thoughtful and well read, dropouts, too skeptical of cultural politics to believe in soup cans but willing to consider actual accomplishment. Pushed aside in a rigged system, blue collars are not disinterested in art.
You can see art like them without giving away your stuff, scuffing up the hands. Art will help you -- try going back the other direction. When you look at art consider how it was made and what it tells you. You can squint at the explanation posted on the wall, or attempt to see and comprehend what’s actually in the frame, the way the less culturally sophisticated, more-grounded poor person might. You can bet the cavalier looking out at you there among the gawkers at the corner of the painting is the artist himself, just as he looked the day he delivered it, wearing that same sly smile, never to be noticed by his rich patron and finally to be seen by you this morning, he winks at you across a couple of centuries. Such as that.
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