How rich do you have to be for a pile of something somewhere in your expansive house to be obviously art? What instructions will you give the housekeeper, do you have to call the artist to move it, are underlings going to laugh behind your back? Other rich people will understand because you’ll tell them how much you paid for it, or you’ll expect them to know already, but be warned, away from the dazzle of the expo your deskilled assemblage might not like the morning light.
Paintings, on the other hand, are portable, and up off the floor they stay out of the way. When you move they stack together in the van, and when well-made are easily maintained, should last forever. Sizes vary, but mostly paintings are all the same, just colors arranged on a flat, rectangular surface. Buying and selling should be easy, the painting, itself, like the puppy in the window, just wanting to be loved and to find a good home, but it isn’t.
The complicated part is price, how is it determined and what does it have to do with the inherent worth of the object? Actually, less and less. It’s a common but inverted logic that suggests price determines value. Anyone can see being very expensive is just a big bluff until someone writes the check, and then all of a sudden it’s real, don’t you see? If you have a few extra bucks and a yen for exotic poker, the art game is tailor-made for you -- hold ‘em, fold ‘em, bet on the next big thing.
Owning art maintains the quixotic notion that commitment, vision, and accomplishment ought to determine price, relative, of course, to the other art around. Simple as that. Rather than consulting a listing of prior affirmations, and factoring in the uptown, high-rent location of the gallery, we suggest looking straight away at the art. Nothing but open-minded, and without regard to abstract or representational, the essential question becomes does this painting sustain a gravitational pull on the attention, is it noticed each time seen? It’s a visual test based on the direct experience of the viewer, and also represents the basic aspiration of anyone who tries to make a picture. All the rest is sauce, at the top a curry of high fashion and tribal identity, the hulking edifice of the art-industrial complex turns out to be a fancy restaurant that somehow lost the meat.
Paintings, on the other hand, are portable, and up off the floor they stay out of the way. When you move they stack together in the van, and when well-made are easily maintained, should last forever. Sizes vary, but mostly paintings are all the same, just colors arranged on a flat, rectangular surface. Buying and selling should be easy, the painting, itself, like the puppy in the window, just wanting to be loved and to find a good home, but it isn’t.
The complicated part is price, how is it determined and what does it have to do with the inherent worth of the object? Actually, less and less. It’s a common but inverted logic that suggests price determines value. Anyone can see being very expensive is just a big bluff until someone writes the check, and then all of a sudden it’s real, don’t you see? If you have a few extra bucks and a yen for exotic poker, the art game is tailor-made for you -- hold ‘em, fold ‘em, bet on the next big thing.
Owning art maintains the quixotic notion that commitment, vision, and accomplishment ought to determine price, relative, of course, to the other art around. Simple as that. Rather than consulting a listing of prior affirmations, and factoring in the uptown, high-rent location of the gallery, we suggest looking straight away at the art. Nothing but open-minded, and without regard to abstract or representational, the essential question becomes does this painting sustain a gravitational pull on the attention, is it noticed each time seen? It’s a visual test based on the direct experience of the viewer, and also represents the basic aspiration of anyone who tries to make a picture. All the rest is sauce, at the top a curry of high fashion and tribal identity, the hulking edifice of the art-industrial complex turns out to be a fancy restaurant that somehow lost the meat.
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