showtime -- big art’s thin disguise

On Friday evening, Gagosian director Sam Orlofsky tweeted about the sale, boasting that the gallery had “set a 7 figure world record for an artist within three hours of the artwork being revealed, and the purchaser never seeing it in person.” from artsy magazine online
 
The painting in question is a dark smeary mess, but extremely large, millionaire size, and destined for storage, since who would care to look at it for more than ten seconds, or in this case, at all? Hey, all you winners, do us all a favor and toss art out the window of your limo as you zoom by, and buy yourselves some time -- you never understood or cared about it, anyway. That brand-name ‘signature art’ you auction back and forth, artificially inflating enormous prices, reveals just what barbarians you really are.

Your usurpation of art as a cover for money laundering and tax evasion, beyond the cheap hustle of peddling fake culture to new money, will eventually find you out. An afternoon’s scrawl, pulling millions at auction on the evening news, is perhaps the most blatant and visible affront to working people you could devise. If you continue to bait them with your privilege and excess, they’ll become belligerent and unreasonable, even irrational and willing to sacrifice their own interests just to expressed how pissed they really are. It seems their voices will finally be heard, even if it takes electing a civic saboteur as president to get their outrage across.

The collapse of your empire of brand-name blue-book art, warehoused fortunes reduced to dust, would mean a great liberation for art itself, and for common people. The malaise may recede when the citizens begin to see themselves and their commonalities more clearly through the medium of the art, both accessible and attainable. Of course sooner or later, newly empowered, they’ll come for you, alter the tax code and pull the plug on your philanthropic write-off racket. (As soon as some city council bolts, so starved for resources that it puts the museum’s collection of modern masters on the market for cash, it’s all over, and their true market value will be revealed. This almost happened in Detroit a few years ago, until so-called philanthropic entities rushed it with a fat donation to the trash collectors union. Actually happened, see owning art jan 2014 -- https://owningart.blogspot.com/2014/01/the-case-of-330-million-dollar-finger.html, and also read its rebuttal.)

Visual art can become a great solace to common people, a verification of personal autonomy and worth, first as an example of value beyond models of mass consumption, and of an expression too individual and personal for algorithms to grasp. The fair price of art is its value to the person who intends to own it and make it a part of their life, negotiated against the time, skill, and vision of the artist, which should be a reasonable and rational bargain in a regional market increasingly aware of its own art and artists.