who really pays -- real art thieves

A new generation of prosecutors promises pursue the tax manipulation going on in major art transactions, such as art bought at a bogus auction for an absurd price, and then donated to a museum for a write-off right away, black ties and limos. These are essentially thefts by very wealthy people from those who contribute to their opulent lifestyles with actual sweat, occupational stress, and physical effort, and the brandname artworks they use for collateral mean no more to them than squares of colored cloth. That’s awful and needs to be fixed, but there’s a more insidious crime going down. They also stole the art.

It’s up for debate -- are common folk too dumb to appreciate art, or are they too smart to pretend to like something they don’t? It’s going to be difficult to argue that rich people are more intelligent when you look at their art. The emotional charge of a color field painting made by an artist weeping into their whiskey is undeniable, until you consider there might be a thousand of them out there, maybe more, no one knows. Present these paintings any way you like, but in the end any one looks like all the others.

People who earn their livings forty hours at a time don’t dream of acquiring such rarified markers of genius, they’re too smart. Working people aren’t charmed by the notion that an afternoon of clever and audacious paint application can be worth more than their lifetime total income, and tend to find themselves unmoved when they see the results. Oddly enough, the one thing that’s out of bounds for serious art these days is any possible appeal to common taste. This dictum exists so rich people can feel smart and it makes the market manageable, but what happened to the art that used to hang in homes, and where are the artists who made it?

Turns out it’s one of art’s first lessons, learned when any particular person shakes themselves free of the mythology of modern art, its celebrity movements and sensational breakthroughs, and just starts looking at art for themselves. Art is about self-discovery first of all, and sooner or later realizing the ultimate decision about what you like is yours to make.

carts before horses -- identity art

Picasso is the pied piper who led twentieth century art astray but it wasn’t in his paintings, it was in the marketing of his name. In his prime, Picasso made art all day long, everyday, taking time out for lunch and using the fish bone in his art that afternoon. He didn’t care what you thought of it, and that was part of his charm, but it was his becoming internationally famous that changed art. Thereafter the name in the corner became more important than the image, the actual art. Even though he made art across a wide range of styles, from assertive statements miles ahead of his contemporaries to almost thoughtless scrawls, all that needs to be said to establish a piece of art’s status is just the name. For the remainder of the twentieth century art slowly transformed into a managed and manipulated pantheon of personality cults, with ambitious artists striving for fame like horses in the derby. In galleries, patrons were encouraged to place their bets and live with the results.

I could suggest this way of looking at art is backward but this is about art, and words will never convey the what the art says directly. It’s a fact that a clever forgery of a famous piece of art that would cost tens of millions is worth absolutely nothing, and probably no fun to look at either. Who would really want to own a genuine Jackson Pollock if he’d never become famous and just happened to live next door? I could go on but we all have eyes. It’s the cross-eyed offspring of signature art that currently informs the art aware, and all around art is being solicited from check-list identity groups, anyone neglected or excluded because of who they are as a member of a maligned minority. Sorry, you’re a little late. In this quaintly southern town our local celebrity artist, Henry Faulkner, was notoriously, almost belligerently, gay decades ago, so that ice has long been broken, and nationally gayness is almost assumed.

Art, believe it or not, is quite democratic, and the insight and attitude embodied in the image doesn’t reveal who made it, although similar sensibilities might recognize each other through art. Frankly, it’s not that important, who made it. It’s interesting to learn about the artist, but it’s a side street, an add-on, something extra you can in time forget so long as you hang on to the painting, putting it up wherever you live and seeing it everyday.