8 ],|ONEY

Artt relationship wirh money begins wirh parronage. lfhen under rhe shadow of
religious ritual, arr is Enanced by the religious body it obediently serves, the arrisrs
often remaining anonymous, as in the Middle Ages, when arrists were atisans whose
duty was ro describe the stories and virtues ofthe Chrisrian faith. Arcisric innovarion
was no! an issue, since the artisr-artisan's dury was to discharge objectives within ser
prescriptions. They were paid for their crearions as a carpenter would be for a cable
or a tailor a coar. The late Middle Ages saw rhe advent of rrade routes on land and
sea, which resulted in a greater influx of goods. People became more demanding
and discriminaring, suppliers more compedtive. For those in secondary production,
in the arrs as elsewhere, increased comperition accompanied rhe desire ro garner
artention through novelcy, invention or efficiency. And thus in the Renaissance
che fowering of the notion of genius: rhe arris! atracrs patrons for his abiliry ro
distinguish himself, which reflects direcdy back on rhe distinction of the patron.
Patronage is therefore nor just a marrer ofspending riches, ir is what secures these
riches and jusrifies them. The central paradox of patronage is rhar ir engenders a
culture of prosperity lhat reverses rhe perception of the parront fortunes: ar! comes
to be seen not as a resuk, but a cause of rhe patront success, like securing a birrhright
after the birth, a favourite ruse ofusurpers and bastard princes.
Just as the relarionship benveen arcisr and patron was so ofien built on a healthy
contempt, the relarionship berween art and money is agonisric, fraught by inequiries,
moraliry and guilt. How can an object like a painring made of clorh, wood, oil
and pigment be worth more than a housing estate? The answer lies in the mystery
which is its religious legacy thar art enjoys, ofbeing above or ourside the world.
Absrract in value and speaking the unspeakable, some works ofart do rhis betrer than
others, bu! the unforrunate pitlill is rhar arrisric merit may become conflated with
rhe price laid on its ineffable power, confusing monetary with spiritual, or symbolic
value. This displaces rhe funcrion ofart to become jusr a cog or rivet in rhe colossal
internarional monetary machine. -{4rile arrk first encounters wirh patronage were to
represent wealth, irs ensuing purpose was to rranscend ir, making art all the more
desirable, and ironically, monerarily valuable. The persona of the affisr was, and is,
also an essential tool in markering rhe mystique that artracrs curiosity and desire.

Parronage featured in ancient Rome, which drew rhe distinction between rhe dis,
pensing ofpolirical favour, or what Renaissance Italy called clientelismo, and supporr
132 art: histories, theories and excePtions
oF the arrs, mecenatitmo, coined after the great literary patron and friend ofAugustus
Occavian, Gaius Maecenas (70 BCE to 8 BCE). Patronage was also a feature in early
feudalJapan, where wealth was conspicuously imbalanced, Nobles were expecred to

bankers and princes (as with the Medici and Sforza dynasdes) of Renaissance Italy,
rvho surrounded themselves not only with artists, but with astrologers, alchemists,
scholars and philosophers, as well as the breed chat will always dog patronage, the
fraud. This came at a period, around the mid- to lare 1300s, when princes were
beginning to take on such people as part of an inner circle, or familiaris, separace
from rhe family, military or civic domain. The pursuic ofabstract klowledge reserved
for an elite few was part of Neo-Placonist ambirions of rulers conscious of rhe fact
rhat power Iay not solely in ryranny but in ideas. A new social value had begun to
take shape, Courtly prosperiry was measured not just on grain and gold but on
cultural richness: rhe people it could attracc and the qualiry of the art produced for
which rulers were apt to pay handsomely.
Parronage was always a triclg, business. As Ingrid Rowland, in her study of the
Renaissance suggests, in many the line between mecenatismo and clientelismo
cases
was muddied, as with for example Raphael (1483-1520) or Sebastian di Piombo (r'
1485-1527), who had administradve sinecures in gratitude for their artistic services,
while Machiavelli and Guicciardini, who held political appointments, also nursed
literary ambirions.l Families with scions in both the clerry and ruling nobility, which
was not unusual, found themsel*'es having to manoeuvre beween their various
interests, normally negotiared so they could be covertly met rather than foregone'
Once artists had forged a separate relationship for themselves and a class distinct
from artisanship, and once they were deemed guardians of tasre, experience and
feeling, the issue of patronage could often be moot. By the end of the eighteench
cenrury, works of att were seen to be superior to cribularions about money But
artists need to live, however inflated their self-importance, For rhis, an ersatz form of
payment, the honorarium, was invenced. Artists could thus be paid without feeling
like salaried workers ot usurers. It is still a term that is ofien used today - as in
Germany (Honorar) - in place ofthe flat contemporary phrase, 'artist's fee''

From the sixteenth century onwards, painting was conspicuously about, and
descriptive ol wealth. The development o[ Dutch and SPanish painting in the
seventeenth centurywas thanks to their naval supremary and the high rate offoreign
trade. Holland became so prosperous that it suffered from what one historian has
called 'an embarrassment of riches'. As a middle-class mercantile culture, the most
popular paintings in Holland at the time were people enioying everyday pursuits
(che genre known as genre painting), porrrairs, and sril [fes describing the plenry
around rhem. The still Iife had numerous fiuctions, pre-eminently as the expression
of uanitas, the vanity of earrhly rhings which, when talen oPtimistically, meanr
relishing the profi,rsion of objects in a transienr world. It was also a convenient way
 money 133

50. Peeter Gysels,5tr// Ltfe neor o Fountoin,c 1585, 38 x 4f cm O Rijksmuseum,Amsterdam.

of flaunting possessions, especially when curios, flowers and musical instrumenrs

and the occasional parrot were concerned. In a work by the Flemish arrisr peerer
Gysels (1621-90), shown in Figure 50, the arrist combines landscapewith still life
to depict a world that is divinely benevolent. It is represenrative of work in this era

But maybe because of its materialism, many thinkers of the early nineteenth
century - Hegel and Hazlitt come ro mind thought Dutch art bland in comparison
-
to the great feats of the Venetians and the magnificence of the court of Louis XIV
The painting, sculpture and architecture of the Baroque period, which has to take

Duke of Marlborough.) And as we see in the massive tomb sculptures of this time
throughout Europe, parrons were as lavish in death as they were in life.
I34 art: histories, theories and excePtions

MARKETING THE ARTIST

The Napoleonic years taught that people could rise in sociery on the basis
of talent
of his marshals, many
as well as birth, which was after all the secret to the success
of whom were born commoners. For the Romantic youth of the early nineteenth

down nature of bourgeois parronage and also to the fact that there were a lot more

51. Wouter vanTroostwiik,self'Partrait, I 809 Oi on cardboard

mounted on pane,5l 3 x 40 cm @ Rijksmuseum,Amsterdam
 money 135

artists circling around the honey pot. Rather than being integrated into society when
art was integrated with ritual, in a fiscally rationalized sociery, artists were purveyors
of what could not be accurately valued, much less adequately understood. Inevitably,
arrists without the right social or academic connections found themselves branded
outsiders, and they marketed themselves as such: radically independent, deep and
tempestuous souls, they were invited to dinner parties as a foil to the proceedings
(and they may have needed the feed); they styled themselves as reckless, insouciant
dandies; theywere snubbed and envied as great lovers; theylived out the pleasures of
the flesh and experienced both its punishments and rewards. Innumerable works of
art have been sold on the personal allure of the author above any real merit.
Like all m1ths, it has its share of truth. Art is valued because it takes risks in
excess of any prosaic, unrewarding job. The social phenomenon of the artist-
bohemian has now become an accepted dimension of artistic practice, acceptable
from the way that artists have literally sculpted their persona so that it cannot
be disassociated from what they produce. Artists from the last century who
come to mind are Salvador Dali with his cane and Dr Seuss moustache; Yves
Klein (1928-62), who patented his own blue (International Klein Blue), self-
consciously cast gold leaf into the Seine as a ceremony of his disregard for art
commodities, or doctored photographs with himself leaping from a window; and
the perennial pitce de rdsistance, Andy'W'arhol (1928-87), the ultimate perform-
ance artist, who played at playing the artist. He would notoriously turn up to
cocktail parties and leave once someone had photographed him. His studio, known
as The Factory, was less a place of industry than an ad hoc party venue for models,
musicians, junkies, weirdos, and artists both failed and made. He also made and
'Warhols
sponsored films and founded the magazine Interuiew. overall output is one
of great ingenuity and subtlety. He was overwhelmingly struck by the idea of death,
and behind his apparently imperturbable showmanship, there lurks an impenetrable
personal demon that touches us as the dual nature of the satisfaction and hollowness
of commercial culture.
Arguably his greatest work of art was his own celebriry. He made himself into
a readymade: I point to myself; I am the work of art. Just as important as the
works themselves is the fact that Andy \Tarhol did them - he was the ultimate
signatory, the artist as brand name. 'Warhol was the pioneer of art's entry into the
sphere of mass-market production and entertainment. He still stands out fiom hi-s
successors because of an inscrutably laconic temperament, which lent an air of ironic
indifference to everlthing he did.

THE ART MARKET

The art dealer and the collector is a conspicuously modern phenomenon, born of
free trade and speculation. Until around the middle of the nineteenrh century, the
commonest way for artists to forge a career was through the public forum (or circus)
of the Salon. Optimal, for any artist, was to get his or her work purchased by the
136 art: histories, theories and excePtions
state, or at least a collector. Young artists would be on the lookout for prospective
commissions, portraits being the most common, though religious commissions were
still coveted despite the loosening grip of the Church. Until the 1870s in France
and a little later in other centres, the Academy, which was attached to government,
exercised a crippling dominance on the artistic system, conferring legitimacy on
all things artistic: it decided who could enter, decided on the curriculum, dictated
priorities, organized all the major exhibitions - to which it gave ostentatious
priorin' ro the artists it trained - at which it diwied out the prizes and advised on
purchases.
With this in mind, it is understandable that the new breed of independent artist,
starting with Courbet (1819_77) and Millet (1814-75), were so antagonistic to the
Establishment; and obversely it is easy to see why dominant academicians such as
G6r6me and Bouguereat (1825-7905) tirelessly, anxiously, obstructed the success
of the vanguard any way they could. A decisive blow was dealt to the Academy
in Vienna in1897, when a group of artists led by Gustav Klimt (1862-1918) an-
nounced their 'secession, justifring their break on three counts: to keep abreast of
the most progressive art of the day, to make exhibitions of a more self-sufficiently
aesthetic type, and to defend modern art at every level of sociery which actually
meant educating the conservatives of the Habsburg regime. The Viennese Secession-
ists helped to widen the notion of exhibition practices and worked closely with
architects and designers, developing sophisticated spaces for display, Iatter-day
temples of art that delighted and barraged the senses. Interestingly enough, however,
these formats had already been tried out in the previous decade or two in commercial
galleries, albeit on a smaller scale. By the beginning of the twentieth century the
Secessionists had built the foundation for the new Establishment, an entrepreneurial
mentality in the artist that admitted commercial concerns as a way of furthering
private experiments. Liaising between Academy and public, a shrewd artist would
reap the benefits ofboth.
Dissent berween radicals and the Establishment had already taken root since
1830, and by the end of the century, rebuffs from academicians held a cachet, certify-
ing rebellious status, from which they and shrewd speculators stood to profit. As
Pierre Bourdieu claims in The Rules ofArt, this division between traditional-academic
and radical-vanguard was an essential component in the growth of the marketplace.
The mainstream quickly consumes works of art (he is also talking about novels),
which get forgotten in the long term, but gives the basic infrastructural support to
gallerists of publlshing houses to support the minoriry of radicals whose reputations
will outlive their commercially viable peers. The cycle of radical to established, he
argues, is not internal to workings ofstyle, it is external and an effect ofperceptions
driven by fmhion and commercial interest. And curiously enough, it is only with
rhe expansion of the market that classifications such as'nude'or'landscape'become
comprehensive and more intricate: 'peasant scene', 'beach scene'. The same goes for
the rvays in which artists are grouped according to their media and subject matter.2
If rve accept Bourdieu's thesis, we must conclude that a significant vector of the
 mone,/ 137

modern experience of the work of art is the market that drives, disseminates and
ratifies it.
ln 1852 the French state established an auction house, the H6tel Drouot, to take
advantage of a heated art market. It was a combination of commercial speculation
and historical know-how not dissimilar from the Christie's and Sothebyt of today.
As Robert Jensen makes clear in his study of the art market of this time, there were
hundreds of dealers in Paris by the 1850s, but few participated in the coterie of
experrs used by the H6tel Drouot. Established in 1848, just before Drouot, two
firms, the Galerie Petit and the Galerie Durand-Ruel, took part in the driving power
of the centralized scheme by guaranteeing authenticity of ob.iects, making market
forecasts, predicting hazards, and calling upon historians and critics to confirm
an artist's importance.3 Durand-Ruel became what Jensen calls the first major
'ideological dealer', meaning one who dealt with artists in a more than arbitrary way,
but worked according to groupings of artists which reflected a particular investment
in taste, in their case the best investments of all, the Realists and the Impressionists.
This aesthetic organization has carried through to the present. Galleries have
aesthetic biases or generational foci that they target at prospective buyers and
institutions. The biggest galleries are organized like the auction houses (to which in
the 1800s theywere once more closely affiliated), in so far as they employ a small
cohort of administrators and experts who ensure that the artists within their stable
are written about, known about by other experts, represented in major collections,
in short, made part of a system that secures their marketability. Such efforts are
important when dealing with an abstract value such as art, but they are dubious
when mediocre artists are bolstered to ridiculous heights. Since the art market is like
the stock market - an expression of confidence in abstract quantd-when many inter-
ests are at stake, it takes time for the value to correct itself, and sometimes it doesnt;
the prices for mediocre artworks can remain unindicatively high. Art and money
have a lot in common. Both are unstable; both pretend to a truth that neither can
veri$r; both rely on consensus, conviction, desire and memory.

As auction results have shown, Impressionism and post-Impressionism are the surest
bet on the commercial market, indeed anything in the bracket from about 1860 until
1 9 1 0, perhaps the most sensuous phases of Modernism. It is also curious to note that

many of the paintings that have commanded the top prices are of people, lending
truth to the journalistt adage that if you are going to make a picture interesting.
ensure that it has a person in it. At the time of the printing of this book, the top
three most expensive works of art, all paintings, are: first, Gustav Klimt's porrrair of
Adele Bloch-Bauer (1907), moodily, haughtily peeping out from a trussed-up and
flattened neo-Byzantine surface in a cavalcade of gold Ieaf, sold to Roberr Lauder
in June 2006 for $135 million, for his Neue Galerie in New York ldoes riar male
the purchase tax-deductible?). A radiant orgy of gold, the rvork drips u'ealth, so
perhaps it met its destiny. The second on the list is Vincent ran Gogh's portrair of
Dr Gachet (1890), sold to theJapanese businessman Rvoei Saito in Mal'1990 fbr
138 art: histories, theories and exceptions
US$82.5 million; third, also to Saito, the smaller version of Renoir's work about the
young urban party, the Moulin de la Galette (1876) for US$78 million. Sums like
these de$. words.

COM MODITI ES, AUCTION EERI NG:

BAUDRILLARD
For Baudrillard s lively and polemical discourse on the art market it is necessary to go
back to Bataille, and the issue ofritual, sacrifice and exchange. For Baudrillard, the
art commodiry is the object par excellence of\Testern societyt hankering for bygone
objects. Art objects purchased for astronomical sums have only peripheral bearing
on the circumstances which gave rise to them (their historical 'truth), but rather are
endowed with a special meaning that sanctifies their symbolic nature as eminently
precious and obscure. In other words, there is absolutely nothing we can say about
Klimt's portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer that may justify the sum paid for it except
maybe that other works by the same artist have had a healthy market history. The
work was bought on taste and personal inclination. Its status as a fetish is double:
the buyer fetishizes the work and, as a result of the sale, the work epitomizes the
commodity fetish.
In this crazy process, the historical boundaries that circumscribe the object be-
come more and more tenuous; its interest as 'most valuable object' takes over. For
Baudrillard, this kind of slippage is integral to artt role within a society that has lost
the continuities of symbolic exchange which bind it to mphic origins. The myths
underlying being are displaced by the my'th that emanates from funnelling immense
amounts of capital into things; once the signifiers of blood, birth and title unravel,
the symbolic energies invested in them leap into objects: bibelots, jewels, furniture,
artefacts and art. \7ith undertones of Mcluhan's 'hot' and 'cool', Baudrillard
examines the difference berween the bygone object and the modern functional object
as 'heavy' on one hand and 'light' on the other. Our techno-culture has secured the
passage from what he calls 'a metallurgic to semiurgic' society, from the theatre of
ritual to a foating system of indefinite values whose meaning derives from their
relation to one another.4
The art auction,'this crucible of the interchange of values', is the unrivalled site
of symbolic exchange. Baudrillard bypasses Marls thesis in the Critique of Political
Economlt, which states that symbolic exchange, money, is buoyed by use value: in
the art auction 'economic exchange value' is exchanged for a 'pure sign', namely
the work of art. This engenders an endless relay and flux that cannor be atomized
to an activity or an equivalent object except those that have been subject to the
sa-me kind of exchange. Art auctions are where aristocrat-plurocrats play out their
games of dominance, albeit amongst themselves. Baudrillard nores the ritual in the
auction event and the personal character ofthe exchange (recorded in the precious
 money 139

artworkt mandatory provenance: what belonged to whom for how long and where
it was sold). Moreovet there is no interplay between supply and demand. Value is
decided upon according to the whim of the auctioneer and the extenr ro which the
ability to exercise that whim is flaunted. If there is any pariry in the process, muses
Baudrillard, it is in the individual buyer and the work he or she buys:

In fact, what we call the 'psychology' of the art lover is also in its entirery a
reduction from the system of exchange. The singulariry that he asserts - that
fetishist passion for the object lived as an elective afEniry - is established on
his recognition as a peer, by virtue of a competitive act, in a communiry of the
privileged. He is the equal to the canvas itself, whose unique value resides in
the relation of pariry or statutory privilege, which, as a sign, it maintains with
the other terms of the limited corpus of paintings. Hence the 'elitist' affiniry
benveen the amateur and the canvas that psychologically connores the very sort
ofvalue, ofexchange and ofaristocratic social relation that is instituted by the
auction.5

And what of the museum as an institution which assembles artworks for the
communal good rather than for individual gain? It 'acts as a guarantee for aristocratic
exchange' on a material level, operating as a kind of 'gold bank', and at an 'organic'
level, ensuring that art is valuable, and that its value plays a part in sociery and in
deciding which works are worth seeing over those that are not. I will return to this
in the next chapter, where I will also discuss questionable entitlement and plundered
objects.
For not all museums themselves are benign. Many, such as the Getry whose trust
is $8 billion, were initiated not only out of the love of art but because of tax breaks it
could achieve by operating as a public museum and trust. It has recently come to light
that the Getty was involved in a series of scandals involving Grecian urns acquired
under illegal circumstances through the now discredited Italian dealer, Giacomo
Medici. Although it never dealt with Medici directly, it is now known that the Getry
acquired fragments of the same urn ar different rimes, which they then assembled.
To make matters worse, in 1996 the prominent philanthropic couple Barbara and
Lawrence Fleischman loaned $400,000 to the anriquiries curator, Marion Tiue,
but declined to disclose the transaction as a possible conflict of interests because
of the mammoth $20 million purchase (already underway) by the Getry of their
antiquities collection, which went hand in glove with an equally lucrative donation
(the latter being tax-deductible). These shenanigans were revealed when ir came
to light that the donated corpus of antiquities contained a stolen item, an ancienr
Roman statue. Barbara Fleischman, who was also on the board of the Getry-, resigned
shortly afterwards. As can be expected, a severe dent was put into Getry's srarus as a
tax-exempt institution.6
Such transactions are effected by advice, advice offered by complex specialist
make-up of curators, historians, dealers and collectors; a role that until recendywas
embodied in one suave, sagacious and shifty rype, the connoisseur.
140 art: histories, theories and exceptions

COLLECTING AND CONNOISSEURSHIP

Early in Marcel Proustt magnum opus, Remembrance of Things Past, the young
narrator makes the acquaintance of the novel's great aesthete, Charles Swann, son
of a rich stockbroker, who spends his time in leisure consorting with the titled elite,
offering society women advice on painting purchases and home decoration, while
amusing himself with finding resemblances between Renaissance painting and
prominent figures.
Had it been absolutely essential to apply to Swann a social co-efficient peculiar
to himself, as distinct from all the other sons of other stockbrokers in his father's
position, his co-efficient would have been rather lower than theirs, because,
being very simple in his habits, and having always had a craze for'antiques' and
pictures, he now lived and amassed his collections in an old house which my
grandmother longed to visit [.. .] hre you really a connoisseur, now?' she would
ask him; 'I ask for your own sake, as you are likely to have fakes palmed off on
you by rhe dealers'.-

There is much more to this than subjective observation and social satire, for what
Proust has painted is a portrait of the quintessential gentleman collector at the end of
the nineteenth century, and the curiosity and scepticism he aroused. I could as easily
have quoted a dozen other passages from other authors, especially Henry James,
many ofwhose major noyels are based on the pressures occasioned by the infiltration
of the new wealth of America into Europe.
The robust arr market of the latter half of the nineteenth century gave birth to
the connoisseur (from the pre-modern French, conoistre,'to kno#), a gentleman
of taste whose knowledge came not only from professorial wisdom but from cont-
inuing experience and lay advice. The connoisseur was conventionally someone of
knowledge with the unquantifiable gifts of discernment and good taste, and such
beings, like Swann (who had real protorypes in the aesthete Charles Haas and
the founder of the Gazette des Beaux-Arrs, Charles Ephrussi), were sought out by
people wishing to make the right decisions, for the purpose of keeping up with
the Joneses and for making profitable investments. Such commerce was in the best
interests of the connoisseur who did not just hanker after recognition, but always
the opportuniry to view rare and beautiful objects. Connoisseurs could seldom resist
becoming collectors and their passion would frequently lead them into becoming
art dealers.
The great antecedent of the connoisseur is Diderot, whose most reliable source
of income in middle life came from Catherine the Great (1729-96), who entrusted
him with major purchases of art treasures from France and the Netherlands to grace
what she planned to be her Francophile, newly enlightened empire. Many of the
great works in the Hermitage are thanks to Diderot's amiable prejudices.
Already, by the end of the nineteenth century, the focus began to move from Paris
ro other great European cities like Vienna, London and Berlin, and to New York,
ri-hich is now the hub of the commercial art world. I say'commercial' because even if
 money t4t

the best work is not done there, it is where artists, dealers and collectors gather with
the confidence of the best buying and selling successes and, by virtue of being in
New York, with the best prestige. It is commonplace for major dealers in commercial
centres in Europe (Cologne, Munich and Zurich) to have offices there, as it is seen
as the international nexus of artistic affairs. It is much like what Rome was in the
eighteenth century. The idea of a commercial artistic centre only came about with
the invention of tourism. Rome was the last stop on the Grand Tour populartzedby
the British in this time, and was a place where artists gravitated to find commissions
and where the afHuent sought the right artist for what they had in mind. As Goethe
remarked rn 1787 in his Journeys in ltaly,'Big money is now being paid for Etruscan
vases [. . .] There is no traveller who doesnt want to own some.'
But there was a difference between the gentleman collector and the modern
speculator-dealer who monopolized on the turn of Europe's fortunes, when old
patrimonies started to dry up, which forced their progeny to look across the Atlantic
in order to mop up mounting debts. The king bar none of connoisseur-dealers was
the son of aJewish-Dutch immigrant to Hull in England, Joseph Duveen (1869-
1939), who later became Baron Duveen of Millbank. His most famous saying,
'Europe has a great deal of art, and America has a great deal of money', was exploited
mercilessly and he, more than anyone, exploited the decline of the old families and
rise of the American financial empires.
Duveen's clients comprised the \Yhoi Who of collectors and collections: Frick,
Hearst, Huntington, Morgan, Kress, Mellon and Rockefeller. Point to a handful of
masterworks in one of the American collections and the chances are that Duveen
had a hand in at least a couple of them. In the process Duveen amassed enormous
wealth, and built the Duveen gallery in the British Museum in his own honour to
house the Elgin Marbles (for whose disastrous cleaning he was also responsible).
In 1912, Duveen entered into a private pact with the other magus of connois-
seurs, Bernard Berenson (1865-1959), who in his heyday was treated as the lasr
word in the field of attribution. The erudite Berenson and mercurial Duveen were
responsible for reviving interest in the Renaissance - which then also raised their
prices. Their relationship ended in acrimony just before Duveen's death in 7937,
over the attribution of the Adoration of the Shepberds (interded for the Kress
collection) which Duveen rightly attributed to Giorgione, but which Berenson
hailed as a Titian. 'While their story is the stuff of legend and their influence one of
en\y, respect for them has paled, as many of their attributions have been proved to
be false, some indeed are of fakes. It has given us cause to presume that this was due
to cynicism as much as casual error.

The equation that both motivated and haunted connoisseurs and collectors at the
turn of the century was this: culture equals class. The great magnares of the USA
used art not just as a vehicle for buying class, but also as a means of expiating their
sins, of cleansing their unimaginable wealth while still allowing them to be able to
keep it.
142 art: histories, theories and exceptions
There are many fascinating tales to be told, and I can only offer a glimpse. In
the case of Mellon, who for most of his life had no time for art, collecting only
began in his sixties. During the Depression, he bought half of the best paintings
in the Hermitage, which Stalin let go for a song. Having long been victimized by
F. D. Roosevelt, Mellon took revenge through beneficence, donating his collection
to the National Gallery in \(ashington. Then there was Alfred Barnes, who made
his fortune from the antiseptic drug, Argyrol, who, with the help of the dealer Paul
Guillaume and luminaries such as Gertrude Stein and her brother Leo, bought up
some of the finest works of early Modernism, the centrepiece being Matisse's Joy of
Lfe (1905). His foundation had over 2,500 objects to its name. The paintings alone
are esrimated to be worth over $2 billion. To raref. the collection all the more, it is
not permitted for works from the Barnes collection to be lent out, making any visit
Iike an act of pilgrimage.
Another interesting case is that of the names behind the Clark Institute in Vil-
liamstown, Massachusetts, two brothers of wildly different temperaments and tastes,
Stephen and Sterling. Inheritors of the Singer sewing machine firm, Stephen was
sedate and bourgeois, Sterling an extrovert with cosmopolitan leanings. Yet it is
Stephen's collection, with its share of pioneer Modernists such as C6zanne, that holds
the greater interest, Sterling having a penchant for the softly brushed idylls ofSargent
and Renoir. Taken apart, the collections are studies in personal preference; taken
together, they cast wide and clear lens on the artistic developments of four decades.
a

But when one casts onet eyes over the gamut of any of the great collectors, one
sees the victory of idiosyncrasy over objectiviry. Exercising a powerful subjective
will appears to be a lot more interesting that trying to please everyone. Private col-
lections - whether in the Cognacq-Jay or Nissim de Camondo in Paris, the Beyeler
in Basle, or the \Tallace in London - bear the imprint of their originator, and as
\(alter Benjamin remarked in his famous essay on the collector, they reveal as
much about the collector as what is collected. As such, they retain the stamp of
the fallible individual. Collections are not motivated by the generalizing impulse to
which, righdy or wrongly, many public collections are accountable. As imprinted
with an individual sensibiliry the private collection has many surprises and curious,
incidental works that enrich the significant ones. For each work has been chosen
according to imperatives that have nothing to do with public accountability. \Mhile
such collections remain on display without supplementation or interference, experi-
encing them is frequently, in my opinion, a less depersonalizing and more rewarding
experience. One has the sense of having uncovered and shared something rather
than of being the witness to an aesthetic event that subsists in all its grandeur
whether you are there to see it or not. Ironically, it would seem, the private collec-
tion, although born from elitism, the least democratic impulse, succeeds in high-
lighting the humanist function of the objects in its store, and of the particular (as
opposed to general) impulse that gathered them together. As John Updike remarked
in a review of an exhibition devoted to the Clark collections, 'Collectors invest in the
future, assembling a perpetuation of their best, most discriminating selves.'8
 mone,/ 143

No national budget or latter-day billionaire can realistically compete with the

collections that the American magnates of the turn of the cenrury assembled, especi-
ally since museums will do anything to avoid de-acquisition. An alternative for the
contemporary collector is to buy from the presenr, and hope that in time the works
will experience a similarly favourable fate.

ART ABOUT MONEY

In one of those curiosities in the annals of historical beginnings and ends, Pop Art
originated in England, not America (just like Romanticism originated in Germany,
not France) - reputedly attributed to a collage work of Eduardo Paolozzi (1924_
2005) in which the word 'pop' issues from a gun, Peter Blake (b. 1932) (designer of
the classic album cover for Sergeant Pepper by the Beatles), and the critic Lawrence
AIIoway (1926-90) (who is credited with coining the term).e Pop Art was in many
ways a logical phenomenon. Americat economy had been artificially heated by the
war effort, which led to the boom decades of the 1950s and 1960s. Many artists of
the generation that followed the Abstract Expressionists were tired of earnest navel-
gazing, preferring to rurn their eye ro rhe reaming outside world of commodity
fetishism that was drowning out rhe solitary voices of men caught up in their own
internalized tragedies. Urban nature, as the Pop artists saw it, did not consist in rrees,
pastures and peasant girls, but in the objects geared for consumer desire, a world
bright in colour and dim on subtlety. Many of the Pop artists came from commercial
backgrounds: Lichtenstein (1923_97) graphic design, \Tarhol advertising and
Rosenquist (b. 1933) billboard painting. Pop is an arr rhar has no compunction
about poetizing the arbitrary, stereotypical signs that spill unremittingly from the
capitalist funnel. It was also astonishing to see artists renouncing the transcendent
quality of art, so single-mindedly pursued by Abstract Expressionism, ro embrace
the vulgar commodiry.
Pop Art enjoyed a revival in the boom years of the mid-1980s, in which arrisrs,
especially American, took special licence in the notion that art holds a mirror to irs
times. Their indulgence was to make art that was shamelessly overblown about the
shamelessly overblown. JeffKoonst MichaelJacleson and Bubbles (1988), reputedly
the biggest porcelain in the world, has become something of a symbol of the high-
flung art ofthe 1980s.
\7orks such as these beg serious questions about the social function ofthe artist
and the nature of artistic commentary. Artists such as Koons (b. 1955; who also
financed his.first major series from money earned from playing the stock market)
argue that kitsch is the most accessible and pervasive factor in our lives, and to deny
it is to make art that denies the truth. (At the same rime as this, most conspicuouslv
following the 1987 market crash, other artists adopted a newfangl ed Arte pouera-
cum-Dada now known as grunge art, which aspires to all that is formless, dilapidated
and crude, a sign ofd6class6 urban hardship.)
144 art: histories, theories and exceptions

52. )eff Koons,Michcel lockson and Bubbles, l9BB, Ceram c, 067 x l79l x 8)6 rnm.
O Courtesy of the artst and the Astrup Fearn ey Museum of l'4odern Art, Oslo.

The critical claims of the disproportionately commodified art object are caught
within acyclic argument, which I will attempt to conclude with here. One of the
reasons why art treasures command such astronomical prices is for the very reason
that they are believed to have meanings that are unique or at least hugely rare. But
we musr question art that is about the commodity which assumes the status of
commodity about which it is a commentary - such art has it both ways, setting itself
both above the discourse, commenting upon it, and within that discourse, profiting
from it. \[hen art engages in meanings that are about those which it proudly sets
itself above, and especially money, it is dealing with something whose virtue is its
limiting, simplifying power, and is therefore trafficking in fool's gold. The world still
subjugates the majority of women. Does this pardon sexist art that justifies itself
with the call that the world is sexist? Or racist, classist art that supposedly truthfully
reflects a racist world? How shallow.
But to make affairs more complicated, it might still be tenable to suggest that
Koons is a great artist - add to this that his prices are among the highest for any liv-
ing artist, and that three years after it was made, the MichaelJackson and Bubbles sold
for US$5,616,750 - because he most precisely, graphically and memorably captures
after Warhol the socio-aesthetic phenomenon of stardom and the massive accumu-
lation of capital. It is his work that comes to mind upon any mention of artworks
about money that make money. The circle is complete.
To combat what to many is a critically self-defeating practice that is simply about
the inequities in the system, artists continue to resort to non-material practices that
question the market and the museums that represent it. This is one of the ideas in
the chapter that follows, on museums and on modes of display that try to destabilize
them.