Saturday, March 31, 2007
Art and Money
They go together like a horse and carriage.
The prices of paintings have often appeared to follow the logic of acreage for income. The larger the work, the higher the price. How good the work might be didn't enter the equation, or even seem relevant. At one time the more careerist artists were painting for corporate lobbies, and that meant big. It grew out of a tradition where artists would create Salon works which were to make their name and migrated into the art markets — the corporations thought they were getting something good because it was big, and like corporate buildings themselves, it enhanced the ego. The personal, suggestive, magical, meditative, poetical and spiritual values of art were abandoned — adopting the value system of the popular culture.
This article says that value and price are distinct. Big surprise there.
…Meyer Schapiro argued that there was a radical difference between art’s spiritual value and its commercial value. He warned against the nihilistic effect of collapsing their difference. I will argue that today, in the public mind, and perhaps in the unconscious of many artists, there is no difference. The commercial value of art has usurped its spiritual value, indeed, seems to determine it. Art’s esthetic, cognitive, emotional and moral value — its value for the dialectical varieties of critical consciousness — has been subsumed by the value of money.