71. Art Supplies: An Editorial on Aesthetic Appreciations, by Michael Porter
We can all agree that works of art fulfill many functions in the lives of those who encounter them. For some, art is almost a religion. For others, art is at best a dependable distraction from life’s ordinary cares. There is a story going around that a wealthy collector in a far land (Australia? New Zealand? Hong Kong?) owns a treasured art masterpiece and views it once a year in a protective underground bunker, complete with perfect temperature and humidity controls and, of course, hanging and lighting that make the annual ritual a perfect encounter. Perhaps this is just what the painting deserves, before the hopefully educated eyes of its owner.
Or perhaps what we have here is an example of the Art Object as Private Trophy, the aesthetic experience as Commodity Fetish.
We must remember: really new aesthetic encounters usually have a sell-by date. How long is a new artwork able to sustain the “shock” of its introduction in gallery, bookstore, concert hall or theater? Six days? Six weeks? Six months? It is not true that art is eternal. As Walter Benjamin put it, the artwork’s “aura” is part of its non-reproducibility and its vulnerability. After a certain period, the individual artifact can even fall into the hands of what have come to be called “curators”. There is nothing wrong with consigning a produced work to controlled environments, but by then inevitably the bloom is off the rose; something like the true experience may have become available only to dedicated scholars and fellow artists who use intuition to guess at original startlement. Let’s face it, what hangs on museum walls is a mere husk before the original effect of the real, artistic thing.
This stern reality (and it is a determinant reality for many aesthetes today) is not going to keep a certain kind of art patron from paying high prices for collectibles. After the curator often comes the dealer. (Museums are known to sell their holdings to raise monies when the roof needs repairs. Public art is especially not eternal.) A husk is a less dangerous commodity than a living, breathing artwork, newborn from a living, breathing artisan. What hangs on the museum wall is a trace, an indication, its captured ineffabilities capable of calling dealerships into existence. (Artists themselves can be difficult to “curate” amid their immediate rites of production.) And your typical collector may not necessarily be an artistic type himself or herself. A moneyed collector may even prefer husks. As long as there is mutual agreement among dealers, the trace can make the deal. The tenebrous mystery of the aesthetic can itself generate hard cash.
Remember, also: an artist may very well be interested in the next painting or symphony or ballet rather than conserving yesterday’s inventions. The curator or dealer or artistic director lives most happily with the past. It may be his or her only route to something like a living present. Life is hard outside the vault. In the world of art appreciation, it takes all kinds.
Ironically, what we call the living “tradition” behind a work of art may be found only within each new work, steeped in its inherited “lineage”, in its style, in its continued search for form. It is all there in the individual summative canvas or choreography produced this very day. And it is probably the thing that is missing thereafter in what is visible to the public in repertory or through institutional display. Ironically, it is often the contextual residue of the tradition that evaporates first. (Not just the Shuck of the New.) The collector would corral that fugitive, antique quality because it is possibly unavailable to him otherwise than through vast expenditure or an available bunker. And without that past, no present.
The best example of the latter fate is to be found in a current documentary film on the merchandizing of The Lost Leonardo. I refer to the movie of that title directed by Andreas Koefoed and currently showing at Film Forum. It concerns the record sale ($450 million) of an image of Christ entitled Salvator Mundi and ascribed by some to Leonardo da Vinci. We find out just how far dealers will go in search of the saleable past. The film covers the painting’s discovery at an auction house in New Orleans; its restoration here in New York by Dianne Modestini; the 2013 sale ($127 million) of the result to a Russian oligarch, Dimitry Ryboloviev, who used Freeport storage to avoid taxes; its 2017 auction by Christie’s New York to the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, Mohammed Bin Salman (MBS, for short), for the above hyperbolic amount, and its presumed current residence in the storerooms of the Louvre Abu Dhabi. Christie’s took $50 million for its cut.
From the beginning of the documentary, the viewer is allowed to be skeptical of claims of authenticity for the painting, and many of the interviews are unconvincing, to say the least. You have seldom seen so many interviewees with shifty eyes in a single motion picture. No one looks trustworthy, even the doubters who claim that this Salvator Mundi is not a good painting, much less a restored work of art. The Lost Leonardo sets a new standard for what can be caught of the inauthentic testimonies of witnesses before what may turn out to be a crime of the century. Think of a gallerist version of the caught mendacity in The Sorrow and the Pity. That’s close.
The “scam” (if that is what it is) was heavily supported by international institutions and celebs. There is a Christie’s advertisement for its coming auction that caught Leonardo DiCaprio lost in abject awe and possibly authentic reverence while staring at the painting. (Yes, that Leonardo. The actor.) In 2011, the British National Gallery put the specimen on display, acclaimed as a newly discovered work by the one and only original Leonardo. And the world-famous Louvre of Paris made efforts to cash in on the world-wide publicity but ended up pulping a new catalog and cancelling its display when the work’s owner demanded that the discovery be exhibited directly opposite the Mona Lisa, as a “civilizational” artifact. There are shots of President Macron welcoming the Crown Prince to Paris that chill the blood. (“So maybe he diced up a journalist”, one voice ventures in passing on the film’s soundtrack.)
Orson Welles’ brilliant fictional documentary F for Fake dealt with artistic misattribution, skilled restoration and fakery, the strong magic of imitations of true art. A double bill of The Lost Leonardo and Fake at Film Forum may be necessary in the near future. In the meantime, the editor and amateur at Ballet Voice merely suggests that somewhere under the hoopla lies a rather muzzy imitation of Leonardo’s idiom redolent of a workshop hand, not the Master’s. But, of course, M.P. is no expert.
The same week that I saw the documentary, I happened to be reading Henry James’ final completed novel from 1911, The Outcry, which deals with the sale by British private owners and some public institutions of beyond-price masterworks to newly wealthy American collectors at the turn of the 20th century. (The novel’s point is that this creates a type of public “outcry” against such barter that was not heard round the world upon the auctions of the vanished Leonardo.) I recommend the novel (edited by Jean Chothia, Cambridge University Press, 2016) to anyone wanting sophisticated literary entertainment and relevant commentary on the art market’s tendency to inflation then, now, and (it would appear) forever. American Booty has seldom been discussed with such plain-spoken judgment and stylistic sophistication.
The avaricious buyer in the novel is the wealthy Breckenridge Bender. As one character puts it, Bender is interested only in “ideal” purchases, the more expensive the better. (The Jamesian irony is never far away.) The novel’s art authenticator is young, idealistic Hugh Crimble; he is described in the language of the period as a “connoisseur”. The owner of the narrative’s most tempting artworks is Lord Theign, who might indeed sell some of his treasures to solve a pressing financial obligation. His daughter, the principled Lady Grace, stands against her father’s plans. She becomes romantically attached to Crimble, who is categorically opposed to the drain on British holdings. As a result, there are suggestions of father-daughter tensions out of Washington Square and even allusions to King Lear. The Outcry was James’ novelization of a play which he wrote at the end of his life and which ran into production difficulties. As a result, the fiction is filled with sequential interviews, tight blocking, and brilliant dialogue.
What is especially interesting is the language that James uses to describe the quandary which the Brits found themselves facing with those marauding American buyers at their gates. Hugh Crimble refers to the vanishing art objects as “spoils” – as in The Spoils of Poynton. The superwealthy are claimed to have substituted “values pecuniary” for serious aesthetics. When honest Hugh says that one of Theign’s canvases is fake, he claims it to be as much a Rubens as he is a Ruskin. To sell to Americans is to feel “the shame of a surrender”. The escalating value of artworks is characterized as the work of businessmen who have made public the money matters once hidden behind closed doors between patron and painter. The bidder is what the novel calls a “money-monster”. The crime is seen as a form of vulgarity.
James had watched the New York edition of his oeuvre fail to turn a profit. He had observed his painter friend John Singer Sargent labor for decades as a society portraitist to make ends meet. The subject of money was on the novelist’s mind when it came to the arts of both literature and painting. The Outcry is the eloquent result.
The prolific British-born artist David Hockney is now in his 80s and showing no sign of slowing down. He too has had paintings sold for monstrous fees (Portrait of an Artist for $90.3 million in 2018 and The Splash for $28.8 million in 2020), but over the last decade he has explored a new medium – the iPad – which may change the way artworks are distributed and sold. Two books have appeared to document his recent work on his property in Normandy during the pandemic lockdown: Spring Cannot Be Cancelled (written with Martin Gayford, Thames and Hudson, 2021); and The Arrival of Spring, Normandy, 2020 (Royal Academy of Arts, 2021). Thanks to the iPad technology – which now allows dense layerings of colors by a variety of brushes – and thanks to Hockney’s drawing skills and command of new technologies, the result is beautiful beyond anything I would have predicted. I’ve always found Hockney’s color-sense to be too facile. And his compositional tastes ran to “arrangements” which advertised a kind of faux-modernism. (l preferred his version of a primitive style, which can be witty, acerbic.) I was not always convinced by Hockney’s various attempts to overcome the tyranny of single-point perspective. But on the evidence of these two books at hand, Hockney has refined his sense of color before the natural beauties of Normandy trees and fields. Nature in all her changefulness and eccentricity has pushed him into imitative organic forms that are fragrant and varied. There are iPad studies here of a pear and a cherry tree that are triumphs of serial documentation. And what Hockney does with reflections of light in pools of water and in swiftly flowing brooks is magical.
All the iPad artist has to do when he finishes his picture is push a button to transmit it to digital devices around the world. Or have a full-color print made, large or small. You can see what this new technology implies for the art market. Mass reproduction becomes controlled distribution. Hockney appears embedded in his new situation in France. Time and again he refers to the perfection of his environment, his studio, and his method. He compares his situation to Monet’s lily pond at Giverny, which is not so far away. Here is a living artist happy with his métier and his motif.
In an ideal world, we would each be a wealthy art patron and keep such a painter in a nearby studio creating works for our delectation at the artist’s individual rate of production. We might even loan our eventual holdings to certain galleries for public show. But, no, most of us must resign ourselves to looking at husks in museums. Nothing criminal in that, except it requires that we bring to bear our knowledge and our imaginations to grasp what the unique quiddity of a work might have been, straight from the burnishing brush.
Enough of the past and present! What about the future? Let’s use our imaginations. Perhaps when MBS and his ilk have conquered France, demoting the Parisian Louvre to a tributary of a perfected Abu Dhabi’s, a French (or French-resident) artist can be found to become the conqueror’s court painter. If you can’t grab the artwork, grab the artist. If by then the production of art has become mostly digital, the product of thousands of iPads, a Prince could himself “regulate” the release of certain master images to a waiting world – for a royal price, not too dear? But let’s say that military takeover is too long to wait. Outright abduction might become necessary: spirit the artist out of France to your royal hideaway. Would a future Hockney – young or old -- adapt? Would he find something to paint in a heavily guarded multicultural oasis? Desert dunes by moonlight. No vanishing points.
M.P.
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