Eating Art in a World of Greed

Today's collectors consume art with insatiable and competitive greed. They can't wait to write their seven-figure checks for those the art market has blessed.
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I have always recoiled from the word "consumer"--especially when it comes to art. I'm old enough to think of consumption as a disease that destroyed decrepit old aunties and sent starving artists in frigid Parisian garrets to the morgue after hacking their way through dreadful coughing spells to a miserable early death.

And yet here we are, a nation of consumers. Our country counts on us to consume, it's these days our patriotic duty. After that dastardly stab at the heart of our financial life, the World Trade Center, our president (small "p" for this one, as always) asked us not for commitment and sacrifice but to go out and consume. We consume not only the food we need to survive, we consume our planet. We consume our forests and our water reserves. We consume our fossil fuels in petroleum products and gasoline. We consume the automobiles that consume the gasoline. We consume electronic products--computers, printers, blackberries, cell phones... We consume cheap trinkets and pornography. We consume and excrete endlessly. But it's not nature any more. It's culture.

We consume art. My late father-in-law, a noted novelist and screenwriter, wrote a catalogue essay for the museum exhibition of his collection entitled "Confessions of an Art Eater (With Apologies to De Quincy)." That was 25 years ago. His collection was a matter of passion for art and for the imaginative stretches of the artist's mind, put together on what by today's standards is barely a shoestring. He was the proud "owner" of an Yves Klein "Zone of Immaterial Pictorial Sensitivity," which involved buying sixteen ingots of pure gold and throwing eight of them into the River Seine under the watchful eye of the artist (who, I believe, wisely kept the other eight,) in a ceremony that ended in the ritual burning of the receipt, the last trace of the transaction.

2007-11-27-throwinggold.jpg

(note: this is not my father-in-law, but another "immaterial" collector)

There was supposed to be literally nothing left of this artwork, but the artist cheated just a bit: he had photographs taken to document the event. They survive. These days, I suppose, someone would buy those photographs for a princely sum, if they didn't already belong in a museum collection. Today's collectors consume art with insatiable and competitive greed. The financial markets worry about "consumer confidence"--Starbucks' sales are down and the Dow Jones gets heartburn; and Macy's and Robinson's have anxiety attacks about the seasonal sales. But never mind, the art markets continue to rage like California wildfires. Collectors swarm to art schools like UCLA's and Yale's to snap up work by unformed whippersnappers in their early twenties. At the ubiquitous international art fairs like Miami/Basel, where I spent some days last year, there's a cattle stampede in the opening hours, with buyers elbowing each other out like those lesser mortals at a Walmart's post-Thanksgiving sale. They can't wait to write their seven-figure checks for those the art market has blessed. The fair opens again in December and, despite the teetering economy, we can expect more of the same. The rich, thanks to our current administration's economic policy, keep getting richer.

How about those November auctions? Records fell. At Christie's, Hugh Grant's Andy Warhol "Liz" went (already famously) for more than $23 million, and a Jeff Koons (that former commodities stock broker, turned canny self-produced contemporary art stock broker) sold at a record $11+ million--a record only to be broken the next day at Sotheby's, when another Koons (it might as easily have been the same, in a quick turn-around!) was hammered down at over $23 million; at the same sale, the British painter Francis Bacon broke his record with one sale at $33 million plus, and then another at $35 million.

These are not inexpensive dinners for the new breed of art eater. May they digest in peace.

2007-11-27-DamienHirst.jpg So that $100 million diamond-encrusted platinum skull by Damien Hirst--the artist himself was a part of the consortium that "invested" in it--looks more and more like the grinning, self-mocking death's head of contemporary art. I have to conclude that it's a brilliant piece of work--brilliant in more senses than just its external glitter. It's a wildly brilliant, triumphantly ironic comment on the art market itself.

The Life of the Mind is a weekly column by Peter Clothier, a widely published author and art critic, who observes all things cultural through the lens of a Buddhist meditation practice.

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