In Defense of Commercial Galleries, Part II (Delusions of some "Golden Era" of Art)

It's exhausting really.

Fighting this notion that there was some "Golden Era" of art purity---one that nasty, greedy dealers destroyed---is apparently a hopeless cause. It's so ingrained in our contemporary mythology, that perhaps it's best to just ignore it. Or so I think, until I read some slapdash drivel like that offered by Germaine Greer in The Guardian. Then my red-headed, Irish-German temper flares, and, well, you get another diatribe.

But first, the drivel:

Art does not exist to display the dexterity or industriousness of the artist, or the grandeur of his personality or that of his patron. Art can do all these things but that is not what makes it art. Art exists for no purpose beyond itself. The first attribute of the art object is that it creates a discontinuity between itself and the unsynthesised manifold. It may do this merely by displaying a signature, or by sitting on a plinth, or by enclosing itself in a box or a frame. The work of painters for whom painting is a part of real life rather than art - Australian Aboriginal painters, say - has no frame, is painted in the sand, on a rock or a body, and is continuous with the painter's reality. Until, that is, a dealer brings along a canvas, which the painter paints flat on the ground, moving round it rather than standing before it. When the dealer decides the work is finished, he grabs it, drives back to the city, frames it and puts a price on it, usually many times more than what he paid for it. Only then does it stop being life and become art. The work of art, or, as we now tend to say, the artwork, is first of all a commodity.

Letting one example of dealers who had taken advantage of one group of artists stand as her only example (when she's leading up to a criticsm of the contemporary market where Western artists with MFAs actually want to work with dealers), Greer uses this developed villain (you can almost hear the cries of the hapless artist as the dealer, draped in a black cape, ties her to the railroad tracks and twirls his moustache) to build a fictional melodrama that climaxes with this shrill, idiotic claim:

The most moving battle of 20th-century art has been to redeem itself from its degrading role as commodity, a battle it has decidedly lost.

Where to begin?

First and foremost, I'd suggest anyone who knows her find and then send Greer a copy of Aubrey Menen's book "Art & Money: An Irreverent History" in which he chronicals the centuries, no, make that millenia, through which art has not only very much been a commodity, but one made more and more expensive MOSTLY through the engineering of artists, sans dealers. In fact, as Warhol finally said out loud, self-aware artists have always seen Art as a business. From Menen's book:

The story goes that a young American admirer of Picasso managed to gain entrance to the august presence. Picasso, as usual, was affable to the young, once they could get by the guards around his villa.

Overwhelmed by this kindness, the young man blurted out: "What is it like to be Picasso?"

Picasso asked him to give him a one-dollar bill. The young man did so. Picasso pinned it to a canvas on his easel, took up a brush, and in a minute or two had redesigned the note with his characteristic bold touches. He then signed it. Giving it back to the admirer, he said: "Now your one dollar is worth five hundred dollars. That is what it is like to be Picasso."

I am sure that a large number of lovers of art will hope that the story is not true. They would hope that Picasso was above mere pelf. They would hope that all genuine artists are above the base consideration of money. In fact, they believe that---in a sordidly commercial world---that is what art is all about.

However, Menen goes on to demonstrate in overwhelming detail that rather than a 21st Centruy battle, this is a 21st Century fantasy. From the time of the Ancient Greeks, very famous artists have manipulated the prices of art and marketed their work as worthy of those prices. So this supposed "Golden Era" when artists made their work without concern for who might want to own it or profit from it is simply a fairy tale.

Now, none of this is to imply that art dealers are not sometimes guilty of taking advantage of artists...merely that it's not part of the job description.

Why I get my knickers in a bunch over this mostly is that no one who has started a gallery from scratch (without funding) would EVER argue that it's an easy way to make money. It's virtually a financially suicidal long-shot, in fact. The folks I know who attempted to start a gallery this way (and many of them are now doing something else) did so because they were passionate about Art. For ill-informed pundits like Greer to then insinuate they're the cause of the degredation of 20th Century art is an unforgivable and wholly misplaced insult. If Greer has specific examples of opportunism, she should offer them, rather than painting with such a huge, undiscerning brush. But she actually digs an even deeper pit for herself, this pompous pontificator, insulting collectors and artists themselves in this moronic conclusion:

Perhaps that's the way to know the "good" artists. They will be the uncollectables. A good artist is beyond fashion, out of reach of the art mafia in their black Bentleys, intensely vulnerable but - we hope - incorruptible.

Why does this hack she get paid for this rubbish? A "good artist"? She wrote that with a straight face? Moreover, her editors let her? Come on, Guardian...we expect more insightful, more informed critiques from 9th Grade thesis papers. Truly, this cartoonish, After-School-Special view of the artist and the market is not only historically inaccurate, but condescending. Only artists who make work that's difficult to collect are "good?" Citizens who'd rather buy art than plasma TVs, or whatever, are criminal-like artistocrats, who are only interested in fashion?

I suspect this myth of anti-commodity purity stems from the popular romanticized stories of the struggling artist whose genius is only recognized after his/her death. ("Lust for Life" ... damn you!!!) But that's no license for a paper like the Guardian to perpetuate it in what, ironically, is a fashionable pose of neo-Socialistic values. If there'a an argument to be made that there's too much emphasis on the commodity aspect of art today, it can most certainly be made with actual facts. It doesn't require the demonization of dealers and revisionistic history Greer offers up.

UPDATE: I violated the first rule of ranting against someone else's text in this post, being in too big a rush this morning to research and learn that 1) Germaine Greer is a woman (no good excuse for that one) and 2) she's got a long history of offering such views (which doesn't make them correct, mind you). I've edited the text to correct the gender of the pronouns, and took out one snarky line asking if English was her first language, and revised my analysis of her example of Aboriginal artists (having misread that). I stand by the rest.