One Artist's Junk is Another Man's Treasure

An article in The Guardian this morning about an electrician who had the foresight to salvage all kinds of, well, junk from the studio of Francis Bacon caught my attention this morning because of a disparity it revealed. First the story, by Charlotte Higgins:

It is not surprising - only a little dispiriting - that a pile of junk Francis Bacon chucked out 30 years ago could earn the man who salvaged it from a skip half a million pounds. A certain Mac Robertson, an electrician working at Bacon's studio, had the foresight to save the clutter of damaged paintings, diaries and cheque stubs before they reached the municipal dump and now all these bits and pieces are up for auction.

Higgins goes on to note how silly it is that folks will spend good money to own, or even just look at, the detritus of someone just because that person was a famous artist:

The Lady of Shalott is never going to be illuminated by Alfred, Lord Tennyson's pipe. And yet I have dumbly looked upon the poet's pipe in a tiny, dusty museum on the Isle of Wight. Ulysses is not going to be cracked wide open because one has beheld a pair of James Joyce's spectacles. And yet that did not stop Sotheby's from auctioning them off a few years back, along with a medal he once won in a singing competition.

It's hard to argue with her reason, and yet, I too have been willing to part with cash to be closer to the artifacts of the life of someone I've been amazed by.

Still, the disparity mentioned above:

There are two classes of such ephemera. One includes letters, diaries, documents of historical and scholarly value. That is allowable; that is what libraries are for. The second category consists of junk.

Hang on there. If letters and diaries and other documents (presumably of a writer) are potentionally of historical and scholarly value, then why are not damaged paintings and diaries of a visual artist?

OK, so I realize there are two questions in there. First is whether the diary of a visual artist (something Higgins has mocked Robertson [and potential bidders] for valuing) is of historical and scholary value. In this instance, I'm sure Higgins is wrong. The diary of a visual artist is as equally important as that of a writer (sometime even more so).

The second question is more complex though: is damaged artwork valuable?

My first response to this wants to be "no." Artwork isn't even artwork (i.e., it's not complete or ready for viewers), until the artist says it is. If Bacon didn't want to present it to the world as finished, then essentially, it's not art yet.

And still, I see immediately that I've confused the matter. We're not talking about whether a damaged Bacon painting is worth anything as art, but rather whether it has historical or scholarly value. Whether it's as interesting and worthy of preserving as Tennyson's pipe or Joyce's spectacles. But that's a bad comparison. The damaged painting is more akin to a writers notes, something that Higgins allows belongs in a library, so why not preserve a damaged painting in a musuem? Bacon didn't shy away from destroying what he wanted no one else to ever see, so we have to assume this piece survived to serve some end.

I could go on ad nauseum, contradciting myself here, when essentially the central question Higgins was asking is why we place value in the things of someone famous that we'd throw away had they belonged to someone else? I guess my real reason for harping on this is to deflate, just a bit, the jaded rejection of the cult of personality that's so popular at the moment. I don't disagree that it is often taken to ludicrous extremes, but given that we'll line up for hours to view the belongings of some boy king who dies millenia ago, I'm not sure this practice isn't hardwired into us somehow. As a species, it's important to us to leave some record (what other species does that?) of our having been here. Perhaps, because it's impossible for there to be physical records of any significant depth of each individual human begin, buying into the cult of personality permits us to project something of ourselves onto certain popular figures and thereby ensure something of us, if only a ticket stub of an exhibition or concert, is connected to the historical importance we collectively assign to them, taking us forward into history with them. I don't know...I'm confusing myself now. Back to what you were doing.