TIME ESSAY
For more than ten years we have been swamped in a glutinous flow of propaganda about art as investment. It oozes from every crack in our visual culture and its molds proliferate on every class and kind of object, from medieval ivories to Dogon totems, from a sepia drawing by Rembrandt to a Deruta pot or a Motherwell collage. There is practically no work of art immune to it, and its effects on the perception of art have been, in general, disastrous. The problem is not simply that art costs money; it always has. Peter Wilson, the genial and astute entrepreneur whose direction of the auction house of Sotheby's has done so much to create the modern investment fetishism, likes to point out that the prices paid in their day for the works of Victorian painters like Alma-Tadema (when multiplied by 30 to bring them into line with the devalued dollar of the '70s) would make the cost of a Pollock or a Jasper Johns today seem almost reasonable. It is said that the Marquess of Westminster, when asked to send a painting from his collection to the 1857 loan exhibition in Manchester, gruffly sent a framed £100,000 bank note instead.
The nexus between art and money, then, is not new. But the pervasiveness of this relationship and the intensity of money-worship in the art world certainly is. There was a time—and it is not so long ago, say ten years —when one could with perfect ease walk into the Met, the Wallace Collection or the Museum of Modern Art and spend a day communing with paintings without once reflecting on how much they might have cost or what they were now likely to fetch. But given the relentless publicity about art prices and auction triumphs—even when one knows how rigged, distorted and manipulated the actual events and statistics have been—it requires the discipline of an anchorite to do that today. Thus it is hard to leaf through the pages of magazines like Réalties or Connaissance des Arts without experiencing a touch of nausea: this is what it has come down to, a ragout of flattering consumer objects floating in a buttery sauce of vicarious chic—Mercedes-Benzes and Daum crystal, Porthault linen and Andy Warhols, Tiepolo drawings and onyx washstands, Dubuffets and silver-garnished narwhal horns.
It requires a feat of extraordinary mnemonic ability to recall the time when "art appreciation" connoted something other than people's tendency to push handmade objets deluxe to more and more expensive levels; when it meant the disinterested study and enjoyment of the human imagination for its own sake. Capital growth, once regarded as an occasional and peripheral reward of the collector's passion, has now become its chief—and in many cases its only—purpose. The "successful" work of art is the one that most rapidly becomes a medium of exchange, its meaning certified by bullion.