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As with the stock market, so with the art market: the client public wants information, needs to have its confusing medley of investment choices weighed, determined and given a reassuring "objectivity." This longing for reliable data is one of the most prominent—and often most ludicrous—features of the art scene today. It has affected all experience of art, criticism not excluded. In the high-culture arena, it is best typified by the kind of imperious discourse about modernism that is now being written mainly by Critic Clement Greenberg's various followers. A fine recent example is the catalogue to the exhibition staged by the Houston Museum of Fine Arts and tendentiously titled The Great Decade of American Abstraction: Modernist Art 1960 to 1970. With preposterous promotional excess, the catalogue informs readers that what artists like Olitski, Noland, Louis and Friedel Dzubas produced in America in the 1960s can be compared in quality with the work of the impressionists between 1865 and 1875, and Braque, Picasso and Matisse between 1905 and 1915.
Price indexing, too, has become a mania; art buyers want to have value lists analogous to the Dow Jones charts. Unfortunately, the statistics are nearly always incomplete, inaccurate and full of special pleading; even so, they have helped crystallize the fantasy that the desire for art can somehow be statistically measured. By far the quaintest manifestation of this to date has been a rating system cobbled together by a young financial tipster named Willi Bongard, which recently appeared in Capital (a monthly German management magazine) and was reported in the Wall Street Journal. His artcom-pass purports to grade the world's 100 greatest artists of the '60s and '70s on a scale of relative fame and thus "objectively" determine whether their works are priced right or not. (This will come as news to those who did not suppose the "world" —by which Bongard apparently means the U.S. and the Common Market bloc—had 100, or even ten, "great" artists swanning around in it just now.)
The system is nothing if not simple. "The fame that some artists attain in time," Bongard writes, "is measurable, on condition that this fame is based mainly on the work of an artist. Certain conclusions may then be drawn as to his qualities." And how may one assess fame? On points. An artist gets 300 points, for instance, if he sells a work to the Museum of Modern Art or the Met, and so down through the Tate Gallery (200), and the Galleria d'Arte Moderna in Turin (160). For a one-man show at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm he gets a 300, but one at the Musee des Arts Decoratifs in Paris is worth only 75; a show at MOMA brings 450, but a retrospective at the Whitney has no listed value. Yet the same show in the Jewish Museum in New York (now almost defunct as a place where serious modern art may regularly be seen) is inexplicably worth 300. Similar ratings are given for participation in group shows, appearance in art books, and the like. The figures seem to be plucked from the air. And so one trudges through what Bongard terms his "parameters," never meeting an iota of proof for these mock-objective confections of status, lost in a parody of credit rating.