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The problem is not that Bongard and commentators like him may be ignorant of the very fluctuations in art politics they pretend to reduce to mere facts and figures; it is that more and more, collectors like to have this sort of ersatz sociology to buttress their timid and uneducated taste. The statistical crudities of art-rating systems can never be refined, because they refer to something that by its very nature cannot be statistically expressed—the irrational corset of fashion and desire that holds our flabby cultural postures in trim. Of course, some of the implications of the art-compass are comic: one thinks of a swarm of young German investors scuttering from gallery to gallery like extras in a Lubitsch farce, with that issue of Capital in their grim pink fists. But comedy is mutable, and very soon the laughter wears off—especially when one considers the only real toad in this imaginary garden of Instant Connoisseurship, the artist.
Because visual artists in the U.S. enjoy none of the royalty protection that the law gives to writers, musicians, performers and other laborers in the cultural vineyard, painters and sculptors rarely get instantly rich on the investment boom. The books of a successful author reap money with every reprint, paperback publication or TV adaptation; any actor who does ten seconds in a soap commercial is entitled to his repeat fees. Not so the artist, who usually sells his performance once and once only. From then on it is an unencumbered object of speculation. This is especially frustrating for a painter who, through economic need, has let almost all his early work go. and at extremely low prices—as most artists do. Today a 1949 de Kooning, which the artist long since sold, is apt to fetch four or five times as much as a 1973 painting. It has been around longer, and has the patina of history.
From the artist's point of view, trading in the '70s is stuck at the level of book publishing in the 18th century, before literary piracy was outlawed. Obviously some change is needed. For some time ad hoc bodies like the twelve-member Artists Rights Association have been pushing for a royalty system on resales of work by living artists—the proposed figure being 15%. In this battle, the shot heard round the art world (which, though smaller than the real world, is just as circular) was fired by the artist Robert Rauschenberg after an enormously publicized auction at Parke-Bernet in which the taxi mogul Robert Scull sold part of his collection of American abstract expressionism and Pop for $2.2 million. Rauschenberg had just seen one of his combine paintings, Thaw (1958), go for $85,000. Remembering that Scull had paid him $900 for it, thus reaping a gross return of 9,333%, he marched up to his patron after the auction, loudly declared that "I've been working my ass off just for you to make that profit," and suggested that Scull might give every artist in the auction free taxi rides for a week.