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No such luck; a moneychanger is more welcome in the temple than a live artist in the bourse. The blasphemy gave Mrs. Scull a fit of the vapors, and she was whisked away to a restorative party after Mr. Scull, looking suitably grim, told the rude dauber that he ought to be grateful, since the auction price would push up the price of his new work. Rauschenberg, accompanied by an artists' accountant and financial counselor named Rubin Gorewitz, went off to Washington to start lobbying. "From now on," he told the Wall Street Journal, "I want a royalty on the resales and I am going to get it." Barring that, he acidly suggested an alternative for preventing investors from raking off excessive profits and leaving none for the artist: "Maybe we should all just sign a contract to produce nothing but unsuccessful work."
The hitch in an informal royalty system is simple: any one who thinks a collector will voluntarily give a 15% cut on resale back to the artist simply does not know collectors. Scull himself opined that a royalty of 1% on resale would be "reasonable," but that artists should really get their fringe benefits from museums, not collectors. "Museums," he told a reporter, "make their living on shows." ("And he doesn't?" was Rauschenberg's incredulous reply when told of this.) What this cynical proposal would accomplish would be to tax museums — and therefore art education — in order to let speculative investors continue in their present blaze of laissez-faire. In fact, museums do not "make their living" on exhibitions. They are nonprofit organizations that exist in order to present shows — and the distinction matters a lot, because the role of museums is neither to speculate in art nor to make excess money by exhibiting it. (Were this not so, gifts to museums would not be tax-deductible and one of the main sources of tax gravy for private collectors would dry up.)
There are several artists — among them, the sculptors Carl Andre and Sol Le Witt and the conceptual artist Hans Haacke — who make it a practice to write a royalty clause into every contract of sale when they release a work. But they are relatively well-known figures and there is an established demand for their art. A young or obscure artist has no bargaining position on resale rights when a collector appears in the studio. Every year the U.S. art-education system cranks out more than 30,000 graduates, each with a degree saying "artist"; there is a glut of immature but professional-looking talent, and the creaky rating systems and distribution methods of the world art market cannot possibly cope with all of their work.