Thanks to a heads up from an artist friend (JT), I just finished watching Robert Hughes’ 2009 documentary for the BBC, The Mona Lisa Curse. I enjoyed it on many levels, first of which was to find Mr. Hughes still in the land of the living and very much the sardonic curmudgeon. This extended video rant can be found on Youtube.com in twelve pieces, making it about an hour and a half long. The transplanted Australian critic displays his hot knife through butter dissections of contemporary art but in this work he turns it on the business of art, particularly in the way commodification has overtaken the main objective of fine art mirroring Wall Street’s carnivorous merger and acquisition mantra from the 80s up through today.
Hughes marks the Mona Lisa’s trip to the Metropolitan Museum in 1963 as the point when art shifted from a cathartic exchange of philosophy device to a mere commercial product with great investment potential. Leave it to crass post-colonialists to corrupt the purity of individual expression. The folk who stood in line to glimpse Leonardo’s spectacle did so on their own terms, most armed only with the knowledge that this was an important painting without any extra information. It was an experience similar to the nascent television offerings of the day. Americans are notorious for ignoring precedents as well as skipping historical lessons. What more was needed to be known considering Nat Cole sang about the painting ten years earlier. The U.S. in 1963 was still flexing its post war muscles while basking in the glow of a healthy atomic economy. Anything needed could be manufactured or simply purchased and shipped over. The mentality of the time allowed for quick fulfillments to any lack. At the time, the country was even producing its own modern art, eclipsing the need for old, musty European versions.
The Critic bemoans the rise of monetary value over emotional content in art and commiserates with the artist Jim Rosenquist over today’s sad state of affairs. The importance of Sotheby’s 1973 auction of the Scull collection is pointed out and images from a documentary of the event are screened which shows Robert Rauschenberg going up to Robert Scull after the event and administering a stern admonishment. Scull responds by stating that the fortuitous hammer prices will benefit the artists, as well. Warhol’s factory production and diminishing standards of quality are noted, as is the obsessive collecting of Andy by a Saudi mega-billionaire and his son. Damien Hirst is Hughes’ ultimate whipping boy for the exorbitant price tags and insipid lack of traditional artistry.
I found The Mona Lisa Curse to be entertaining for its quick and informative pacing but found that acid analysis on Hughes’ part to be most reassuring. At the close of the documentary, I was filled with the urge to tell Mr. Hughes, “Well, what did you expect?” The critic shares some of the blame for today’s speculation in the art market. His book and film, both with the same name, The Shock of the New (1981), displayed the progression of modern art from the mid-1800s through the 1980s. The film series based on the book is more telling as it begins at a pedestrian pace, gaining momentum as it covers all the ‘isms of modernism until it becomes a near stroboscopic blur of contemporaryness. The directorial structure of the documentary presages the shift in the control of cultural power from salons to artists to patrons to museums to collectors to multinational financial corporations.
Hughes truly shows his years when he dismisses Damien Hirst and his formaldehyde-swigging ilk based upon the lack of artisanal skill and inability to insert significant pedagogical content. Hirst, Koons, Prince and their brethren function in an ether created by a post-postmodern economy. An economy not simply based on production and consumption, or even supply and demand. Production of art is secondary to producing an aura around art. Reality TV is a phantasmal echo of the conniving and manipulation of Art. The art of this latest generation lies not within the brush, or even in the hand that wields it. It resides in the mindset that can create a commotion about an object, roil the waters of adorers and imbue it with a scent of theatrics. Oh, and within this cloud of popular lust there is a kernel of an object, complete with title and date, dripping in sarcasm, vacuum sealed within a prophylactic shield of systemic endorsement.
Today’s museums lament their current inability to compete with investment-minded collectors, but their historical existence is less than that of Modernism. The Patron has been the unseen hand that has guided, and continues to guide, the creation, collection and display of art. The Artist has been the indentured object maker far longer than the autonomous creative force of most of the 20th century. The social services remain the same; it’s the pimp that changes over the ages. Rauschenberg, Rosenquist and Lichtenstein may have missed out on the money train in the beginning, but ultimately Robert Scull was right, crass as he may have been in saying so, the artists did benefit. The pop artists did it by controlling production. They limited their exposure through galleries and they began to keep part of their own art. This type of homemade retirement plan presented the following generations of artists a business plan on which to build. Self promotion as spectacle, popular culture reified as invested content combined with modern manufacturing created an opportunity for the modern day P.T. Barnum.
After all is aid and done, The Mona Lisa Curse lays out a depressing representation of art and the business of art in today’s landscape. But this inflated art bubble will burst and this economic event will occur for several congruent reasons. Art purchased for reasons devoid of aesthetics is indistinguishable from any other portfolio asset. The piece is tethered to the ebb and flow of monetary economies. Content is inconsequential. If the market that includes art investment fails, all the inclusory contents are absorbed by creditors. If the creditors end up with confiscated art, how will they be rated in order to classify them for liquidation? Judgments may have to be made on such crazy notions as quality of construction, artist skill or even socially significant content.
