Puesta en marcha del circuito de refrigeración

No chapter on art and money can be complete without mention of astronomical prices paid at art auctions,

especially in the boom years of the 1980s. Prices of Van Gogh’s works at sales in 1987, in particular, stunned the world: his Irises sold for $53.9 million and Sunflowers for $39.9 million. In the same year, two of Van Gogh’s other works went for $20 million and $13.75 million. The irony was grotesque in light of the artist’s own pov- erty and despair over being unable to sell works during his lifetime. The thought that a work like the Mona Lisa is ‘priceless’ makes it difficult to see and appreciate as art (when one is lucky enough to get a second to stand before it). Can we ever again see Van Gogh’s works as art rather than as huge dollar signs?

Sometimes a museum capitalizes on our absorption with money. A membership solicitation brochure for Australia’s National Gallery of Art from 1995 featured the controversy over its purchase of Jackson Pollock’s painting Blue Poles. The brochure’s cover showed a huge tabloid headline that denounced the painting: ‘Drunks Did It!’ But, on the inside of the brochure, the museum (and presumably its members) got the last laugh by pronouncing, ‘Now the world thinks it’s worth over $20 million. And it’s all yours from $14.50 (i.e., the price of a membership)’. After succumbing to this appeal, will the new museum member really be able to look at Blue Poles for its artistic value?

Museums are only a part of the current story of the money, markets, museums

art market, because wealthy collectors worldwide have more buying power. Charles Saatchi has been accused of manipulating the market for the latest young and trendy artists through his sudden shifts in purchases or sales. His support of exhibitions like the controversial

Sensation show of young ‘Britpack’ artists has been criti-

cized: through promoting the exhibition, Saatchi raises the value of works that his gallery owns.

How can an artist escape or confront the art market, with its vagaries of trends and fickle favour? Some take money as their subject matter by sculpting or painting it, even including real money in their art. Installation artist Ann Hamilton’s huge room-sized project, Priva-

tion and Excess, in San Francisco’s Capp Street Gallery,

1989, used thousands of pennies—tons’ worth— encased in honey, highlighting both their colour and sheen to allude to complex notions of hoarding and value. Artist J. S. Boggs makes a living by drawing very realistic copies of US currency—always indicating somewhere that the bill is not real. His skill is enough to fascinate people into taking the money as payment for, say, a trip to a coffee shop. He later finds patrons to buy back his bills, and then exhibits them along with the original receipts for items purchased. Boggs’s status as an artist has not enabled him to escape without fre- quent run-ins from the counterfeiting police!

15 This membership brochure for the National Gallery of Aus- tralia traded on the controversy about the museum’s purchase of Jackson Pollock’s painting Blue Poles (1952). See also overleaf.

Some artists bypass the market by using alternative forms, such as installation and performance art, which are not readily packaged for sale. Graffiti artists, with their strike-and-vanish tactics, seem to reject the gallery system altogether. But some of them who have risen to fame, like Jean-Michel Basquiat and Barry McGee, get caught up in the system when their work becomes mar- ketable. McGee is trying to toe a fine line between his street work with the signature ‘Twist’ and signed gallery art that sells (see Plate III). His work has been shown in galleries from San Francisco to Minneapolis to São Paulo. I confess to fomenting some wicked plans for the gallery’s windows when I read in a catalogue essay at one of his art exhibitions that McGee once said, ‘Some- times a rock soaring through a plate of glass can be the most beautiful, compelling work of art I have ever seen’. German artist Hans Haacke has made commercial- ization and corporate support of art exhibitions the central subject of his work. Haacke’s dry, scathing exhibitions juxtapose the cultural sponsorship brought to you by corporations like Mobil and Cartier with their nefarious activities in troubled regions of the world. Haacke’s project, Voici Alcan in 1983, for example, juxtaposed images of the Alcan Corporation’s logo framing scenes of famous opera productions it had supported with a similar ‘ad-style’ image showing the

graphic close-up face of the dead liberationist leader Stephen Biko in South Africa. Haacke’s plans for work that denounced a slum landlord with shady real estate dealings was cancelled six weeks before it was scheduled to be shown in 1971 at New York’s Guggenheim Museum. Speculation was that the property owner’s friends on the Board of Trustees arranged the cancella- tion of this planned exhibit.

The irony here again, as with McGee, is that the sys- tem often seeks to consume even its harshest critics. Benjamin Buchloch championed Haacke in a 16-page cover story for the glossy magazine Art in America in February 1988. In a lengthy footnote, Buchloch insisted that Haacke is ‘marginalized’—despite the artist’s increasing prominence and marketability. One work of Haacke’s had recently sold in auction at Christie’s for what even Buchloch admitted was the ‘rather impres- sive price of slightly more than $90,000’! Setting these financial ironies aside (along with Buchloch’s laboured account of how the artist rejects ‘aesthetic autonomy and pleasure’), I simply find Haacke’s work too preachy and boring. It is also ephemeral, and risks losing its punch when the context alters. Visually stronger work like Goya’s The Executions of May 3, 1808 retains its power to disturb us long after the specific political scene has changed; it is not clear that Haacke’s didactic

16 Christo and Jeanne-Claude, Running Fence, Sonoma and Marin Counties, California, 1972–1976, exemplifies the couple’s ephemeral yet beautiful interventions in a

wall texts, shown in a uniform series of panels, will do this.

There are other models of how (not to) make money from art. American artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude make art that is deliberately transitory and cannot be sold. They travel the world, conceiving and executing huge landscape and environmental installation pro- jects. Best known are their Running Fence (1972–1976) in California, The Pont Neuf Wrapped in Paris (1975– 1985), and the gaily skirted bright pink Surrounded

Islands in Miami Bay (1980–1983). In their Umbrellas

project (1984–1991), carried out both in Japan (with blue umbrellas) and California (with yellow umbrellas), the couple undertook to link the natural landscapes of river and mountains not only across the two nations but also to the artificial landscapes of freeways, by making the work visible across miles. Getting permission and collaborative support becomes part of the art project, and the pair derive no income from photographs, books, posters, postcards, and films. They pay all the expenses of the project with their own money coming from the sale of preparatory drawings, collages, scale models, all created before the completion of a project.

Perhaps the strongest examples of anti- commercialism in art are Tibetan Buddhist sacred paintings done from coloured sand, not as a permanent

product, nor really even as art (see Plate IV). The detailed mandalas are constructed by monks in a painstaking process over days, producing the image of a sacred scene as an aid to meditation. Once complete, the image is ritually erased and the sand scattered (preferably into a body of water) to effect cleansing and purification. The work’s impermanence epitomizes the Buddhist view of life’s transitory nature. Obviously these paintings are religious and are not done to sell a product. Still, when undertaken in a major museum, the context suggests that the project is, after all, a kind of art. Recent appearances by Tibetan sand-painters have carried clear political messages, as the monks seek to glean American or Canadian support during Tibetan repression by China. And there is also some sort of underlying financial structure at work. When I saw the monks, their room included not only altars to Buddha with flowers and incense, but also a money jar for dona- tions to help their monastery in India and to aid Tibetan refugees.