For many,
art has become big business... fortunes can be made and lost buying
art, just as in real estate and in the penny stock markets.
Appetites are made ravenous by huge auction prices. Art has become
another commodity, to be bought and sold, as dispassionately as hog
bellies.
"The art world is now different from what it was in the 1930's.
It was less confusing then: there was not the restless succession of
`isms'; it was easier for young artists to find themselves... art
was not the big business it has become. There was no such thing as
`blue chips' in art. Well known artists worked daily in modest
studios, they were not the `celebrities' and `personalities' they
are today." (241)
Raphael Soyer, "Social Concern and Urban Realism"
"The Art Support Structure - as it now exists, is a product of
the overall inflationary, bull-market consumerism that shot into
high gear in the early 1960's, when art became one of the new,
mushrooming `leisure-time industries'. And the art world, while
continuing to pay lip service to the notion of quality, rushed to be
part of the gross national product.
Student bodies in the art academies skyrocketed. More degrees
produced more teachers, to teach more `artists'. This influx had to
be accommodated, so there were more galleries to help them hawk
their wares, abetted by an aura of glamour and chic painted by a
largely uncritical art press. There were national endowments, and
new foundations from the `private sector." (242)
Thomas Albright
"Art is all right when it is left alone; it is a respectable and
laudable ambition and occupation but no honest person wants to be
driven to do anything, or be driven to doing it in any given place.
I have learned a great deal about art and its meaning since I
conceived a kind of contempt for what the idolaters would have the
world think it is...it is all wrong to be driven to make a
mercantile commodity of it." (243)
Marsden Hartley, Notes, 1919 - 1936
"In one week in may 1990, the Japanese industrialist ... paid
$160 million US for two paintings bought in New York: $82.5 million
for Van Gogh's Portrait of Dr. Gachet at Christies and $78.1 million
for Renoir's At the Moulin de la Galette at Sotheby's." (244)
There is a "false equation of art with money and `success' that
dealers and collectors have managed to create." (245)
Thomas Albright
241. Raphael Soyer, "Social Concern and Urban Realism"; Art in
America by Jamey Gambrell
242. Thomas Albright, On Art and Artists, (U.S.A., The Chronicle
Publishing Co.,1989), p. 180
243. Herschel B. Chipp, Theories of Modern Art, (Berkeley and L.A.,
Cal., University of California Press, 1968), p. 529
244. Rita Reif, Saturday Review, The Vancouver Sun, Sat.Aug.24. 1991
245. Thomas Albright, On Art and Artists, (U.S.A., The Chronicle
Publishing Co.,1989), p. 179
