Published on Jan 29, 2021
Art and Figures
What is art? Let’s not get into that. This question gets asked, however, way too frequently, especially as a means to end a debate about art. Those debates are usually about how art is “not what it used to be anymore”, how modern art “makes no sense”, or “isn’t even art to begin with”. Little is it known that those statements are only the tip of the iceberg to what may be the biggest deglamorization of the modern art scene today.
It all began in 1973, when Robert and Ethen Scull, two owners of a wealthy taxi company in New York, held an art auction that shook the world, where they raised an unheard before total sum of millions of dollars by only selling American contemporary art. What they did, simply enough, was commanding the auction at unfathomably high prices, which would go up to twenty times higher than the prices at which they bought the art piece a few years back. Despite the high criticism, this method would only be the beginning of a new trend, which would then become an unshakable reality. Really, Robert and Ethen Scull were the living proof that any press is good press. By today’s standards, the then-record-breaking prices—even adjusted for inflation—sound almost quaint. This phenomenon does not have the clearest roots, but one could agree that the art market exploded, especially in the 1990’s, after the fall of communism in Eastern Europe, which led the expansion of this industry to reach a wider audience, that even reached India and China. To quote Thomas Seydoux, former chairman of Impressionist and Modern art at Christie’s, “thirty years ago, millionaires had boats and jets—but didn’t necessarily have any art at all. For the very wealthy today, it’s not fine not to be interested in art.” (source: How Modern Art Serves the Rich, Rachel Wetzler, The New Republic, 2018)
The reason of that is a little bit more complex than just billionaires suddenly having a good sense of taste, or wanting to show off their wealth and status by owning a private museum, even though the latter is completely and utterly true. In The Dark Side of the Boom: The Excesses of the Art Market in the 21st Century, Georgina Adam explains that being in possession of art works is a very creative and very widespread loophole used by the ultra-wealthy to legally defer paying taxes. Simply put, this “loophole” in the tax code is more commonly known as “like-kind exchanges”, and was supposed to help farmers in the 1920’s by letting them defer taxes on livestock trades. Today, art collectors use it to their advantage simply by using the proceeds of the sale of one work in order to buy another within a margin of 180 days.
So there are a lot of things that come into play during an art auction now, and a lot of things that art critics have to keep in mind when analyzing a piece of art, because in a lot of cases, the art being sold might not be more than a mere commission to help some rich guy defer taxes legally, like maybe sticking a banana on a wall, for a hundred and twenty thousand dollars. Of course, whether an art piece was made for artistic purposes or monetary ones can never be proven, and not appreciating a banana on a wall can be explained by simply not resonating with the art piece, and not understanding art itself. And, to be fair, the connection between artists and the rich and powerful is not as young as it seems, as it is known that the most beautiful Renaissance pieces were commissions by bishops, kings, and Popes, like the Sistine Chapel or the Mona Lisa. Moreover, an art piece that is not criticized doesn’t exist, can’t exist. Art is art in its way to be revolutionary, and an art piece can be considered “good” in its capacity to redefine art, and the artistic process. Marcel Duchamp and his ready-mades are a perfect example of that.
And so, after covering the several transformations of the art market, the schemes and strategies that happen behind the scenes, and what it means for the quality of said art these days, it’s important to remember that finding loopholes is necessary in order to make unfathomable sums of money these days, and that no billionaire came to be without profiting off of said loopholes in every department, especially in the human rights one, so it is logical that one would rather be remembered for their patronage of the arts rather than for profiteering off human misery. In the not-so magical land of the arts, just like the art pieces themselves, nothing is really new.
