Word: arts
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...case, whom does the art boom benefit? Only collectors and middlemen. Few artists get to share in it. This is partly because boom conditions create an unreal system of reputation, with most of the benefits going to a handful of stars at the top and scarcely anything to the rest. The American art education system, churning out as many graduate artists every five years as there were people in late 15th century Florence, has in effect created an unemployable art proletariat whose work society cannot "profitably" absorb. Generous tax laws, which enabled collectors to buy low, keep a picture...
...most of us who cannot make or buy art but do want to look at it in peace, the art boom has been a disaster. The confusion of art with bullion may have done more to alter the way people experience works of art than any event since the arrival of mass color reproduction. It may well be that my generation -the people born between 1935 and 1940 -will be the last to remember what a truly disinterested museum visit was like. Quite simply, it is now difficult and, for most people, impossible to walk into a gallery and look...
...those ten years have passed, and the painting is still contaminated by the fallout from its price. The dance of digits in front of one's eyes renders the thing "special," isolated, fetishistically rare. It not only removes the painting from the flow of discourse about experience that art is meant to sustain, but it makes the price part of the subject of the work, separating it, by implication, from everything else ever painted by Velázquez, turning it from one painting among others into a dead whale on a flatcar, a curiosity to be gawped...
This culture is now getting to the point where everything that can be regarded, however distantly, as a work of art is primarily esteemed not for its ability to communicate meaning, or its use as historical evidence, or its capacity to generate aesthetic pleasure, but for its convertibility into cash. The exoticism of high price generates curiosity, and this curiosity fills the museum, turning it into a low-rating mass medium. But there it collides with an older American tradition, the 19th century reformist belief that contact with works of art is morally elevating and that museums are, in spirit...
...they are not "sexy." As corporate public relations firms insert their flackery into the curatorial arena, diminishing the museum's own control of what it shows while encouraging clients to favor exhibitions with guaranteed pull, the situation will not improve. Eventually, we may be reduced to the Ultimate Art Show, a display of all the gold in Fort Knox relocated to the Whitney Museum or some other institution, stacked up as a minimal sculpture. By then, price will have completely supplanted meaning. The Treasure and the Masterpiece will have fused, the triumph of the art boom will be achieved...