Word: one
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Addicted Amateur With gray-black locks dangling in ringlets over his black velvet jacket, Stuart Pivar, 49, resembles an apparition from one of the dark Victorian paintings of which he is an avid collector. A New Yorker who owns several plastics companies, he accumulates paintings and bronzes because "there is nothing more exciting than to have great objects of art around." He concentrates on 19th century academics, pre-Raphaelites and symbolists, because at the time he began collecting 20 years ago they cost relatively little. Hofstra-educated Pivar has steeped himself in his field since then, reading exhaustively and traveling...
...spiritual value has been confirmed, for millions, by its wondrous convertibility into cash. You can't argue with it. It means something if somebody pays $2.5 million for a lummocking spread of icebergs by Frederic Church, a salon machine whose pedestrian invocations of the sublime are not worth one square foot of a good Turner...
...things rise in price, as though in some universal resurrection and canonization of the dead. Twenty years ago, you might not have got $1,000 for the Pre-Raphaelite painting that now fetches $100,000. The $30,000 Tiffany lamp was not worth $3,000, and so on. One is left with the impression-indeed it is cultivated assiduously by the largest gaggle of public relations people ever to batten on the flank of culture-that art prices can only go up; the market has transcended its old uncertainty, whether the objects are million-dollar Titians or ten-buck trash...
...flood of undiscriminating investment capital that flows toward art these days may yet produce a crisis analogous to the one that nearly sank the Bordeaux wine industry in the early 1970s. A surge of investment in Bordeaux vintages, to some extent by people who could not tell Medoc from camels' urine, shoved prices so high that traditional consumers of claret switched to Italian and other wines, thus tearing the bottom out of the market...
Nine of 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...