Oil Painting and Art as Commodity

Art Collection of Archduke Leopold Wilhelm, Teniers, 1651

A long, forgive me, but interesting quote from John Berger's Ways of Seeing, which I just read for the first time.

"Oil painting did to appearances what capital did to social relations. It turned everything into an object. Everything became exchangeable because everything became a commodity. The soul, thanks to the Cartesian system, was saved in a category apart. A painting could speak to the soul --by way of what it referred to, but never by the way it envisaged. Oil painting conveyed a vision of total exteriority. 


Pictures immediately spring to mind to contradict this assertion. Works by Rembrandt, El Greco, Giorgione, Vermeer, Turner, etc. Yet if one studies these works in relation to the tradition as a whole, one discovers that they were exceptions of a very special kind. The tradition consisted of many hundreds of thousands of canvases and easel pictures distributed throughout Europe. A great number have not survived. Of those which have survived only a small fraction are seriously as works of fine art, and of this fraction another small fraction comprises the actual pictures repeatedly reproduced and presented as the works of 'the masters'. 


Visitors to art museums are often overwhelmed by the number of works on display, and by what they take to be their own culpable inability to concentrate on more than a few of these works. In fact such a reaction is altogether reasonable. Art history has totally failed to come to terms with the problem of the relationship between the outstanding work and the average work of the European tradition. The notion of Genius is not in itself an adequate answer. Consequently the confusion remains on the wall of the galleries. Third-rate works surround an outstanding work without recognition --let alone explanation-- of what fundamentally differentiates them. 


The art of any culture will show a wide differential of talent. But in no other culture is the difference between 'masterpiece' and average work so large as in the tradition of the oil painting. In this tradition the difference is not just a question of skill or imagination, but also of morale. The average work --an increasingly after the seventeenth century-- was a work produced more or less cynically: that is to say the values it was nominally expressing were less meaningful to the painter than the finishing of the commission or the selling of his product. Hack work is not the result of either clumsiness or provincialism; it is the result of the market making more insistent demands than the art. The period of the oil painting corresponds with the rise of the open art market. And it is in this contradiction between art and market that the explanations must be sought for what amounts to the contrast, the antagonism existing between the exceptional work and the average."

- John Berger, Ways of Seeing, pp.87-88. 

Think of all those still lifes. The value of the object being protrayed helped determine the value of the painting itself. It was an argument for the patron's wealth or beauty or other impressive quality. Today, with an open art market in full swing, such forms of representation  are just  as present, albeit in a questioning manner. The photographic "portraits" of Cindy Sherman and certainly the oil paintings of Julie Heffernan come to mind.

Look What Happened to the Art Market

"Without Wall Street many forms of books, incunables, high spots of modern literature, are already unobtainable by the average collector or even fairly well-to-do collectors. Think Great Gatsby at over a $100k...Look what happened in the art market, where paintings that used to cost thousands are now hundreds of thousands, and paintings that used to cost hundreds of thousands of dollars are now millions of dollars.... 

If Wall Street gets hold of books and turns them into high priced investment widgets, then look out. No one will be able to afford them any more and some of the joy of collecting will be gone."

This quote from The Man who Loved Books Too Much: The True Story of a Thief, a Detective, and a World of Literary Obsession came from a book dealer upon hearing that book collections were being characterized in Worth magazine as good investments. It certainly hard to imagine people like to Vogels collecting in todays market, which bounced back from the financial crisis without losing much of the gains it has made over the past 20 years.

Does the rare book market share the same future? If so, I'd better scrounge up my first editions. It's interesting that this book dealer, who would profit for this more than the average collector potentially, doesn't like the idea of pricing people out of their collecting hobby. The dealers arguably benefit more than the collectors or artists, because many collectors are priced out and because fewer contemporary artists make the cut for the higher prices being paid at auction. But on the other hand, perhaps it is a sign of the health of the art market than it can command such record high prices.

By the way, the book itself is proving quite enjoyable. It's the true story of a book thief who stole rare books and hoarded them in the modest apartment he shared with his father, not unlike the art thief of my novel who steals to create his own personal collection that he keeps at his mother's house.