art and money

Andy Warhol’s “Green Car Crash,” his 1963 painting of an overturned car on fire, sold at Christie’s this week for a record $71.7 million this week. That’s nearly twice the amount used for disaster victims and reconstruction.

Fat price, thin story. When the painting made the news, the stories were about its cost, with little to zero discussion about the significance of the painting means or why it's valued so highly.

Defining art in terms of money is not new. In 1961, when New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art paid $2.3 million plus for Rembrandt's "Aristotle Contemplating the Bust of Homer," newspapers reported the price on their front pages. Time magazine reprinted the image on its cover under the title "The Solid Gold Muse."

After that, art sales began to get the kind of media attention usually reserved for heavy trading on the stock exchange. By the time the '90s rolled in, the Los Angeles Times reported that you could use low interest loans to buy a Renoir and double your money in a year. Art, the newspaper said, was a form of currency. We moved from seeing art's real value to seeing it as real estate that hangs on the wall.

Dorian Gray, where are you? Remember the Oscar Wilde story in "The Picture of Dorian Gray," a 1945 film which equated truth and beauty with art? Remember how Gray traded his soul for eternal youth, and how his evil ways were reflected in his likeness, which show him aging horribly? Art was about truth back then. No longer. Think of movies in the last couple of decades:

The art dealer in "Beverly Hills Cop"' who uses a gallery as a front organization for his cocaine business.
The Michael Douglas character who gloats in "Wall Street" that although he paid $60,000 for a Miro, he can sell it for $600,000 because art is just a "capitalist illusion."

I could cry.