Money and Art
On speaking about the unspeakable
I wrote an article yesterday about the pretentiousness of the art world which included some critical remarks about the wealthy class that often supports and increasingly drives it. One of my longtime patrons took some offense at the piece, so it only feels fair to quickly follow up with a qualification of my intent in writing such things.
There is a cartoon from the 1980s that has hung for decades in all of my various studios across the country (I’d reproduce it here, except that to do so would probably risk a copyright infringement, so I’ll just have to describe it). In it, a neatly dressed man in a suit and tie faces a more disheveled figure with one hand held out and a paintbrush in the other. The painter is saying “can I have a grant so I can finish my art?” Behind him is a portrait on canvas of the suited man’s head with a label beneath it that reads “FUCKING ASSHO –”.
We aren’t supposed to talk about this uglier side of the sometimes uneasy relationship between artists and patrons, but that doesn’t mean that it is not real, or does not happen. The cartoon is funny because it happens all the time. I have kept it on my studio wall all these years, partly because it always makes me laugh, and partly to remind myself not to be like the artist in the drawing. I’ve been lucky to have some wonderful patrons, some of whom are relatively wealthy (though not egregiously so) and a great many others others who are, like me, people who live somewhere in the middle of the wide economic arc that used to exist in America between extreme wealth and extreme poverty — i.e., doctors, lawyers and other skilled professionals, or else folks with some family money, who have had the wherewithal to buy my pictures from time to time.
Except in those cases where one or another of the galleries I’ve worked with sold my paintings to strangers whose exact means were unknown to me, and who — in that more impersonal kind of transaction — had no desire to know or have any actual contact with me, I have always worked directly with collectors towards whom I bear no ill will or resentful inverted snobbery. They are all good folks whom I like and admire, for whose support I am grateful, and whose company and friendship I enjoy. I also far prefer these sorts of direct relationships to the distanced exchanges of the gallery trade. In fact, the only sales I ever knowingly made to very rich people whom I might not have liked, and would have preferred not to deal with had I known them, were when pieces went through a couple of different dealers to members of the tech elite. The most troubling of these happened when one of my Santa Fe galleries managed to sell a large painting to a very famous software billionaire. The gallerists were pleased to make that placement and called me into their offices to discuss it in hushed and reverent tones while placing before me a document of a sort I had never encountered before. It was a Non-Disclosure Agreement, which by signing prevented me from ever publicly uttering or otherwise publishing the identity of this oligarchic titan. The transaction felt wrong to me, and yet I went through with it because it meant a good sale for my dealers and some good money in my own pocket right when I was working hard to support a couple of growing boys, one of whom was about to go off to college. Still, the whole business of the NDA always rubbed me the wrong way and I regretted acquiescing to it before the ink was even dry. What it implied by its very nature was a presumption by the buyer that his identity and prestige were too socially important to be sullied by association with my lowly self in any way beyond his ability to take something that I had made and hang it in one of his many houses as some sort of a trophy of his wealth and importance. I imagine — though I do not know this for certain — that had I been a famous artworld celebrity like an Andy Warhol or a Jasper Johns, he’d have been happy enough to have me spread it about that he had bought one of my pictures, because some more prestige would have come his way as a result of that association. But as a comparative unknown, I was only to be seen and not “heard”.
Funnily enough I felt far dirtier, and far more compromised, in accepting that particular bit of patronage than I ever did in the years when a small-time drug dealer was regularly buying my pictures with bills pulled off of big rolls stashed in his voluminous sweat-pants pockets. The latter was a nice man who I personally liked and with whom I remained friendly even after he was caught, prosecuted and “did his time”. He sold recreational drugs to grownup partiers of his own social circle and was in that respect a far less objectionable character, to me at any rate, than the silicon valley tycoon with the NDA. I never had to sign an agreement with the drug dealer, we just trusted each-other to be discreet about our relationship. And in a way, we were actually both engaged in the very similar trades of selling different sorts of pleasures to people with more means than ourselves who otherwise hadn’t the ability to create those pleasures for themselves.
Money has always set up uneasy alliances and potentially fractious relationships across the divide between those who have it and those who don’t. There are a great many artists, especially nowadays, who make a pointed practice of using their work, like the painter in the cartoon, to critique the very class which supports them. I have never been as much interested in doing that as I have in simply making low-key portrayals of the world in which all these things unfold without offering much in the way of an opinion about it, except to say that I saw it. I leave it to others to decide for themselves how they feel about the world we live in. But I am not unaware of, nor indifferent to the growing hypocrisies and dysfunctions — or the many layers of corruption — that flow from the extraordinary wealth gap that has grown up in our country since I first began, in the early 1980s, to make things that rich people might like to buy. I do often write about this disparity of means because I see the negative influence that it has had, and is having, on the world of art, on its markets and on its makers most of all. The economic fundamentals of our now much benighted Republic have tipped too far and too unhealthily out of balance. Talking about that is both a valid and an important aspect of our cultural conversations around art. I don’t need to make paintings about it, but I do live and work in one tributary of the economy that is profoundly impacted by these realities. I therefore owe it to my own work, as well as to those who support it, to use these written musings to describe the problems I see as honestly and openly as possible.