Art and money

Citation

Miller, S. (2002), "Art and money", European Business Review, Vol. 14 No. 6. https://doi.org/10.1108/ebr.2002.05414fab.004

Art and money

Sanda Miller

Keywords: Economics, Art, History

Art and money have always made good bedfellows, or have they? This is the moot point I wish to address in this article.

The equation appears simple: artist creates art; collector pays good money to purchase it; a partnership as old as art itself and this partnership has been forged between money and art; that is to say between artists and collectors. To that extent, the history of art is the history of artists and collectors as well.

Fortunately it provides also a unique insight into a perfectly symmetrical, if often fraught relationship. What history of art also reveals – perhaps not altogether unexpectedly – is that this is a causal relationship inasmuch as the meaning of collecting keeps changing, altering the status of collector and artist alike in the process.

Thus during the Renaissance, collecting was tantamount to "bespoke patronage" (Baxandall, 1972). The reason is simple: nowadays there is a free market which operates according to the law of supply and demand, but during the Renaissance artists worked exclusively on commission. The banking family of the Medicis were the first private patrons, in the modern sense of the word, to commission on a large scale, and because of their fabulous wealth amassed from banking, they were in a position to commission the most outstanding artists available to work for the glory of Florence which reflected – not a little – their own.

It was not until the seventeenth century that a wind of change started to blow. First, it happened in protestant and bourgeois Holland, where a new type of art patronage resulted in the emergence of the free market with the corollary that it begot that necessary evil, the middle man: the art dealer. They are still with us today.

The concept of opening the family art treasures collected, in many cases over generations, for private enjoyment to the general public simply did not exist and the first attempt at creating a gallery opened to the public, which appears to have been the unique initiative of the prince of Hesse-Cassel during the eighteenth century, remained an isolated example in the context. The introduction of the museum/gallery as a place specializing in exhibiting art for public consumption was a nineteenth century innovation, although a Musée National des Arts was already founded by the French Revolutionary government in 1792 when the painter Jean-Honoré Fragonard was appointed' "… to inventory and direct the conservation of the nationalised works of art from the royal palaces, from churches, and from the houses of émigres. The majority of the pictures which now form the Louvre Museum are nationalised property from these three sources" (Wilenski, 1973).

Even more recent is the concept of the commercial gallery as pioneered towards the end of the nineteenth century by Vollard, whose gallery in rue Lafitte became a hallmark of the Parisian art scene. Vollard, who was a shrewd businessman, inaugurated his tiny art shop with a show of Edouard Manet's drawings, hitherto deemed unsaleable and, therefore, still in the possession of his widow. From then he never looked back as he fondly reminisces in Recollections of a Picture Dealer&/it; (Vollard, 1978). The year was 1893.

The twentieth century, however, is yet again a different matter. Not only have commercial galleries proliferated, complete with gallery owners' memoirs such as Kahnweiler's (1971) My Galleries&/it; and Gimpel's (1963) Journal d'un Collectionneur&/it; (first published in 1961 by Editions Gallimard and 1963 (posthumously) by Editions Calmann-Levy in Paris respectively and subsequently translated into English), but also their power and influence on the European art market can hardly be overestimated.

Another important shift has also taken place at the interstices of Vollard's art shop and Kahnweiler and Gimpel's galleries, which is precisely that their status is elevated from shop to gallery, and it is the latter which comes to dominate the money-oriented twentieth century art scene and above all art market. One of the main contributing factors to this seemingly innocuous shift was the change of patronage: the aristocrats who dominated collecting during the "Grand Tour" were replaced by the capitalists as defined by Karl Marx in Das Kapital.&/it; This meant, at least according to Marxist ideology, that art ceased to be a source of disinterested aesthetic pleasure, a thing of beauty and a joy forever, or whatever popular lore teaches us about the experience of beauty, but simply and vulgarly a commodity to be bought and sold, perhaps for financial gain. Some shift!

By way of example, we need only consider the finest private collections of the great European aristocratic families, made accessible to the public thanks to quantities of lavishly illustrated books unflatteringly referred to of late as "coffee table books" of which one example would be Great Family Collections&/it;, edited by the distinguished Cubist scholar and collector Cooper (1965). In it the choicest art treasures belonging to the ancient aristocratic collections of the Colonna and Doria Pamphili princes in Rome, the Duke of Alba in Madrid; the Earls Spencer and the Dukes of Devonshire in England were photographed and thus made accesible to the general public.

Equally impressive are the capitalist dynasties of the twentieth century, among them the Guggenheims whose collection was subsequently housed in the famous museum conceived and built for the family by Frank Lloyd Wright, and inaugurated in October 1959, within six months of the architect's death (Roth, 1980).

Solomon Guggenheim's niece, Peggy – herself a distinguished collector whose Venetian palazzo is now an art museum – was an avid collector both of art and artists some of whom she married or acquired as lovers, as she reminisces in her memoirs Out of This Century (Confessions of an Art Addict)&/it;, in which she refers to Wright's extravagant helical structure as: " … a huge garage. It is built on a site that is inadequate for its size and it looks very cramped, suffering from its nearness to adjacent buildings …" (Guggenheim, 1979).

To this category belong also Charles and Maurice Saatchi in London, who have assembled one of the largest, if not the&/it; largest private collection of contemporary art in the world. In 1985 they opened a gallery, which enabled them to present their vast private collection to the public. The architect Max Gordon was commissioned to turn a disused warehouse into an appropriate space and the result was 98A Boundary Road, hidden in the leafy and affluent suburb of St John's Wood, a dramatic white kunsthalle&/it; fit their treasures. The last exhibition held in that space, consisting of the works of Ukrainian artist Boris Mikhailov whose bleak photographs of life among the dispossessed, the freakish, the sick, the forgotten, in other words the dregs society discards, had its vernissage on 11’September 2001. It unwittingly provided also an unforgettable catharsis for the collective emotions the world was experiencing as a result of the tragic events taking place in New York. At present the collection is in search of a new permanent space that will allow it to continue to be a presence on the London art scene.

No less dramatic is an even more recent development: the "Centro Cultural Andratx". Built literally in the middle of nowhere, on the outskirts of the sleepy backwaters of Andratx – a charming village in Mallorca – this cultural centre consists of a cluster of spaces and gardens to include a kunsthalle&/it; for major international exhibitions of museum standing, a commercial gallery, artists' studios, library, restaurant as well as apartments offering hospitality to prospective collectors and sponsors, all in all 4,000 square metres of space. Not surprising then that this cultural centre benefits from one of the largest private spaces in Europe. Built by Mallorcan architect Jaime Bestard, it was inaugurated on 20 September 2001, and is the result of a decade of "dreaming" and planning by two Danish art dealers, Jacob and Patricia Ashbaek. They happen also to be the owners of one of the most prestigious art galleries in Copenhagen opened in the 1970s. With the new cultural centre, their ambitions extended beyond presenting exhibitions, to providing also a multi-purpose space for artistic and intellectual cross-fertilisation.

Enlightened examples of contemporary patronage or cynical exploitation of artists in pursuit of fame, power and personal gain: genuine altruism and passion for art or hubris? This is the question we need to answer in order to establish whether art and money are aesthetically and ethically compatible; for, from a commercial point of view, the relationship is most certainly necessary rather than contingent.

There are several strands we can identify within this debate. We could perhaps consider again the Saatchi collection in London and Jacob and Patricia Ashbaek's dream artistic establishment in Mallorca as case studies.

When the Saatchi gallery was inaugurated in 1987, it presented artists from their huge personal collection, which had been already catalogued in four mammoth volumes entitled Art of Our Time&/it;, published in l984 by Lund Humphries. They list some 400 paintings – a substantial number of works to be in private hands by most standards. They are, however, only the tip of the iceberg, and are not necessarily the choicest either. The collection is considerably vaster. Just how vast it is we do not know.

If we consider the very act of collecting which is the raison d'être&/it; behind the compulsion to accumulate, it is interesting to ponder that Sigmund Freud, himself a keen collector whose house at 20 Maresfield Gardens in Finchley is now a museum, complete with the famous coach bedecked by a Persian carpet, became interested in the unconscious impulses which motivate the collector, which he considered to be yet another expression of infantile anal retention. Freud's famous pupils such as Ferenczi, Andreas Salomé and Ernest Jones too have discussed the "erotico-anal" character of the process of collecting, the latter specifically referring to the interest in the discovery of the treasure as "an incestuous exploration of Mother Earth" (Molfino and Molfino, 1997).

If we consider again the nature of the Saatchi collection, given the motley styles and variety of artists they seem to have collected with equal passion, not only would it be futile to speculate regarding an artistic preference; more likely it is an act of "repetition compulsion" as Freud would have it, to acquire objects and thus secure immortality.

Be that as it may, not surprisingly their motivation to collect has come under scrutiny for quite different reasons from the moment the gallery opened to the public in 1987 and several possible reasons spring to mind, some of which may not be immediately obvious.

First, the gallery functions as a museum in the sense that the works are not for sale; mostly they come from the family collection.

Second, given the mysterious way the law of supply and demand operates with devastating effect on market prices, it is difficult to understand why anybody would purchase an artist's work in bulk as the Saatchis have been doing. What can be the reason, one might ask? Can it possibly be the "disinterested pleasure" Immanuel Kant predicates of the aesthetic experience? Can it be the Freudian "repetition-compulsion" which is stronger than reason? or something that is altogether more prosaic?

Consider, for example, that the Saatchis are aiming to tamper with the art market by manipulating it, and the simplest way to do it is to influence market prices by starving the market of certain artists whose work thus acquires rarity value. An example would be the slow working – and at present very famous and very expensive to acquire – German artist Anselm Kiefer, handsomely represented in the Saatchi collection, but never available on the market.

There are other ways too: consider also for instance the early 1980s exhibition of paintings by the young American painter Julian Schnabel at the Tate Gallery, an unprecedented honour for one so young. Almost all the works on display were on loan from the Saatchi collection and this led to the cynical conclusion aired by a hostile London press that the Saatchis might have vested interests in the Tate acquiring a work by Schnabel. As it happened the Tate did acquire a painting by Schnabel, which was tantamount to the official seal of approval of Schnabel's aesthetic as well as commercial worth. The exhibition attracted also a number of venomous reviews – perhaps unjustly – although it is true that while he may not have been ready for such an honour, nor was he that bad. Several years on, his success and fame, not to mention commercial value, have gone from strength to strength and his success was assured by an enormous exhibition held in January-March l987 at the Musée National d'Art Moderne, Centre Pompidou in Paris.

In a text entitled: "Espacios para arte" the distinguished art critic and curator, Rosa Martinez comments about the aims and objectives of the "Centro Cultural Andratx" which cost over E7 million to build. Although the prime movers were Jacob and Patricia Ashbaek, the centre registered in Spain as a limited company counts 15 owners, all Danish, among them a former football player, all of whom support the centre by – among other things – buying works on show in the commercial gallery. And naturally a suspicious local press accused the Danish consortium of covering its true aims and objectives which are to do with speculative property development in overpriced Mallorca, under the guise of worthy artistic enterprises.

What conclusion can we draw from these fascinating case studies?

Let us pose the following question: What prompted Charles Saatchi and Maurice Saatchi to open an art gallery in London as an addition to an already considerable business empire, or Jacob and Patricia Asbaek, owners of one of the most prestigious art galleries in Copenhagen, to build the enormous "Centro Cultural de Andratx" in the middle of nowhere in Mallorca? After all, what Charles and Maurice Saatchi, or Jacob and Patricia Ashbaek and many others besides do is to buy – in these particular instances also show – and sell art. Ultimately short of the "intentional fallacy", rearing its head in this debate, what does it matter what actually prompted either of them to open such impressive museums. What matters is that, even if we are not able to unpick the causes fully that prompted them into action, the effect is fully beneficial as well as enjoyable for the art world: we need a few more such Maecenas!

ReferencesBaxandall, M. (1972), Painting and Experience in Fifteenth Century Italy, Oxford University Press, Oxford.Cooper, D. (Ed.) (1965), Great Family Collections, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London.Gimpel, R. (1963), Journal d'un collectionneur (marchand de tableaux), Calmann-Levy, Paris.Guggenheim, P. (1979), Out of This Century (Confessions of an Art Addict). André Deutsch, London, p. 360.Kahnweiler, D.-H. (1971), My Galleries and Painters, Thames and Hudson, London.Molfino, F. and Molfino, A.M. (1997), Il possesso della bellezza (Dialogo sui collezionisti d'arte), Umberto Allemandi and Co., Torino, pp. 55-6.Roth, L.M. (1980), A Concise History of American Architecture, Icon Editions, New York, NY, p. 292.Vollard, A. (1978), Recollections of a Picture Dealer, Chapter VI, at Madame Manet's, Dover Publications, New York, NY, pp. 49-59.Wilenski, R.H. (1973), French Painting, Dover Publications, New York, NY, p. 167.