Last year’s major art “happening” — Damien Hirsch’s staged discovery of a shipwreck full of sculpture — is poised to earn somewhere in the neighborhood of a billion dollars in sales when it finally closes in December.
To pay for foundry fees, staging, etc., Hirsch sold off a million dollars of his art. Subtracting the commission on a billion dollars worth of sales — promotions costs — a little wine and cheese — I’m guessing Hirsch still walks away from this stunt with a few million in his profit column.
One art critic said that Hirsch “pushed kitsch to the point of sublime.” What’s so sublime about fake art?
Last week, Banksy pulled another fast one. This one was a little less slimy — funnier by far — a little less icky. Unless you’ve been under a rock, you probably already heard about the Banksy painting that was sold for $1.3 million at a London Sotheby’s auction and just as the gavel cracked down and “SOLD” rang out, the audience watched as the painting slowly melted down below the bottom of the frame and came out in shreds.
Wow! How fun is that?! The audience — the buyer — all Banksy-d!
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| "Love Is In the Bin" by Banksy |
But wait a minute! An update on the story. The painting has been retitled by Banksy himself: “Love Is In the Bin.” The high bidder is thrilled to keep the shredded picture because it’s worth more now than its winning auction price. The shredded artwork is proclaimed to be a rare, new breed, original.
Meanwhile, the visual of a picture dripping in shreds from the bottom of its frame struck a chord in the advertising world. Ikea and Perrier nearly overnight adopted the image and McDonald’s produced posters and ads with the image and french fries dripping from below. My guess is that one of these first ad posters will be worth a bunch of money soon.
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| McDonald' "french fries" poster |
How to react to all this?
Artsy (online) Magazine just printed an extensive piece on Thomas Kinkade, the “painter of light,” whose images of cabins and cute animals show up in posters, calendars, and dishes. Kinkade died in 2012 at the age of 54. He was charged with sexual infidelity, drug addiction, and general craziness and some think he committed suicide. Maybe it was sweetness overload? The same year, his company earned $4.5 billion dollars.
Kinkade’s art was the bane of serious art critics and collectors but embraced by Mr. and Mrs. Everybody-Else. One art critic asked a woman who clearly made sacrifices to afford the Kinkade $55 poster why she was buying this picture. She had tears in her eyes as she described how happy it made her — the make-believe world that it illustrated, the one she hoped to find someday for herself, maybe in Heaven if not on this earth.
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| The Kinkade cabin in fog/garden/woods/snow |
Kinkade capitalized on the gap between the art elite and middle America — the forerunner of our present national political scene. In much the same way, the message was “them” (the coastal insiders) and “us” (middle America.) Right back to red vs. blue — tribes of “In the Know” and “In the Not!”
The art world has always been in on this divide. We call it and explain it in other terms but there it is. I am part of it. When I see painted wall murals of big roses defacing a brick wall, I want to scream. The neighbors who live within those city blocks see something entirely different. I can’t explain to them why an old building has dignity and if left alone, has a chance at rebirth. They can’t convince me that with their surroundings gray and in tatters, the view of a huge mermaid swimming along the railroad underpass is uplifting. I want to yell “really?! what does a mermaid have to do with life in the inner city?” And they respond “I’ll never have a cabin with smoke curling from it’s chimney serenely sitting in snow but I want the dream.”
Can we ever find a common meeting place? I don’t know. Meanwhile, I am blue and you are red and I am right…and you are right…
