Episode 36 - The Commodification of Art

Transcript

David: 0:06

Hi, I'm David Pena-Guzman.

Ellie: 0:08

And I'm Ellie Anderson. Welcome to Overthink.

David: 0:11

The podcast where two friends,

Ellie: 0:13

who are also professors,

David: 0:15

put philosophy in dialogue with the everyday.

Ellie: 0:18

Because big ideas are within everyone's reach.

David: 0:30

In 2018, a Banksy painting sold for $1.4 million at a Sotheby's auction. But right after it was sold, it immediately lowered itself through a shredder that was built into the bottom of the frame and of course this went viral immediately.

Ellie: 0:49

Yeah, I mean, just imagine spending a million and a half dollars on a painting only to have it immediately destroy itself. But I also had, I have to wonder here, like maybe Banksy realized how ugly it was. It was that Girl with Balloon painting that they're so known for.

David: 1:07

Well, no, I don't, I- I don't think it's that, but also it's important to know that it only shredded halfway because the mechanism stopped working halfway. So it was supposed to shred the painting entirely, but it only shredded about half and then it stopped.

Ellie: 1:24

Oh, my God. I didn't know that. I feel like the headline was just like shredded painting by Banksy at Sotheby's or something like that. But that's almost even better because now you have half of an ugly painting and half of an ugly shredded painting. Sorry the Banksy fans out there, maybe I'm like alienating folks just right off the bat with my disdain for Banksy's Girl with a Balloon.

David: 1:44

Oh, my God. Is it just Girl with a Balloon or all Banksy?

Ellie: 1:48

I don't feel like I know Banksy's oeuvre well enough to make that statement, but I would say I have a generally negative impression of Banksy? How about you?

David: 1:55

I don't dislike him, but I also don't love him. Either way I think maybe the seller of the painting will agree with you that it was just an ugly shredded painting, who knows. But the weird thing is that this half shredded painting is now expected to go for between 5 and $8 million. And Sotheby's has claimed that it was the first artwork in history to be created live during an auction. So they're trying to put a positive spin on it by claiming this or- originality to it.

Ellie: 2:29

David, I can't. It's a half destroyed piece of art and they're like, oh, well, see, it's actually this anticapitalist commentary on the ephemerality of art. It's actually a performance piece that we're going to sell it for five to $8 million.

David: 2:49

Yeah. And I mean, I think you're right that the piece was meant to be a critique of capitalism and art markets, insofar as it was meant to destroy somebody's capital immediately upon investment. So the idea is that somebody would pay up $1.4 million and then Banksy would give them the middle finger and be like, ha, now it's worth nothing. In fact, when the piece sold, Banksy made a post on their Instagram, that read, going, going gone, you know, as a reference to the practice of selling something a- at auction where the auctioneer will say that, but also as an indicator of the destruction of capital that he thought he was going to do. Paradoxically, the exact opposite thing happened, um, because, as we just saw, the work's value increased and became much more expensive because of its self-destruction. So I think this is an example of how capitalism can appropriate even the things that seek to resist it.

Ellie: 3:51

Yeah, no, for sure. Also you said he for Banksy, do we even know who Banksy is?

David: 3:56

So the official word on the street is no. And I did read an article a couple of years ago that speculated that it's a woman. By now, most of the people who we think might be Banksy are men, but we don't really know for sure. So-

Ellie: 4:12

Definitely Kanye west, so we can maybe settle that now.

David: 4:16

Maybe it's George Bush, you know, who became an artist after his presidency.

Ellie: 4:22

From the paintings of cats to like the Girl with the Balloon. Oh yeah. Wow.

David: 4:26

His paintings of immigrants, which I honestly just find so creepy, that George Bush, after his really problematic term, starts just like developing this aesthetic fascination with brown people and painting brown people.

Ellie: 4:42

Oh, wow. I didn't actually know about that turn. Wow. Oh my goodness. But you know, I think this Banksy being shrouded in mystery is kind of interesting because in spite of Banksy's antiestablishment orientation, Banksy pieces are part of the establishment. They're going for millions of dollars at auction. And there's a way that I think, by being anonymous, perhaps Banksy is like trying to resist the cult of the artist, but there's still such a culty thing about people speculating about who Banksy is, like that is a cult of the artist in its own right. So we're fetishizing Banksy's art and Banksy.

David: 5:22

Yeah. And it's even cultish in the technical sense that only a select few have access to the truth, because some people do know who Banksy is, because especially with the painting that sold at Sotheby's, it was operated by remote control. So we know that somebody at the auction had the remote control and as soon as it sold, sort of click the button to make it shred.

Ellie: 5:46

Yes.

David: 5:47

Somebody was given instructions by Banksy to do it. And so there are the-

Ellie: 5:51

It was probably some unpaid intern who like, has a house on Fire Island because their parents are rich, you know?

David: 6:00

I wouldn't put it past any contemporary artists to basically have all their work be done by interns.

Ellie: 6:06

Yeah. I mean, at least the shredding, but who knows maybe the art too.

David: 6:12

Today, we are talking about the commodification of art.

Ellie: 6:17

How have artworks become objects of consumption in the global marketplace?

David: 6:22

And how does this change not only how art is bought and sold by the movers and shakers of the art market, but also how it is experienced by the rest of us?

Ellie: 6:32

And what are anticapitalist artists doing to create works of art that can't be consumed?

David: 6:46

Ellie, would you say that you are into art?

Ellie: 6:49

Hmm. I mean, this is a fraught question for me. I, well, I used to be obsessed with art. I wanted to be a museum curator when I was in high school. I took a bunch of art history classes in high school and college. And I, you know, I teach philosophy of art pretty regularly, or at least I have in previous jobs, but lately I haven't been that into it, to be honest. So the only museum, to just give you an example, that I've been to in the past year and a half is the Hollywood Wax Museum.

David: 7:18

True fine art.

Ellie: 7:19

I know, classic classic. Not even- its, you know, it's not even an art museum. It's just like a culty celebrity museum that I went into, you know, late one night cause it's open till midnight. Anyway, that's a different story. It was really fun. But I think lately, I guess I find it increasingly hard to feel art, to connect with it in the way that I used to, let alone to distinguish the incredible stuff from the BS. So it's been, to be honest, a bit of a crisis for me.

David: 7:44

Yeah. I mean, I think it's really difficult to differentiate the good stuff from the bad stuff. And I've always had this chip on my shoulder about my own incapacity to talk about art, to a large degree because I didn't have a very artistic upbringing and-

Ellie: 7:59

You have a chip on your shoulder about your inability to talk about it. You're just like, Yeah. I'm above it.

David: 8:04

Oh.

Ellie: 8:05

I'm above it because I can't talk about it.

David: 8:06

When life gives you lemons. Yeah. I'm like, I don't talk about art because I am so self-aware that I don't even think that there's a good way to differentiate the good from the bad. Yeah, so super bougie about my own incapacity to be bougie. That's where I'm at. But that's not to say that I don't appreciate art. I love going to museums. I love going to galleries. And I do like being surrounded by artwork.

Ellie: 8:32

Yeah. I mean, there's like at least one really artsy early era Instagram photo of us standing in front of a work of art at the High Museum in Atlanta, looking pensive.

David: 8:43

Need to find it. We need to find it again and share it with our Instagram fans.

Ellie: 8:49

Although to be honest, I think there's a bunch of other people in it too who may or may not want a reminder of that, you know, pseudo artsy phase. But in any case, I know I'll get back into visual arts in particular at some point, and museum going at some point, but you know lately I just keep thinking about John Dewey's claim that modern society encourages us to recognize art rather than perceive it. So John Dewey, famous American philosopher from the early 20th century associated with pragmatism. Dewey has a really amazing theory of art. And one of the many aspects of it is that nowadays, rather than actually perceiving art. By which he means sort of getting into the flow or rhythm of a piece as an organic whole that tells us something about the world or that makes us feel some type of way, ideally a combination of both, we tend to just recognize artworks nowadays. We just sort of like, oh, flash of recognition, moving on. And I think our society doesn't really know how to engage with art except as a commodity. And this is why we have the tendency to recognize it rather than to genuinely perceive it. And I think, for instance, about the phenomenon of taking photos of artworks, which fascinates me. Maybe this has changed a little bit in the past few years, but I think, especially once we all started toting around handheld iPhone cameras and stuff, everybody was just going around to museums and taking photos of the paintings that they saw there. You know, picture yourself in the Louvre, and you're just surrounded by hundreds of people who are staring at the Mona Lisa. No, no, not staring, sorry. I'm I- misspeak, who are staring at the image of the Mona Lisa through their iPhone camera, right?

David: 10:27

Yeah, I think that's definitely right. And most photographs that you see on social media, all for major works of art, especially the Mona Lisa, are photographs that include, in the frame, a ton of other phones that people are holding up above them because to see the Mona Lisa, it's such a famous painting at the Louvre, that they walk you through it, you cannot stay and linger, they sort of push you because there are so many people. And so you only have like five seconds to like, take your picture and go. And so even if you wanted to perceive, you can't, all you can do is recognize.

Ellie: 11:01

Well, totally. And I think that speaks to the profound sadness of this mode of interacting with art, because I think the point is not to be like, oh, look at those plebeians taking photos of the Mona Lisa because they don't appreciate art. The point is rather to be like, what are the conditions of our current society that make this the most legible way of experiencing the Mona Lisa for most people? I think the camera becomes a proxy for the presence of the human subject, because we don't really know how to be present with works of art. It's like we're window shopping for an aesthetic experience because we don't know how to perceive in sense.

David: 11:37

Yeah, we're all teenagers at the mall.

Ellie: 11:41

Yeah.

David: 11:41

With the exception that at the end of going to the mall, at least the teenagers who are window shopping, they don't fool themselves into thinking that they've bought the things that they saw, whereas I think most of us do fool ourselves into thinking that we have truly experienced art simply because we have consumed it or recognized it at the museum. You see where I'm going?

Ellie: 12:03

Oh, I get it. I get it. Okay. So like we're mistaking the window shopping of a piece of art with actually possessing it?

David: 12:10

Uh, with having had a genuine artistic experience or aesthetic experience?

Ellie: 12:14

Or perception in Dewey.

David: 12:16

Yeah, yeah, exactly. Well, in Dewey's sense of art as experience, right, as something that transforms your relationship to the everyday, by the way, this is where I plug in that my first ever publication in a philosophy journal, when I was an undergrad, was about John Dewey's work on art.

Ellie: 12:33

What, okay. We got to find it. Also impressive that you were published as an undergrad, unless it was like in an undergrad journal.

David: 12:38

It was not. You didn't see this, but I just flipped my hair. When I went to grad school, I planned initially to study aesthetics and Dewey. That was my original plan. And then I veered into very different directions.

Ellie: 12:58

Well, honestly, that's kind of a common tale, because what a lot of people realize when they get to grad school in philosophy is that there are like virtually no jobs in philosophy of art and aesthetics. It's actually really sad and, you know, sort of an indictment of our cultures approach to art. So it's like the few people who could help us understand how to perceive art are being edged out of philosophy, which isn't to say that like art historians and other folks can't also help.

David: 13:20

Yeah, definitely.

Ellie: 13:22

Kind of metaphor for the edging out of art in our society in general.

David: 13:24

No, definitely. And in my case, I moved in the direction of social theory, German philosophy, critical theory. And there is a connection here because then I got interested in the philosopher, Walter Benjamin, who also wrote a really influential essay in the 1930s entitled "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," where he makes an argument very similar in spirit to Dewey's, and he makes the claim that in the wake of the Industrial Revolution, we are bombarded with so many images of art. So many reproductions of artistic works like photographs of paintings, photographs of photographs, copies of photographs, so on and so forth.

Ellie: 14:10

Images of the Mona Lisa everywhere.

David: 14:11

Exactly, that as a result, art can no longer bring about that critical effect, which is to make us step back for a moment from the immediacy of our surroundings and reflect upon the world. And in this essay, he says, you know, nowadays we sort of treat art as been there, done that, by the time we see a real painting in the flesh, because we've seen it so many times that we recognize it, as you say, but we no longer linger with it. And I really like this notion of lingering and I take it to be literal in the sense that we don't spend time with art. I've heard that the average museum goer, for instance, spends no more than eight seconds looking at a painting before moving on to the next. So talk about window shopping, but I also take the notion of lingering to be metaphorical, because it refers to the activation of our critical thinking faculties, which for Benjamin refers to a kind of thinking that is activated by art that moves the spectator from mere perception of art or mere relationship to the artwork to a much broader critique of the social order that is prompted by the experience of art. So when you go from thinking about this particular painting to thinking about what it means and what questions it raises about the status quo.

Ellie: 15:39

Okay. So you're saying that if we're sort of taking Benjamin seriously, maybe we should spend longer than eight seconds looking at a painting because only then can we, to go back to Dewey, sort of perceive it rather than recognize it. I mean, I do think that if a painting is not my taste, if I bad, which of course at the same thing cause my taste is just-

David: 15:59

Objective. You're the ground zero of art.

Ellie: 16:05

Right? I'm not going to spend more than a couple seconds, let alone eight, looking at it and maybe that's fine, right?

David: 16:11

Really?

Ellie: 16:12

Like there's some paintings that I just don't think are particularly good or some works of art that I don't think are good.

David: 16:17

But when I see something that I hate, I actually spend more time on it developing my hatred, cultivating bile, and that requires more than eight seconds.

Ellie: 16:28

I'm not talking about hating. I'm talking about like work that's just like banal, basic, boring, whatever. I don't want to linger in front it get rid of stuff. Um, like a lot of the stuff that I've seen in New York galleries in the past couple of years, cause even though I have not been to more museums than the Hollywood Wax Museum, I have been to the Chelsea galleries.

David: 16:43

Did you linger with the wax statues?

Ellie: 16:45

Oh. Yeah in the Hollywood wax museum, I was like, whoa, these are, these are worth perceiving fully. I'm not just going to recognize the Will Farrell wax image. Anyway, okay. So back to Benjamin though. I mean, I do think, though, David, that Benjamin also has this idea of distraction or Zerstreuung, if we want to be fancy in my like kind of deficient German accent, that comes out in that essay where he said that actually it's potentially liberatory that people are starting to view art in a state of distraction. And, you know, he's writing this in the 1930s, so he's not thinking about us like scrolling our Instagram feeds while we're watching Netflix in the background. He's thinking about watching films in a movie theater and some of the techniques of montage that filmmakers were using at the time. And he says that actually receiving an artwork in the state of distraction is potentially liberatory because it encourages us to sort of see the breakdown of our environment, see the way that the editor is choosing to cut a particular film, rather than just accepting the way that a work of art exists as like, oh, this is the only way that they could have portrayed it because yeah, that is reality. So it's the difference between a Charlie Chaplin film and a Wagner opera, for instance. And so he actually is super critical of the traditional mode of contemplating art and letting it completely absorb you, because that for him can lead to just like sheer acceptance of the status quo. So maybe he'd support my scrolling on Instagram while watching TV and movies.

David: 18:21

I- I don't know that I would go nearly that far, because even when he's talking about something like montage that exposes the fault lines that are arbitrarily or artificially created for us, and that we are expected to accept as the fault lines of the real, even that needs lingering, right? So one of the things that he says is that the problem with cinema is precisely when people will sort of let themselves be taken up by the movie without taking that step back to reflect on the constructive or constructed elements of the montage. So even that needs lingering and he talks about it in terms of distance, right? The ability to take a step back, like I said, and analyze, which for him is what philosophy is all about.

Ellie: 19:06

Yeah, for sure. So the cultivation of distance between the spectator and the artwork might provide the conditions for questioning the social norms. But, you know, I think one thing that we might want to distinguish here is that kind of distance that you're talking about, David, that allows for critical reflection on artworks and the conditions of life from what Marx calls indifference, because in the 1844 Manuscripts Marx defines a commodity as something toward which we become indifferent because it's interchangeable with other objects. So part of the commodity form involves seeing an object for its value on the marketplace, right? So the Banksy piece is valuable because it's worth five to $8 million, not because of the actual contents of the work of art and that interchangeability, you know, it's like the equivalent of any other work of art that's worth five to $8 million, means that we become indifferent to the actual objects. So I think that's actually really crucial to the idea that art is commodified is that we tend to see artworks just in terms of their monetary value, their exchange value, rather than as something that engages us because of their unique properties.

David: 20:20

No that's right. So I think the concept of distance that we get out of Benjamin is definitely something like an interested distance, right, where you are interested in the particularity of the work of art, but you step back from it in order to let critical thinking happen in the presence of that work.

Ellie: 20:40

Yeah, and I mean another thing to put in the mix here, as we're thinking about the way that artworks become interchangeable commodity forms is what Benjamin's fellow Frankfurt School philosopher, Theodor Adorno calls the culture industry, and the culture industry is basically the mechanized and fast production of so-called low art that doesn't have a lot of aesthetic merit. And so I'm thinking here about popular music, which is in many cases nowadays algorithmically produced hits that all sound the same. And I was fascinated to find out that there are actually algorithms that music producers use in order to produce hits. And then of course, we've got like the big budget franchise films that are basically retellings of the same stories. Like how many times do we need to hear about the origin story of Spiderman? Although I heard the recent one was actually really good.

David: 21:29

Yeah, I don't know. I think Spider-Man 17 was a cinematic masterpiece.

Ellie: 21:34

Well, I actually did hear that the reason Spiderman was like really incredible, the animated one. I just haven't seen it, but you know, it's like why that, as opposed to a different story altogether. So a lot of the discussion about commodification of art reminds me of Marx's idea that what happens in capitalism is that all human senses, all of our kind of like rich modes of perceiving and interacting in the world, get reduced to the single sense of having. So we can't really interact with things or other people in any other mode than a mode of consumption. We want to possess. We want to have. We want to consume. And so because human society, according to Marx, is tied together by consumerism, it makes sense that we would treat art as something to be consumed because that's, according to him, what we do with just about everything. And on that note, I just really want to bring up this amazing quote from the German filmmaker and cultural critic Hito Steyerl, who writes quote cinema today is above all a stimulus package to buying new televisions, home projector systems, and retina display iPads. We might streaming services these days.

David: 22:41

So, I guess the idea is not that we produce those gadgets for the sake of watching movies, but that we produce movies for the sake of owning those gadgets, right? Like the end goal is the technic.

Ellie: 23:20

So I mentioned before that I feel like a lot of people nowadays just don't know how to interact with the arts, especially art in museums, through no fault of their own. A lot of this has to do with a deficiency in arts education, inaccessibility of museums, and I would also say the sort of absence of a strong social fabric that makes the arts legible and makes artistic productions legible across a wide variety of groups. But I think one thing that we're seeing today is this sort of weird bifurcation of the art world of like the high arts, you know, that happened in galleries and museums and this is confusing and separate from everyday existence. A lot of people don't know how to interact with this type of art, that kind of classic old school Pollock, my toddler could do that reaction. But then on the other hand, we have an extreme interweaving of the arts into everyday life today in a way that has not been seen in much of modernity because so many of us are watching TV and movies in our homes and photography is integrated into our everyday life in a way that it wasn't previously due to the proliferation of smartphone, cameras, and Instagram, et cetera, et cetera, TikTok videos, you know, are creating amateur film editors of so many young people.

David: 24:31

Yeah and I think this bifurcation is what the art historian Lawrence Levine calls high brow versus low brow or fine art versus low art. And of course, this raises questions about what is known as the autonomy of art. Does art exists truly in a separate realm from everyday life, the life of the people or is it part of everyday life? And it sounds like you, Ellie, and I will say me as well think it should be the latter, that there shouldn't be this bifurcation because the bifurcation is itself the problem.

Ellie: 25:08

Yeah. I mean, I do think it's a problem to have an autonomous sphere of art that is separate from everyday life, especially separate from the everyday life of many average citizens and more accessible to an elite privileged view. And then kind of the mass of everyday culture on the other hand. But I think I would maybe describe the problem a little bit differently because I don't actually know if the highbrow-lowbrow distinction is as useful to me when we're thinking about things like TV, because there's a lot of really incredible television today, just as one example, that is being streamed in homes all over the nation. And so one thing you've seen in the past, like 20 years, especially the past 10 years is the highbrow-ification of television. But in any case I do agree with you that we tend to see art as existing in a separate realm from our everyday life, in large part due to this kind of imagined autonomy of art. And that for Dewey is a symptom of deficient capitalist consumerist modes of our society. It's because our ways of relating to the rhythms of everyday life and each other are so impoverished that we set up the artistic sphere as something unto itself. And so Dewey really wants to advocate an integration of the arts in everyday life, which I think is great, but I also want to say that I'm taken by a potentially incompatible ideas, at on the face of it, which is Adorno's idea that society today actually has the opposite problem. For Adorno, art is not autonomous enough because it's always commodified. And so we don't have the separate sphere of art that for him is required in order for art to critically reflect on the conditions of society.

David: 26:54

Yeah. And one way to think about Adorno's critique, because you mentioned the highbrow-ification of lowbrow art like movies, is that Adorno is really concerned about the lowbrow-ification of high art, right? Like the, the taking down of fine art and other forms of cultural expression to the level of the culture industry. Either way, I do get the sense that when you put Dewey and Adorno side-to-side and think about their differences, one thing that unites them is that both seem to be taken by some imagined before time, potentially when artworks weren't treated as an object to be consumed. But couldn't we say that art in fact has always been connected to markets.

Ellie: 27:45

So I don't think I would go so far as to say always been connected to markets, but I think it often has been. For instance, if we think about the concept of patrons in Renaissance, Italy, right? The Medicis are responsible for so many of the incredible artworks that we have because they commissioned pieces by the greatest artists of their day. And so there's a long history of patronage and commissioning where so many of the most stunning artworks in the history of art are thanks to the patronage of wealthy people. And then these wealthy people were often putting their own artworks in their homes or in their private chapels and private collections and then they weren't accessible to the public. So then what you see in the 19th century is this boon of public art museums, trying to make the work more accessible to the average person.

David: 28:34

The British art historian Michael Baxandall notes that the first step in this direction, which now we can call the commodification of art, occurs really in the Renaissance with the rise of art contracts, because a lot of pictorial art, especially painting, was already subject to very high degrees of contractual predetermination, and it was a commission typically for a religious or a political or a mercantile elite.

Ellie: 29:00

And then you have to like put the patron in the little corner, right. Looking more attractive than they are in real life.

David: 29:06

Yeah. So there, there, there is already a market and it means that the artist is producing under already somewhat reified economic conditions. Then again, the sociologist of art, Diana Crane, whose work has been very influential for me in thinking about art, says that changes in the late 20th century have really changed the game because they have led to art becoming a pure commodity in the Marxist sense of the term. And she attributes this commodification of art to two developments that brought about a wholesale revolution in how art is valued. And the first of these changes is the change in the spaces associated with fine art or great art. She argues that throughout the 20th century, the places where you would have to go, if you wanted to find fine art, would be the gallery and the museum, right. You would go to the MoMA. You would go to the Tate. You would go to a fancy gallery in Paris or in New York, maybe in Berlin. Fast forward a few decades into the late 20th century and that geography of fine art changes. Suddenly, the museum is replaced by the art fair and the gallery is replaced by the auction house. And the difference here is significant because if, to get into a museum, you have to be invited, right, by a curator who wants to showcase your art because they make an assessment about the symbolic value of your contribution to art, in an art fair you pay to get in. So suddenly it's a pay for play model. And according to her, the rise of art fairs, the rise of art biennials, the rise of auction houses like Sotheby's or Christie's, so in connection here to Banksy with whom we began our episode, mean that the art world has shifted from a symbolic way of valuing art to a purely material one, where the only thing that matters nowadays in terms of establishing an artistic reputation is how much money does your art sell for, rather than what place it occupies in the history of art.

Ellie: 31:24

So we've got rise of the art fair and the auction house. What's the other one?

David: 31:28

The second one is the rise of mega collectors, which is a new breed of art collectors that emerges in the late 20th century that are defined primarily by the fact that they are filthy rich. So by definition, a mega collector in the art world is defined as somebody who has at least $30 million.

Ellie: 31:51

Like total assets or in art?

David: 31:53

No, total assets, and that can use those assets to buy and sell art. We're not talking about a ton of people in the world that fit into this category and Crane notes that even though there aren't that many people who have that much money, to a large extent because of the logic of capitalist accumulation, where fewer and fewer people have all the money, still, they represent between 80 and 90% of the global art market as a whole.

Ellie: 32:22

Oh my God.

David: 32:23

And so this handful of really wealthy people, so think about businessman, think about investors, hedge fund managers, their values, and their worldviews, are swamping the market and tilting the market so that the market organizes itself around their desires, their interests, their wants and beliefs.

Ellie: 32:49

Yeah, I'm just envisioning here some rich guy who went to Harvard Business School and then took over daddy's hedge fund and decided that jumping into the art market would be a way of making money for his investors.

David: 33:00

Yeah, you are not wrong. A number of the world's most famous mega collectors kind of fall into this category. I don't know if they went to Harvard, but in general they do approach art with a financial interest. And here we might think about somebody like Francois Pinault, who is a French businessman who is married to Salma Hayek. So Francois Pinault is a very famous mega collector, one of the top 20 in the world. And he's so wealthy that he has his own museum in the center of Paris, basically, called the Pinault Museum.

Ellie: 33:31

Okay. I feel FOMO. I've never heard of this museum. What's wrong with me? I'm so out of it.

David: 33:37

Um, I've been to it. And to be honest, it's a really strange experience because you go into this building, which by the way, used to be the stock exchange, very symbolically, in Paris. And then this guy took it over and turned it into a museum, kind of a little bit ironic there.

Ellie: 33:54

Yeah.

David: 33:55

You walk into this museum that is called a museum and it looks like a museum and it feels like a museum, but it is technically not a museum. It is a private collection. You're basically walking through this rich guy's living room and looking at his paintings.

Ellie: 34:12

In the stock exchange. Well, and no it is a museum, it's just a museum that's based on a collection and that's so many museums. I think people, you know, don't always realize it's like, oh yeah, this is such and such rich person's collection.

David: 34:23

Yeah, but it's also not a museum because it doesn't have the public function, right. It's not as if it had a public orientation and then lost it because it needed private backing. It's been private from the very beginning.

Ellie: 34:36

Well, but what do you mean by private? Because it is open to the public, right.

David: 34:39

You have to pay to get in. Yes.

Ellie: 34:42

Okay. But it is open to the public if you pay. I mean, that's really similar to a lot of museums worldwide, like the Frick Collection in New York and like the Getty Museum in LA, the Broad Museum in LA. Maybe it's just that he has bad taste.

David: 34:55

Well, that's one thing, right? That the museum is a reflection of his personal taste. I'm sure he works with art critics and students of art, but in the end, it's what he likes. And to be honest, some of the pieces are ugly.

Ellie: 35:08

You would spend less than eight seconds looking at

David: 35:10

them. Yeah. I actually only spent three minutes total in the entire three story building. I just ran and I was like, been there, done that, recognize that, didn't perceive it.

Ellie: 35:21

Oh, my God. You're like, this is your living room, forget bye, just going to just like run through, crashing everything.

David: 35:27

No, but I think the point that I want to make here is that people like Francois Pinault, who are dominating the market simply by virtue of their wealth, are not only changing who owns the art, but what art is bought and sold because they control the capital and consequently, what art gets made, because if people want their art to be sold, they have to cater to the needs of this very specific community of typically wealthy, white, North American and European, although there are also a number of Chinese mega collectors.

Ellie: 36:02

So the first thing is that I think a question is how are these collectors choosing what they like and what they dislike? Because it's probably not just like standing in front of a painting and being like, oh, this speaks to me, right. I recently learned that there's a website called Art Rank that uses algorithms to calculate which art is most profitable to buy. So that guys like this can buy it without even seeing it, right, let alone having to judge its value for themselves. And I have to say, not saying I have a lot of sympathy for mega collectors, but I can frankly understand the appeal of this because in a world in which it is so challenging to understand the value of art just by engaging with the art itself, of course, there's like some weird algorithmic model that's used to determine the values. I'm not saying I think Art Rank is a good thing. It's actually, you know, terrifying symptom of what's going on in our society. But I would read it precisely as a symptom rather than as like something that itself is the problem, right.

David: 36:59

But let's be clear that there are two different kinds of value here. There is a question of how do I evaluate this art by looking at it in terms of its meaning, what this website does is it merely gives you information about financial forecasts, how much it's likely to be. So it's two different things.

Ellie: 37:16

Yeah, well, and because they can't assess the value in terms of meaning, of course there's a recourse to this other form of value. But I also think, you know, another thing that needs to be brought in here is the fact that these mega collectors are mega collectors in many cases, because there are such good tax breaks for collecting art. And so art is eligible for all kinds of really extreme tax breaks in the US and so wealthy people like Pinault get to look like they're fancy and patrons of the arts, because they're intrinsically interested in the arts while also keeping a lot more of their money than they would if they spent it on something else. And, you know, just as one example, there, there's this thing called a freeport, which is basically some warehouse that's beyond the authority of customs agencies that allows you to store your art there without paying duties and taxes on it. So rich people will literally store art there indefinitely, while it gains value, before selling or donating it so that they can minimize or even avoid entirely the taxes and duties and other fees that they have to pay.

David: 38:21

Another thing that is very common is the practice of lending art to museums. Again, it makes them seem like benevolent guys who are trying to carry out a public mission to make art accessible to the riff raff, you know, and the problem here is that it's a financial decision. So for example, if I am a mega collector and I buy a painting for, let's say a very low $5 million.

Ellie: 38:49

You got that new Banksy in your-

David: 38:51

Yeah, I got it on sale. One of the things that I can do is I lend it to a famous museum and I'm like, Hey museum, you can't afford this painting, but I'll let you borrow it so that you can do an exhibit for a few months. Because the museum is still such a source of prestige in the art world, the mere fact of my painting suddenly being on display at the Tate or at the SF MoMA.

Ellie: 39:16

Oh, it raises its value.

David: 39:18

Multiplies this value by a factor of like eight to nine, 15 times. And then I bring it back into my collection and suddenly I've just made a ton of money and all of that is tax deductible, right? And so there are all these ways in which the filthy rich can use art and the cultural capital that art brings really as a tax evasion strategy in the end.

Ellie: 39:49

Oh my God, it's dark. And it's about to get darker, because another thing that you mentioned, David, was this wave that artists are actually driven to try and cater their tastes to the taste if we can call it that, to the algorithm perhaps, of wealthy patrons, but we even see that among arts that have not traditionally been up for auction of $5 million plus at Christie. For instance, there have also been indigenous communities that have been encouraged not to be influenced by other cultures in order to keep their art pure and therefore appealing to tourists. So the, Huichol Indians in Western Mexico started to incorporate symbols that we would associate with American culture, like the Mickey Mouse head or the VW bug symbols, yeah, into their beaded artworks in the 20th century. And then in the 1970s, this anthropologist, Susana Eger Valdez comes in and is like, look, this isn't really that appealing for people who want to understand what Huichol art is about. Could you maybe stop putting in the Mickey Mouse and VW symbols in and stick with your traditional imagery, which includes hummingbirds and corn. And since then Huichol Indians have done this in order to appeal to tourists because they're a very poor group for the most part. And they need the money from the tourists art market.

David: 41:12

Yeah. And you know, I come from a part of Mexico that is right next to Huichol country, essentially. So I grew up being very familiar with the Huichol community and hearing-

Ellie: 41:22

The hummingbirds, but not the Mickey Mouse.

David: 41:23

Yeah, not the Mickey mouse and not the car symbols. And I most definitely do not speakHuichol, never have, but this speaks to a larger crisis of authenticity and indigeneity that runs through the very lifeblood of Mexico itself, really, where one and the same time mexicans often praise indigenous art, such as the bead work of the Huichols, but only insofar as that art is legible to non-Huichol Mexicans as authentically Huichol, right. So there is this pressure for Indians to be Indians, according to non-Indian standards. And at the moment that indigenous tradition and indigenous art ceasesus to be legible to the mainstream, the mainstream very quickly turns its back on it. So it's a very weird consumptive relationship.

Ellie: 42:20

'Cause it's like, we know that you were colonized, but you have to pretend like you weren't in your art.

David: 42:25

Yes. And you also have to express through your art a national indigenous spirit that we all want to claim for ourselves, because we all want to say in Mexico that we are indigenous, but we're also going to keep you as second class citizens. And we're going to expect you to produce that indigeneity on our terms.

Ellie: 42:46

Mmm.

David: 42:47

And of course it's not only Mexico. Now, if we think about an American context and it may be in connection to fashion, cultural appropriation has been a major issue with corporations like Urban Outfitters, which was sued by the Navajo nation a couple of years ago for their use of Navajo art patterns as a marketing ploy and that lawsuit resulted in a settlement. I don't know the details of the settlement, but yet another example of this really parasitic relationship that the art world sometimes develops in relation to indigenous communities. And similar things have happened with other fashion brands like Zara. Gucci got into a lot of trouble about this recently.

Ellie: 43:31

You know, I think it's so interesting how easily this conversation went from quote, art to quote, fashion, but I think fashion creates commodities. And I think it's telling that it's so easy for us to talk about art in the same way, because art also at this point creates commodity. And behind some of these discussions too is the idea that artists on the one hand are expected to create original work. And on the other hand, all of the market conditions of the art world encourage them to be as unoriginal as possible, or rather not as unoriginal as possible, but rather unoriginal so that they're appealing to people, especially these mega collectors or the tourist in the case of the Huichols, but original enough that there's like a slight tweak so that they stand out in some ways. So everything's like a remake of something else that's been financially successful already, especially if we're like applying this to music, film, and TV too. But It's like with a new thing, with a twist.

David: 44:30

Like be original according to that Harvard guy who went to business school.

Ellie: 44:37

Exactly, which I really want to mention one potential counter example here, which is Thomas Kinkade. I love to mention Thomas Kinkade because he is that rare contemporary artist who actually appeals to the middle class, even though his work is like absolutely hideous and according to some doesn't even count as art.

David: 44:59

So I had seen a lot of Kinkade pieces before realizing that they're connected to an artist, that that's a guy's signature look. I thought they were just like ugly prints made in a computer with a lot of pastels. I know it's really mean. And, you know, the funny thing is that my experience of Kinkade pieces really changed because initially when I didn't know they were art, I was like, oh, well, that's kinda fugly, that's fine. But then I got really fascinated by how monstrous they are. And then I came to the conclusion that they are so monstrous that they are revealing in a fundamental way the truth of the art market today. So I consider Kinkade paintings meta paintings. They are paintings about painting.

Ellie: 45:44

They're commentaries.

David: 45:46

They are commentaries upon the practice of art in the 21st century.

Ellie: 46:00

Enjoying this episode? Please rate and review us on Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your podcasts. You can also connect with us and other listeners through our Facebook page or group as well as on Instagram and Twitter at @overthink_pod.

David: 46:19

In an article entitled "Digital Provenance and the Artwork as Derivative," McKenzie Wark, who is a scholar of media and cultural studies, argues that art has been so commodified in the 20th and 21st centuries that it's not even technically a commodity anymore, but what she calls a derivative, meaning that it's value no longer derives from what it is or the place that it occupies in a particular market, but rather from its proximity to other sources of value, especially sources connected to fame, money, and influence. So for example, a painting as derivative has value not because it's a great painting, but because Jay-Z owned it, or because it hung in the living room of Paris Hilton.

Ellie: 47:10

Well, I think this raises the question of whether art today can play a critical function in society or whether it's been entirely subsumed into consumerism. The contemporary theorist Sianne Ngai talks about the way that art has actually, in her view, survived through rather than against the commodity form. It's become part of the everyday through things like JPEGs and gifs and other forms of what she calls zany and cute media. She's like, let's just get rid of the old myth of disinterestedness and lean in to the gif culture.

David: 47:44

I As Adorno turns in his grave a thousand times over.

Ellie: 47:50

What do you think about possible kinds of art that could be resisting commodification? Are there modes of art that encourage perception rather than recognition and/or are pushing the boundaries of what we conceptualize as art because they're not consumable?

David: 48:06

Yeah. So I think the question here is, is there anti-capitalist art in the contemporary art market, where markets seem to have completely swamped the art world? And, you know, I think this is a question that is very important for a lot of artists who individually may be committed to an anti-capitalist political framework and maybe interested in using their art to resist flows of capital, but it's tricky, right? Because one of the things that we know about capitalism is just how flexible it is, how versatile it is, and how easily it can sort of swallow all the things that try to resist that, just like with the Banksy piece that we talked about, right. Banksy wanted to sell a painting for a lot of money and then destroy it. And then the destruction itself became an even more expensive commodity.

Ellie: 48:55

Yeah, totally.

David: 48:55

But nonetheless, I think there might be types of art that by their very nature pose an obstacle to commodification, and one type of art that comes to mind for me is street art, things like community murals, and also graffiti. And I think the reason that these forms of art can resist capitalism is on the one hand because often they are anonymous, that applies a lot more to graffiti than to murals, but it can apply to murals as well. And so you never really know who did it, especially because most of those works from the very beginning violate private property. You paint on somebody's house or on a public freeway or on a bridge, something like that. So they are kind of confrontational from the start.

Ellie: 49:45

Yeah. And I think that's definitely how graffiti has become so influential, is precisely as a kind of rebellious resistance to capitalist forces of consumerism. But I mean, I think one thing that's been troubling for a lot of folks interested in graffiti in recent decades is precisely the way that they've become co-opted. So Banksy, right, starting as a street artist or Jean-Michel Basquiat becoming sort of the darling, even back in the time of Warhol and his group in New York, right. And Basquiat's one of the highest selling artists today.

David: 50:17

Absolutely. But there's still nonetheless something about graffiti and murals and other forms of street art that I think is harder to appropriate. And maybe one way to think about this has to do with the concept of solidity because of the fact that they happen on concrete, on buildings. Things are not very easy to transport once they are created in public spaces, right? The art is not going to come to your art fair in the same way that a painting will, in the same way that maybe a smaller statue will. And so the fact that it's hard to transport means that it's hard to move. And one thing that capitalism demands of its objects is mobility, right? That you will go wherever the capital flows take you, that you will be displayed at the auction house, that you will go and be displayed at the art fair. So I still believe that even though there are definitely cases of co-option, those cases are the exception that proves the rule more so than disprove it, because by and large, street art I think does remain outside of the space of fine art, of art markets, and remains largely in the domain of community.

Ellie: 51:35

That point about solidity, I think is super interesting, David. And at the same time, I would actually say that while I definitely agree with you that part of how capitalism works is by making things liquid and mobile, there are some forms of art that resists commodification precisely by being so mobile that capitalism can't pin them down through making them possessable. So for instance rather than the graffiti art that we've been discussing, we might think about the work of American artists, Christo and Jeanne-Claude who do these installations in public places, often in big cities, that then come down after a time. So they do a lot of work with like umbrellas and one of the most famous works in the 1970s and eighties was called The Pont-Neuf Wrapped, where they took the Pont-Neuf, this iconic bridge in Paris, and they just wrapped it.

David: 52:25

In what.

Ellie: 52:26

In a woven polyamide fabric, silky in appearance. So anyway, that has to come down after time. So we've got that commentary. You can't possess like the fabric that they're wrapping the bridge in, and then in a super different note, I don't know if you remember, David, that in grad school, Emory, where we went, would have an annual visit from this group of Tibetan monks, who would do a mandala made out of sand. They-

David: 52:51

Yes. Yes.

Ellie: 52:54

works on campus.

David: 52:56

Oh my God. Yes. I remember that.

Ellie: 52:58

Yeah. And so they spend months creating the super intricate mandala, and then at the end they just blow it all away. And it's supposed to be a reflection of the impermanence of life and that kind of impermanent sand painting, or the wrapping of the Pont-Neuf, while having pretty different aims, are both essentially antithetical to the logic of consumerism because they cannot be possessed. They're fungible actually. Let's put it that way. They're the opposite of non fungible tokens.

David: 53:29

I think even though we've developed this contrast between the solidity of graffiti and murals and then the liquidity or the airiness of something like a Tibetan mandala, in fact, that is exactly what they share because one of the things that you know as a graffiti artist and as a mural artist, is that your work will be inevitably painted over by somebody else, right, which is not an expectation that people who do painting with oil and on canvas necessarily have.

Ellie: 54:00

I also think that there's the whole genre of performance art, which although it can be recorded, is fundamentally tied to a given situation that cannot be reproduced through a recording. And so there's that to throw in there too. I think a lot of anti-capitalist artists today are performance artists.

David: 54:19

Well, and we might also want to throw in a very broad and maybe inchoate category of what I call personal art. So all those acts of artistic creation and expressivity that people make without the intent of ever putting it out in a market or even having an audience-

Ellie: 54:39

Oh, okay. Okay.

David: 54:40

for that. So what am I thinking about here? I'm thinking about the art of children, that ugly macaroni necklace, that coloring outside the lines, the weird fashion of the people that I see sometimes outside in San Francisco where it's not according to the norms of the fashion world, but there is definitely an exuberant quality. There is an overflow of expressivity that is artistic in nature, but that is for everybody and for nobody. And that at no point is marketed in the technical sense. So, so I might want to incorporate this category that I just named personal art as truly resisting capitalism, because it's just for the self.

Ellie: 55:27

And I think actually, David, that takes us back really nicely to the views of Dewey because as I mentioned, for Dewey, it's a problem that we've sequestered art into this separate sphere of the art world that's inaccessible to so many people. He wants to restore the continuity between art, which he calls an intensified form of experience, and everyday experience. And so the child who's creating a macaroni necklace is having an intensified experience of wanting to create something according to the laws of beauty.

David: 55:58

Yes.

Ellie: 55:58

Or at least like, you know, an organic whole, but then the rhythm of that creation stands as a kind of mountain in the landscape of their everyday life.

David: 56:07

No, I think that's right. And thinking about all the things that we do that are not purely for survival as potentially aesthetic, right? Whenever there's any kind of excess in the stream of consciousness, in the stream of the every day, and recognizing that it's not so much that everybody is an artist, but that everybody can have aesthetic experience.

Ellie: 56:29

Yeah. And also that we're already having aesthetic experiences. Maybe this is a difference between Dewey and perhaps more pessimistic thinkers like Adorno, is that we're actually actively engaging aesthetically in our lives on a daily basis. And our problem is our way of not recognizing that as aesthetic, of isolating art, that's a social symptom of capitalism.

David: 56:55

Yeah. I wonder how much my experience would go for at Sotheby's auction. We hope you enjoyed today's episode. Please rate and review us on Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your podcasts.

Ellie: 57:17

You can find us at overthinkpodcast.com, where you can email us with questions, feedback, or even requests for life advice.

David: 57:24

You can also find us on Instagram and Twitter at @overthink_pod. We'd like to thank our audio editor, Ross Harris, and our production assistants, Sam Hernandez and Anna Solomon.

Ellie: 57:34

Thanks to Samuel P.K. Smith for the original music and Trevor Ames for our logo. Thanks so much for joining us today.