On Sep 16, 2008, at 11:04 AM, William Conger wrote:
The current auctioning of Hirst's new production -- bypassing the usual dealers -- exemplifies his role as a money-changer-washer for the big money folks. Would anyone, especially a rich capitalist, spend 15+ million for one of Hirst's manufactured art-objects if it were certain that its future value in a decade or so would be pennies on the dollar? Surely, the answer is no.
When I see such news items in the general press, I expect the writers to hyperventilate about the oddity of it all (isn't that just like artists?) and to exhibit little erectile bumps all over their corpuses, revealing their excitement at the succhs de scandale of it all. The mass-circulation press tends to lag far behind the developments in the art world, still trying to fully assimilate Impressionism and Van Gogh, Cubism, Abstract Expressionism, Minimalism, etc. At least, as a lifeline for the press, Pop Art--now at least 50 years old--seems to be more "gettable," if only because it uses popular images as malleable subject matter, which the press generates as their intended *meaning* and *purpose* [pace, Cheerskep]. As for the astronomic prices, well, as you say, William, that's just bubble-economics. It's a bigger-fool gambit, and in its own way isn't very different from paying a few actors $10-$20,000,000 for one movie role while most actors make much, much less for many more roles. | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Michael Brady [EMAIL PROTECTED]
