A high price

SO, WHAT is to be made by the $72.8m sale of an abstract painting by Mark Rothko last week? The record-breaking bid made it the costliest work of contemporary art ever bought, confirming Sotheby’s confidence “that a Rockefeller Rothko is now the ultimate luxury object,” Christopher Benfey sighs.

I’m reminded of a lecture given by David Hickey, an art critic, years ago (delivered in his compelling Southern Baptist drawl). He was defining the difference between beauty and value: the visceral, mouth-gaping wallop of good art, and its inevitable commodification. Only the first consumer of a work of art truly sees its beauty, he suggested; subsequent buyers merely purchase an icon, a status symbol, at a reassuringly inflated cost. The visual cues morph, and the retail value of a painting inevitably influences how we see it–perhaps to a point where we fail to see the artwork at all.

Naturally, anyone who spends tens of millions of dollars on a painting is not really thinking about the effect of the oils on canvas. Still, such an absurd exhibition of wealth makes this quote from Bonnie Clearwater, author of “The Rothko Book” and director of the Museum of Contemporary Art in North Miami, Florida, oddly apropos: “Rothko wanted painting to be miraculous for the viewer and for himself. They weren’t just colors on a canvas but a mirror of modern fragmented times.”

Mr Benfey writes:

Money was the last thing on Rothko’s mind when he painted White Center (Yellow, Pink and Lavender on Rose) in 1950. Clement Greenberg claimed in the mid-1950s that the great achievement of Rothko’s paintings, along with those of his Abstract Expressionist confreres Barnett Newman and Clyfford Still, was that “they have escaped the ‘object’ (and luxury-object) associations that attach themselves increasingly to the easel picture.” The irony is that Rothko—which sounds a bit like a brand name—had invented a new kind of aesthetic commodity.

One can’t help but wonder how the artist–who committed suicide in 1970–would have reacted to the sticker price of his boardroom-friendly works. He had been struggling for something more spiritual. Inadvertently, he ended up painting a yet more effective mirror of our fragmented times.

 THIS just in: This week’s Buttonwood column addresses the issue of these record-breaking auction bids.