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.

Something for the Antique Roadshow

FEAST YOUR eyes on two remarkable photographs by Edward Steichen, taken about a century ago, which have only recently come to light. Relics of the earliest days of colour photography, they are lushly tinted portraits of a raven-haired woman, thought to be Charlotte Spaulding, a friend and student. They are at once inviting and forbidding, staged yet intimate. In their gauzy splendour, one can’t help but think of Gustav Klimt’s jewel-like portraits of Adele Bloch-Bauer (one of which sold for a king’s ransom last summer). After decades in the cupboard of Spaulding’s daughter (which helped preserve these rare, colour autochromes), they will be on view this autumn at the George Eastman House in Rochester, a top photography museum.

Adorable America

AT A time when American patriotism seems to be suffering some blows–a bumbling president, a questionable war–the art market is seeing a rise in the value of a more wistful, more romantic view of the country. Norman Rockwell, a painter whose work is often sneered at as greeting-card illustrations, has become a top seller. As the New York Sun reports:

There’s a sea change going on in the market for American painting. The field has traditionally been dominated by austere portraits of Founding Fathers, impressionist style landscapes, and expansive seascapes. Now, pictures by Norman Rockwell and Andrew Wyeth, once sniffed at as mere illustrators, may spike the American paintings sales, which take place tomorrow at Bonhams and Doyle New York, at Sotheby’s Wednesday, and at Christie’s Thursday.

A decade ago, works by Rockwell and Mr. Wyeth barely fetched $1 million. However, “now there is an understanding that their availability is diminishing,” the head of American paintings at Christie’s, Eric Wilding, said. That dwindling supply means higher prices.

Sotheby’s is betting that Rockwell’s original cover painting for the September 15, 1945, issue of the Saturday Evening Post, “Home on Leave (Sailor in Hammock),” will sell for between $2 million and $3 million.  

Rockwell’s work, full of apple-cheeked children and smiling postmen, has often seemed nostalgic for an America that never was.  (Few are surprised that Steven Spielberg is a fan.) Though Rockwell may have been more complicated than many assume, there is something grimly fitting about the rising stock of pictures of smiling soldiers, just as newspapers fill up with ever more photos of bloodied ones.

Norman Rockwell with angst

Thanks goes to Christopher Benfey for coining perhaps the most breezily insightful description of Edward Hopper in this nice slide-show. Timed to coincide with a big retrospective at the Museum of Fine Art in Boston, Mr Benfrey’s look at Hopper’s “Secret World” manages to enrich a familiar subject.

A place for women to promote women

IN MARCH the Brooklyn Museum finally opened its long-awaited Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art. Of its 8,300 square feet, 5,000 are permanently dedicated to Judy Chicago’s “The Dinner Party“, a seminal installation from the 1970s that hearkens back to an earlier essentialist “hear me roar” era. The rest is a permanent place for women to promote women.

But wait: once a movement gets a wing in an art museum (even one in an outer borough), isn’t the struggle over? And what is feminist art now?

Possess all the great art ever made*

THE latest and greatest contribution to the popular economics paperback bookshelf comes in August from Tyler Cowen, ace blogger, academic, and all-round good egg. It is called “Discover Your Inner Economist” (Dutton,  August 2007), and it may well be the best book ever written by anybody on any subject.

Here is Mr Cowen explaining how the art market works:

 1   Landscapes can triple in value when there are horses or figures in the foreground. Evidence of industry usually lowers a picture’s value.

2    A still life with flowers is worth more than one with fruit. Roses stand at the top of the flower hierarchy. Chrysanthemums amd lupines (seen as working class) stand at the bottom.

3    There is a price hierarchy for animals. Purebred dogs help a picture more than mongrels do. Spaniels are worth more than collies. Racehorses are worth more than carthorses. When it comes to game birds the following rule of thumb holds: the more expensive it is to shoot the bird, the more the bird addas to the value of the painting. A grouse is worth more than a mallard, and the painter should show the animal from the front, not the back.

4    Water adds value to a picture, but only if it is calm. Shipwrecks are a no-no.

5    Round and oval works are extremely unpopular with buyers.

6    An 18th-century Francois Boucher nude sketch of a woman can be worth ten times more than a comparable sketch of a man.

The moral?

The Me Factor is at work. For that reason, don’t expect a large market in paintings of plane crashes.

* This is the title of one of Tyler Cowen’s chapters. I stole it, thinking it had a high read-me quotient. His other chapter titles include: “How to control the world: the basics”, and “Look good at home, on a date, or while being tortured”.

Martín Ramírez / Fine Art / New York

Martín Ramírez (1895-1963) is considered one of the great American “outsider” artists of the 20th century. As a Mexican immigrant, he was arrested and taken into custody in northern California in 1925. Diagnosed with schizophrenia, he spent the next 35 years in various mental institutions, unable to communicate in English.

But he began drawing, scribbling on scraps of paper that he struggled to hide from hospital staff who would often throw his work away. He came to the attention of Dr Tarmo Pasto, a psychology professor, who ended up studying him (and providing art materials) as part of his research on art therapy and rehabilitation.