The More You Pay, The More It's Worth

There are indeed no fewer than four stories concerning the art world buzzing around Curmie’s brain-box at the moment: the cake-flinging incident involving the Mona Lisa, the millions of dollars of damage at the Dallas Museum of Art caused by a young man “mad at his girl,” and the remarkably amateurish and possibly mischievous restoration of Prague’s Orloj Clock. Curmie has little to add about this last item, and may or may not get to talking about the first two. All of which leaves this item for today’s piece:

An under-appreciated Don McLean song, “The More You Pay, The More It’s Worth,” popped into Curmie’s head unbidden this month. One reason, I suspect, is that a little under three weeks ago, Sotheby’s, the New York-based auction house specializing in high-end artworks and similar items, had a little sale. “Little,” of course, is a fungible term, in this case suggesting that a mere $408 million (well, OK, a little more than that) changed hands in a single evening. 

Picasso’s “Femme Nue couchée”

Leading the way was a Picasso painting, “Femme nue couchée,” in which the famous cubist imagined his lover, Marie-Thérèse Walter, as what the Guardian described as “a multi-limbed sea creature.” That seems pretty accurate, although the prose of Sotheby’s blurb is somewhat purpler:

A crowning achievement of painterly verve, energy and manipulation of the human form, the present work succinctly synthesizes the artist’s groundbreaking achievements of the late 1920s and early 1930s into one colorful, dynamic canvas. Here, in the seclusion of his new country home in Boisgeloup, the nude figure of Marie-Thérèse reclines in a highly abstracted space, her biomorphic figure imbued with fertility, sexuality and grace.

Well, OK, then.

Anyway, people seem to think it’s a pretty impressive painting. Curmie’s not here to disagree with that assessment. Indeed, were you to move the decimal point on the sale price of $67,500,000 a few places to the left, and Curmie might be interested. Indeed, Curmie really likes Monet’s “Le Grand Canal et Santa Maria della Salute,” which sold on the same night, but not, perhaps, to the tune of $56,600,000. In all, some ten paintings sold for $10,000,000 or more apiece, just that one night.

Of course, the Picasso wasn’t even close to being the highest-priced artwork to be sold this month. Andy Warhol’s “Shot Sage Blue Marilyn,” went for almost three times as much at a Christie’s sale only eight days earlier. Yes, really: $195,000,000.

What would possess someone—anyone—to spend that kind of money on a single painting? The most obvious answer is conspicuous consumption: you spend millions of dollars on an artwork to show the world that you can. Another possibility is as an investment: what you can buy for a mere $195 million today might double in value, even relative to inflation, in just a few months. Of course, it might not, but if you’ve got that kind of money to spend on a painting, you can afford to take a gamble. Occasionally, the buyer is a museum rather than an “individual collector.” As a regular person with an interest in art, you like these folks. You might need to travel to Paris or London or New York, but you can actually see that masterpiece.

Of course, a lot of people go to those museums to say they’ve been there. Curmie remembers two trips to London’s Tate Modern: one in December of 2010, one in May of 2019. The special exhibitions on those two visits were of, respectively, Paul Gauguin and Dorothea Tanning. The former was, as might be expected, more expensive, ridiculously crowded, and peopled by a lot of folks who gave every impression of not wanting to be there. To some extent, Curmie was one of them: he likes Gauguin, but isn’t a huge fan, and the exhibition wasn’t of (Curmie’s personal opinion of) the artist’s best work.  Curmie’s claustrophobia didn’t help, either.

Tanning’s most famous painting,
“Birthday”

By contrast, Curmie could show up at the ticket booth for the Tanning exhibition, buy a ticket at a reasonable price, and walk right in, instead of having to wait for two hours. There were other patrons there, but there was room to move around, and everyone was actually engaging with the art, stopping to examine this painting, stepping back to get a different perspective on that one, actually reading the posted descriptions. Curmie confesses he’d barely heard of Tanning prior to seeing that exhibition; a couple of the pictures in the promotional materials looked interesting, so he gave it a try. Curmie is now a fan. That’s what is supposed to happen: you check something out, and you like it. (Or it’s not to your liking; that’s OK, too.)

The point is that people swarmed the Gauguin exhibition not because they’re Gauguin fans, but because Gauguin is famous. And there’s no absolute guarantee that you’re looking at an authentic Gauguin, anyway, as a couple of stories from the last couple of years demonstrate. Here’s one about alleged Gauguins at the Getty Museum (this piece is now admitted to be a fake), the National Gallery in Washington, DC, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. And here’s one about a fake in the Tate’s own permanent collection.

Curmie’s suspicion is two-fold: that the average person (Curmie included) couldn’t tell the difference, and either liked or didn’t like these works based on personal, idiosyncratic taste, independent of issues of authenticity; and that such an average person would be less likely to visit a museum or pay extra for a special exhibition if one or more artworks were believed to be forgeries or even (honestly) misattributed.

This might be the time to remind you, Gentle Reader, of the now-famous episode of world-famous violinist Joshua Bell putting on a baseball cap and a t-shirt and busking in a Washington, DC, subway station, playing a multi-million-dollar Stradivarius. Virtually no one paid any attention, and he made a total of $32, over half of it from a single contributor who actually recognized him from having paid a lot more than that to see him perform a night or two earlier. As blogger Harvey Reid puts it, “It’s hard for people to believe there is something amazing going on when there is no crowd, and nothing telling you to pay attention. There is a lot of context and provenance involved.”

Also of interest is the rationale for the Toledo Museum of Art’s sale of Cézanne’s “Clairière” (“the Glade”): “to establish an endowment to fund art acquisitions.” The painting sold for $41.7 million, so their endowment is off to a good start. More to the point, the management in Toledo seems to think that owning 400 paintings worth $100,000 apiece might be better than having one painting worth $40 million. Curmie nods in agreement.

Of course, the visual arts aren’t alone in this. COVID—both the pandemic itself and the still-extant regulations regarding mask-wearing (a restriction that has passed its sell-by date for most people) have actually made live theatre much more affordable. I just checked: I could get a ticket for Hamilton, once in the $600 range, on Tuesday night for less than $150 on Broadway, or for about $60 in the West End. The play I’d most like to see in either of those cities, Girl on an Altar, has good seats available all this week for £20, or about $25.

Theatre prices will skyrocket again once the industry finds its footing again.  (There was a brouhaha in London recently when tickets to Cock hit £460, or about $575, counting absurdly high processing fees.) Curmie has seen a lot of commentary from friends based in New York that it is becoming increasingly difficult to get New Yorkers to come to the theatre,  Tourists make up well over half of Broadway audiences already, and that percentage seems to be growing.  If Broadway is to ever again be a place where something other than already-established musicals can thrive, it will have to be the locals that make it so.  And that means prices that middle-class New Yorkers can afford.

But live music has gone in the opposite direction. An “Open Letter to Paul McCartney Regarding Ticket Prices” by Ryan Ritchie was published in Los Angeles Magazine a few weeks ago. A sample: “Call me naïve, but I don’t think any three people should have to pay $700 to attend any concert that doesn’t include Elvis walking onto the stage and confirming he faked his 1977 death. That is worth $700.”

It gets worse. Curmie follows the “Spring-Nuts” (Bruce Springsteen fans) Facebook page. The Boss, once the voice of the working class, recently released the European dates for a tour that won’t start until nearly a year from now. Many of those venues are already sold out, with tickets for even standing room running into the hundreds of dollars apiece, and that’s before the scalpers get in on the action. And a LOT of American fans are flying to Dublin or Amsterdam or wherever to see a concert. Curmie and Beloved Spouse would probably spend $500 or so, total, to see Springsteen live… but not round-trip airfare for two to Europe, several nights in hotel rooms (and meals in restaurants), and $400+ per ticket for standing room. Who will be at those concerts? Some die-hard fans, willing to drain their life savings to see their hero… and a bunch of rich people.

This isn’t good for the industry, or, more importantly, for the culture. If people are denied the opportunity to hear live music, or to see the detail of a great painting or sculpture, they’ll never understand that the actual art object is always superior in manifold ways to reproductions—recordings, photographs, whatever.  And they’ll either lose interest in the transcendence of great art, because they’ve never experienced it (notice that neither image included with this post does justice to the original painting), or, as in Plato’s cave allegory, they’ll try to convince themselves that the shadows are the real thing. Curmie isn’t sure which is worse, but he does know this: either way, we all lose.