Word: boom
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...some critics, the auction houses' success is excessive. While no one blames them for dizzy prices-they are not their bidders' keepers-even dealers who are making wild profits as a result of the art boom evince a certain distaste for the whole process. London's Waddington points out that the auction world's Big Two, unlike most thriving corporations, do not plow back even part of their profits into research, grants for young artists or gifts to museums. Says he: "They are simply dealing in commodities." There is a gavel-size black cloud over...
There are some kinds of success, the painter Edgar Degas once remarked, that are indistinguishable from panic. So it seems with the present boom in the art market. For the past 15 years or so, collectors, dealers, auction houses and their willing accomplices, journalists, have been moved to pleasure, then wonder, and now to a sort of popeyed awe at the upward movement of art prices. If art was once expected to provoke un nouveau frisson, a new kind of shudder, its present function is to become a new type of bullion. Thus, we are told by art industry flacks...
...case, whom does the art boom benefit? Only collectors and middlemen. Few artists get to share in it. This is partly because boom conditions create an unreal system of reputation, with most of the benefits going to a handful of stars at the top and scarcely anything to the rest. The American art education system, churning out as many graduate artists every five years as there were people in late 15th century Florence, has in effect created an unemployable art proletariat whose work society cannot "profitably" absorb. Generous tax laws, which enabled collectors to buy low, keep a picture...
...most of us who cannot make or buy art but do want to look at it in peace, the art boom has been a disaster. The confusion of art with bullion may have done more to alter the way people experience works of art than any event since the arrival of mass color reproduction. It may well be that my generation -the people born between 1935 and 1940 -will be the last to remember what a truly disinterested museum visit was like. Quite simply, it is now difficult and, for most people, impossible to walk into a gallery and look...
...Ultimate Art Show, a display of all the gold in Fort Knox relocated to the Whitney Museum or some other institution, stacked up as a minimal sculpture. By then, price will have completely supplanted meaning. The Treasure and the Masterpiece will have fused, the triumph of the art boom will be achieved, and we can all creep home. - Robert Hughes