Word: marketing
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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From the point of view of American museums, the art-market boom is an unmitigated disaster. These institutions voice a litany of complaints, a wrenching sense of disfranchisement and weakness, as their once adequate annual buying budgets of $2 million to $5 million are turned to chicken feed by art inflation. "There are many areas where museums can no longer buy," says James Wood, director of the Art Institute of Chicago. "It's bad for the museums, but it goes beyond that. It's bad for the country." The symbol of the Metropolitan Museum of Art's plight...
...James Wood the damage comes down to a confusion between aesthetic and material value. "When a work of art passes through our doors, it should leave the world of economics," says Wood. "Walking through a great museum is not going to give you a profile that reflects the auction market. You have to educate people to grasp that the money paid for a work of art is utterly secondary to its lasting value, its ability to make them respond...
...problem is that although art has always been a commodity, it loses its inherent value when it is treated only as such. To lock it into a market circus is to lock people out of contemplating it. This inexorable process tends to collapse the nuances of meaning and visual experience under the brute weight of price. It is not a compliment to the work. If there were only one copy of each book in the world, fought over by multimillionaires and investment trusts, what would happen to one's sense of literature -- the tissue of its meanings that sustain...
...living artists afford to give their work to U.S. museums, since all the tax relief they get from such generosity is the cost of their materials. Thus, in a historic fit of legislative folly, the Government began to starve its museums just at the moment when the art market began to paralyze them. It bales out incompetent savings-and-loan businesses but leaves in the lurch one of the real successes of American public life, its public art collections...
...inflated market is also eroding the other main function of museums: the loan exhibition. Without a doubt, the past 15 years in America have been the golden age of the museum retrospective, bringing a series of great and (for this generation of museums and their public) definitive exhibitions, done at the highest pitch of scholarship and curatorial skill: late and early Cezanne, Picasso, Manet, Van Gogh, Monet, Degas, Watteau, Velazquez, Poussin, up to MOMA's current show of Picasso's and Braque's Cubist years and, perhaps, Seurat to come...