Word: price
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...then reap a tax benefit by giving it to a museum at its enhanced value, fueled the art boom. The inequity of such laws has been that, if the artist gives his own work to the same museum in the same year, he cannot claim its fair market price as a write-off: all that the IRS gives him back is the cost of canvas and paint. The unfairness is compounded when the artist dies: the state then assesses the paintings in his estate at their highest market value and makes his heirs pay tax on that. This...
...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 at a work of art without its "value"-which means simply price, real or hypothetical-intruding on their reflections. After Velazquez's Juan de Pareja was bought at auction for New York's Metropolitan Museum for $5.5 million in 1970, the then director of the Met insisted, in his usual peppy, overbearing fashion, that the fuss about the price...
Nine of those ten years have passed, and the painting is still contaminated by the fallout from its price. The dance of digits in front of one's eyes renders the thing "special," isolated, fetishistically rare. It not only removes the painting from the flow of discourse about experience that art is meant to sustain, but it makes the price part of the subject of the work, separating it, by implication, from everything else ever painted by Velázquez, turning it from one painting among others into a dead whale on a flatcar, a curiosity to be gawped...
...point where everything that can be regarded, however distantly, as a work of art is primarily esteemed not for its ability to communicate meaning, or its use as historical evidence, or its capacity to generate aesthetic pleasure, but for its convertibility into cash. The exoticism of high price generates curiosity, and this curiosity fills the museum, turning it into a low-rating mass medium. But there it collides with an older American tradition, the 19th century reformist belief that contact with works of art is morally elevating and that museums are, in spirit, secular churches. In the eddies of this...
...encouraging clients to favor exhibitions with guaranteed pull, the situation will not improve. Eventually, we may be reduced to the 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