Andy Warhol, the artist who exalted in works and thought the art of making money and immortalized the dollar icon, years ago had entered the collection of the former secretary of the Rifondazione Comunista party, Fausto Bertinotti, who had received two of his works as a gift (sic!) from banker Mario D’Urso (among other positions CEO of Lehman Brothers). The icing on the cake was the subject represented by the two works sold at auction: Mao Tse Tung, revolutionary and chairman of the Chinese Communist Party! Consumerism, Finance, and Communism seem to merge here, the class distinction represented by a work of art symbolic of the ultraliberal market gets the better of Marx and Engels. Not even Philip Dick would have been able to write such a despotic novel about the end of communism and the victory of the fantacapitalism that enriches itself by selling images belonging to communists or depicting communist icons, nor was Slavoj Zizek able to imagine it among his paradigmatic analyses of transesthetics.
The fact of Bertinotti’s Warhols in itself is extremely interesting for the short circuits it triggers more than for the eventful economy. In fact, the auction, including other works, did not exceed 250,000 euros, a snort of tobacco in comparison with the million-dollar auctions, such as the one concerning America, Maurizio Cattelan’s golden toilet, which will soon be auctioned at Sotheby’s with a starting base of $10 million, its real value according to the current weight of gold.
America ’s case is of interest because it fulfills Warhol’s prophecy that, instead of buying works of art, people should have framed real bills corresponding to the value of the work. The problem is that money depreciates and gold does not, so those who had followed Warhol’s advice would not have gotten a good deal. America, on the other hand, is worth the material it is made of (which is now at its historical peak) and its value fully replaces that of the artifact as a work of art. Since Cattelan’s top-rated auction work is $17 million(Hym in 2016), at the very least we should expect an auction record for America of $27 million. If not, Cattelan will prove that he has not been a good bargain, worth his artistic part less than the material of which the work is made. And since, as Heidegger wrote in The Origin of the Work of Art, matter must disappear, be forgotten in order to become a work of art, finally a work by Cattelan might turn out to be what it is: nothing but or less than its market value according to the weight of gold. Art has nothing to do with it, with much of the critical, monographic, historical essays that sadomasochistically continue to be written and published about him or the exhibitions that are still dedicated to him.
If, however, America is beaten to at least or more than $27 million, Cattelan will prove that he is still a good financial investment. Write about it then, those who wish to do so, as of artist.
In all of this then, we must be honest, what does art have to do with it? Aren’t we finally faced with a truth that we tell ourselves half-heartedly, privately, almost surreptitiously, that we have been alluding to for decades without ever coming to its real conclusions? If market success and exchange value ever had, in centuries past, any utility with respect to artistic creation (something we must increasingly doubt: the Impressionists, for example, had no market when they created the Impressionist masterpieces, and the same is true of all the great artists who have shaped the history of art), today we can say that the market is as deleterious as it can be to the work of art. It forces artists to produce anyway in order to maintain the machine they have started (often challenging and expensive), it focuses all attention on value and economic success over artistic success, and it is unclear what it can bring to the content and forms of the creative process, except in so-called artists who produce works designed as market and luxury objects (suitable for international fairs, brand showcases, fashion shows and very expensive handbags). We do not count in our days the many albeit sublime artists who, launched immediately on the market at million-dollar prices, have exhausted their strength and originality within a few years. We could call them “the fallen of art because of the market” despite the fact that they continue to succeed in the art market.
That said, not all ills come to harm. The disagreement is now clear, the rift sharp, the separation total: on one side auction houses, luxury brands, fairs and multinational galleries with their respective artists; on the other side creative processes, critical discourses, the study of forms with their respective artists. In between is the border, the event horizon, beyond which one is drawn toward the singularity of the market, beyond which one can still articulate an intellectual, critical, and disinterested discourse.
Perhaps it will become increasingly important and urgent to decide which side we are on. America is just a borderline case, the latest in order of time: think of For the Love of God, Damien Hirst’s diamond-studded skull, whose material value in 2007 was 14 million pounds, its sale value (if it really happened) 100 million, with a differential between material and artistic coefficient of as much as 86 million. The gold and diamonds only expose the substance of these value-bearing works: pure financial exchange value, nothing else. It may be interesting, if anything, to compare their sales performance and artistic surplus versus material surplus, a question we leave, of course, to experts in economics and investment.
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