An art collection is first and foremost, just that — a series of objects that can be classified in some way or another as Art. Aside from this immediate commonality any collection will usually be bound by some other quality. Against the breadth of human artistic expression a collector will, consciously or otherwise pull a series of artworks together under another unifier. What is it about these pieces that appeals to the collector who drags them to sit alongside one another? What quality do they share beyond simply falling under the broad category of Art?
This article is intended as the first in a disparate and nonlinear series in which I’d like to unpack that very human obsession of collecting, categorising and attributing value. Authenticity and counterfeit will be examined, touching on how time has changed our social attitudes toward various forms of art and other expression; how we define its value, and how this has adapted in the wake of the New Digital Market.
Today I’m using two art collections as my springboard into this territory, the first being that which belongs to Charles Saatchi and secondly that of the Metropolitan Museum of Art under the director Thomas Hoving. Why draw these two collections, largely separated by a couple of decades and one ocean? I plan to illustrate the way in which both collections construct the value of individual works and of the collections as a whole, and the way in which this has contributed to the commodification of art, and our changing attitudes to the purpose of art in our lives. The following is based on an essay I wrote at university some ten years ago now and it’s interesting to me to sit with these ideas again and reexamine them against the turbulent backdrop of the rise of social media and the digital market since then.
The collection of the Met is available for the public to view, and as such, its purpose is clear: Museums are designed to make cultural heritage available for the viewing public. The Saatchi Collection’s purpose, however, is a more difficult one to pinpoint. A considerable body of writing on collecting exists, however Charles Saatchi’s obsessive collecting of art has continued to perplex his critics. At one moment he buys large quantities of artwork, the next he sells it for profit or gives it to galleries. The psychoanalyst Anthony Storr suggests that collecting leads to classifying, which relieves the desire to make order from chaos, and ultimately to control the components of a collection, to have absolute mastery over them: in short a quest for dominance (Hatton and Walker, 2005, pp.68–69). Hatton and Walker go on to suggest that Saatchi’s competitive streak (which can be seen in his love for games and motor racing) implies another reason for collecting: to rival the art collections of others. When he opened his own gallery in 1985, it seemed he had taken on galleries and curators as his new competitors. What is most interesting about the Saatchi Collection is the profound effect it has had on contemporary art, and the way in which it is thought about in today’s world. Certainly, Saatchi has a fondness for art, but it is also clear that he belongs to a group of collectors who view art as an investment.
Thomas Hoving was director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art between the years of 1967 and 1977. During this time he made drastic changes to both the Met’s policies on the acquisition of art and the way its shows were curated and presented to the public. This was to have a profound effect on broader museum practice and contributed to changing attitudes towards the consumption of art. Robert Hughes, in his documentary film The Mona Lisa Curse, pinpoints the moment that for him signified a new attitude towards art. In 1962 the Mona Lisa by Leonardo Da Vinci was sent to America to be displayed at the Met. As it hung on the walls of the medieval gallery it attracted one and a half million visitors in a month. “[The Mona Lisa] made the leap from artwork, to icon of mass consumption; these people didn’t come to see it, they came to have seen it” (Hughes, 2008). Increasingly, art has come to be viewed this way: many people come to see art because it is in vogue. Consumption of art is often seen as ‘entertaining’, as opposed to ‘cultural’. Hughes argues that this diminishes our ability to see art for its critical content. During Hoving’s time at the Met, this is just what he sought to achieve from art — that it would become sensationalist. Hoving believed that to appeal to a more contemporary audience, art museums must operate in new ways, more similar to the world of show business. Interviewed in The Mona Lisa Curse, Hoving says: “The idea why a museum should be any more aristocratic than a movie theatre seemed to me bull wash… Let’s have banners, blockbuster shows, evening openings… we were the first to allow corporate sponsorship.” Clearly this new orchestration of the museum had a profound effect on the way art was to be viewed, and signified a shift in the attitude taken towards it. Furthermore, Hoving made changes to the Met’s deaccessioning policy, selling so-called ‘minor works’ to fund the purchase of ‘world-class’ pieces. He favoured these more prestigious works over more comprehensive holdings of relatively smaller works. He wanted a contemporary art department too, and to start it an art collector called Robert Scull lent him a gigantic 45-foot painting by the pop artist James Rosenquist, the F-111.
Scull is another figurehead in Art’s journey to commodification. He was to be the archetype for a new kind of art collector, the first collector to treat art as a financial investment. “The traditional collector, who collects primarily out of aesthetic feeling and views increases in value as fortuitous by-products of the activity, has been joined by a new breed of collector, who is essentially interested in the financial return on his investment in art.” (Koenisberg, p.24). By lending the F-111 to the Met, it would drastically increase in value, now having the prestige of the museum attached to it. Museums began to be considered as “banks in the political economy of paintings” (Hatton and Walker, p.69). This meant that Scull could later sell the painting on at an inflated price, making a comfortable profit from the markup. Like Saatchi, Scull would visit artists in their studios, and buy paintings from them at a low price, then sell them on at auction houses once their value had increased. 1973 was the year when money would change the art world, and Scull would officially cement his role in laying the foundations for those that would come to be known as ‘supercollectors’. That was the year that Scull auctioned a significant portion of his pop art collection at Sotheby’s New York for over $2 million. This was the first time art could truly be considered a financial investment. As such, it was the first time that monetary value could become a focal point in a work of art. “The notorious Scull auction was a milestone event for contemporary art; it heralded the commercial success of Pop, but more importantly, it affirmed the role big money would have in shaping and dominating the art world in the later 20th century and beyond” (Vallen, 2008). Scull became a millionaire, and the artists whose works were sold for such a huge mark-up were infuriated that such profits could be made from their work, without the artists themselves ever seeing a cut of the earnings. Jane Addams Allen defines supercollectors in Hatton and Walker, p.1: “Their wealth derives from multi-million-dollar family businesses that are also international; they buy where art is cheap and sell where it is expensive, usually the USA, they buy in bulk and work hard at their hobby; they use dealers as scouts but in general make their own selections; they establish art institutions and hire curators to run them; they exert a significant influence on the art market — they can raise prices by merely viewing works of art.”
It is fairly obvious to many observers that Charles Saatchi buys art largely for the purposes of investment, utilising his position to increase the value of his collection, and also his status as collector. But it seems there is another motive, one that is something close to vanity. He visits artists in their studios, generally seeking out those that are new and unheard of, and buys vast quantities of their work at one time. He certainly acquires works for their aesthetic character and this can be seen when one views the pieces of his collection, they could be said to have a certain set of characteristics; however, he does so with a motive towards profit. Robert Hughes sees private collections as an expression of the egoism of the owner (Hatton and Walker, p.72), but they must also be a reflection on some level of the collector’s desire. Dubbed a ‘neophiliac’, or one obsessed with the new, it seems Saatchi seeks some kind of rejuvenation from his pieces, as though he hopes to attain some kind of youth through his collection of the new and avant-garde. It is clearly important to him that he remain at the cutting edge, and by ‘discovering’ new artists before anyone else, he is granted this. But there is also an economic advantage to this. By using his influence as a supercollector, and the prestige asserted by the Saatchi Gallery on works which it displays, the value of the work is increased, leaving Saatchi a tidy profit on those that he later resells. The consequence for public museums however is that they can no longer afford these pieces for their own collections, and as such must rely on private collectors to loan them these works. “The danger here is that the contents of national museums may be determined by the particular tastes of supercollectors rather than by the selections of professional curators, who are more accountable to the public than dealers and private collectors” (Hatton and Walker, p.117). Thus we can see the influence supercollectors have in shifting the public’s focus to their own tastes, and the way artwork’s monetary value becomes its defining factor in the public eye.
Damien Hirst belongs to the art movement the ‘Young British Artists’, a movement that has much to thank Charles Saatchi for, he being a key figure in promoting their work and their rise to stardom. Damien Hirst’s work is interesting to me, as it seems to play on the idea of the commodification of art, to some degree. In The Mona Lisa Curse, Robert Hughes attacks Hirst’s now notorious 2007 work For The Love of God, a human skull, coated in platinum and covered in 8,601 diamonds. This work cost £14 million to produce, and had an asking price of £50 million which if sold, would make it the highest price ever paid for the work of a living artist. Hughes has stated: “…We are left with art like this, stripped of all but its market value. If art can’t tell us about the world we live in, then it’s not worth having at all.” I find the statement problematic, as I think a work like this tells us much about the world we live in. If at first it seems to exist only for its market value, then in doing so it creates a powerful message about the commodification of art. There is an interesting tension between making art which both provokes questions like these, and simultaneously buys back into this system of commodification — by becoming a commodity in itself. It is this tension that serves for me to make the work all the more interesting. Whether this was intentional or not is of no interest to me. The work is aesthetically tacky, crass and has been accused of cultural appropriation as well as plagiarism to boot. However, I’ve come to see it as being a perfect lens into the current state of our art world. Hirst is often criticized for not being so much an artist as a brand, but this too is massively telling about what is constituted as art in a world where the market dominates. Art presented as something closer to entertainment, with an emphasis on the spectacle, rather than as cultural artefact. Thanks to Thomas Hoving’s directorship of The Metropolitan Museum of Art — which had a profound impact on the way museums have operated ever since — it seems museum frameworks would sooner present one ‘masterpiece’ by a certain artist, rather than several smaller pieces, which might provide us with better critical insight. As Hughes suggests: a mirror to the cult of the celebrity. We can also see how the activities of supercollectors such as Charles Saatchi have influenced this, and also how they have commodified art by driving up prices, often overshadowing it’s critical content. Art has become both populist and sensationalist. Similarly, it seems the role of artists has changed: they no longer are known simply within the scope of the art world, but have become represented in the mass media too. This exposure reflects the changing status of the world of art in the late 20th and 21st centuries, and how art comes to mirror money-driven consumer capitalism, celebrity obsessed culture, and western societies’ obedience to mass media.
Tom W
References : Hatton, R and Walker, J. (2005) Supercollector. London, UK: Institute of Artology
Hughes, R. (Writer and Producer). (2008) The Mona Lisa Curse [documentary] London, UK: Channel 4
Koenisburg, L. (1989). Art as a Commodity? Aspects of a Current Issue. Archives of American Art Journal. Volume 29. No 3/4. pp. 23–35.
Pearce, S. (1995). Collecting Ourselves. On Collecting, an investigation into collecting in the European tradition, (pp. 159–177) London and New York: Routledge.
Vallen, M. (2008). The Unveiling of Robert Scull. Retrieved from http://art-for-a-
change.com/blog/2008/02/unveiling-of-robert-scull.html
While, A. (2003). Locating Art Worlds: London and the Making of Young British Art. Area.Volume 35. №3. Pp. 251–262
