Art And Business



We keep coming back to this theme of Art and Business. Perhaps it is the fact that on the first day of the Damien Hirst auction at Sotheby's that snagged a record $199 million, it was the same day Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. collapsed. What does that say about Art, about business and about the Artist as businessman? Banks fall over, arts triumphs reads a headline. As someone who considers himself a fellow traveler of the fugitive-gypsy creative underclass, shouldn't The Corsair be happy at that victory of Art against a gloomy economy?

Perhaps (The Corsair sips a peppery Madeira).

But we've never quite considered Hirst an Artist. He is, to be sure, the Artist-Businessman that people like Peter Brant -- those opportunistic collectors of Contemporary Art -- regard with what can only be properly construed as big love. According to the T: Magazine profile Brant converted "readily" to late-20th-century art because Zurich art dealer Bruno Bischofberger convinced him that all the best French impressionists -- true artists -- were too expensive or in museums. In other words, late-20th-century art was accessible. That fact probably tells one everything one needs to know about Brant's sincerity with regards to the importance of late-20th-century art.

But Brant should not and cannot be dismissed entirely. Artists are self-indulgent creatures and have historically had a complicated relationship with their benefactors. The relationship, curiously, between Andy Warhol and Peter Brant is one of the most complicated in Contemporary Art, and therefore the most shallow. On a recent Charlie Rose, Brant returned to his running theme of the Artists as businessman. Brant is a wildly successful businessman who has chosen to surround himself with Beauty (And, occasionally, Art). Brant is right in declaring that the Artist of the 21st century ought to have some business skills. The problem is that the "Artists" who excel at business, at making themselves into brands -- Botero, for instance -- reek of fraud and "art-stunt." Some of that has to do with the poverty of arts education, and part of it has to do with the spirit of democratic capitalism which often rewards the most popular and not necessarily the most deserving.

This brings The Corsair back to the Rothko in Bertram Copper's office in "Mad Men." "Between you and me, that thing should double in value by Christmas.” You get the feeling that the writers of "Mad Men" were asking us, presciently, if Art, even then, is a commodity whose value is derived entirely for how much another investor is willing to pay. It is a question that The Corsair, in his reptile green mind palace smelling of good pipe tobacco and old books, has been asking himself for going on two weeks.