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Monday, November 19, 2007

The Real Money Issue

posted by on November 19 at 10:21 AM

While Modern Art Notes worried over LA MOCA’s announcement/decision to place a Louis Vuitton boutique in the center of Takashi Murakami’s retrospective at the museum, and LAT critic Christopher Knight, known for getting tough on institutions, praised the cleverness of the store in art-historical terms, Jori Finkel of the New York Times was thinking bigger.

She was wondering why the exhibition itself (at a nonprofit museum) was funded by three powerful private dealers who sell Murakami’s art out in the real world—for real prices, not the chump change of handbags.

And why one of the dealers, Blum & Poe, chartered a jet so that a particular artwork made it into the show.

The story Finkel wrote is evenhanded, but there are damning moments, and one comes about halfway through the piece.

The worst case, most interviewed agreed, would be for a museum to accept money from a gallery to stage a show of new or available work that the gallery could essentially sell straight off the museum walls. … (O)nly a handful of the 90-plus works in the Murakami exhibition are for sale, most prominently the “Oval Buddha” sculpture, offered by Blum & Poe.

Oval Buddha is the newest work in the show, the 19-foot platinum and aluminum sculpture that Blum & Poe chartered a jet for. Add to this that the commercial gallery is also underwriting the exhibition, and the situation starts to stink.

But as Finkel explains, the museums she includes in her story—most prominently (but certainly not only) the Guggenheim (with its Richard Prince retrospective) and LA MOCA—solicited the ethically shaky support of these private dealers.

It’s a fascinating read about the state of the world of art today.

Does the compromised context change the way we see Murakami’s commercially minded art? If Knight had known the full story about the show’s funding when he wrote his review, would it have altered passages like this one, or simply underscored them?:

The show is unambiguously titled “© Murakami.” The copyright symbol reads as a defiant, paradoxical assertion that the artist — not the private collector or public museum — retains perpetual ownership of the art-idea. That’s something we need to hear, especially as the mindless hand-wringing over today’s art market escalates faster than most stock portfolios.

In capitalist society, art objects are a species of money, not a consumable commodity (as they’re often mistakenly purported to be). Art is a medium of exchange, but artists establish its enduring value — not some hedge-fund gazillionaire with a shopping list.

The claim gets reasserted in the show’s newest work, recently completed and never before exhibited (although anticipated in a small figure drawn at the bottom of the mural-size Gero Tan painting). A Buddha-like self-portrait of Murakami is seated atop a lotus, riding on the back of a mythical beast, like Elizabeth “Cleopatra” Taylor entering Rome astride a colossal Sphinx.

Formed in aluminum and more than 18 feet tall, the silvery sculpture is covered in platinum leaf. It’s the world’s biggest bowling trophy — an Oscar®™ the artist awards to himself.

Oh, and one other thing I’ll say because MAN didn’t: Why didn’t the LAT get this story?

RSS icon Comments

1

I disagree with plenty here, but I'll toss in just one note: I don't think it's any one writer's responsibility to call out every ethical infraction in American museumdom. I don't try, I don't think I know anyone who does. I'm ecstatic to see others take up institution-focused journalism and institutional critique. (It's been a yawning gap in American cultural journalism for years now.) And like I said yesterday on MAN: Bravo to Jori for raising this one.

Posted by Tyler Green | November 20, 2007 6:48 AM
2

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