Okay, I will concede that, to write on a subway car or the side of a building, without someone's permission, is an act of vandalism. However, graffiti moved from the street into the art gallery a long time ago. I knew this back in the mid eighties when I worked for Sotheby's Auction House in New York. Works by street artists like Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring started showing up in Sotheby's galleries and they were being sold, at that time, for tens of thousands of dollars. The same society, that vilified graffiti artists as vandals and criminals, was very eager to acquire their works on canvas to display in their condos on the upper east side. But this is often the case with art and artists. At Sotheby's we use to say that the profits from the sale of Impressionist paintings paid the rent and all of the salaries; Impressionist paintings being the most expensive in the market place. Yet we know that Van Gogh died virtually penniless after shooting himself in 1890. I also learned at Sotheby's that art appreciation has little to do with how much you like a work of art but how much that art will increase in value in the years to come.
These urban neo-Miros and neo-Mondrians were troubadours of the transit system. Hell, they couldn't afford to buy and stretch canvases so they used what was available until they "got up and got noticed."
When I was at Sotheby's I worked on a video treatment of a collection of Impressionist paintings. The collection consisted of Lautrec, Monet, Pissaro, Renoir, Cezanne and Cassatt among others. The videotape depicted the beauty of the paintings magnificently with fades and dissolves that both accentuated and complimented the paintings. All that was needed was music. I tried Bach, Beethoven, Handel and Brahms and none of their music worked. When I spoke with a Hungarian film director named Karoly Bardosh, I asked him why was I having such a difficult time finding suitable music. He said I needed to use Impressionist composers whose music was more compatible with Impressionist paintings. He suggested using Claude Debussy, Erik Satie and Maurice Ravel. These are the composers who were doing in music what Monet and Mary Cassatt were doing on canvas. When I told Karoly how well the music complimented the paintings he said if I was looking for poetry in the same vein I should look at the work of Ezra Pound. Again the triumvirate of painting, music and poetry. So along with the arrival of this new Urban Street Art came Hip-Hop (rap) and break dancing. While pundits demeaned street artists in the press, Macy's and Bloomingdales were profiting from the sale of the urban street fashion that these artists inspired; from Harlem to haute couture. Like Punk Rock before, you know you've been co-opted when they start selling t-shirts held together with safety pins on Fifth Avenue, or when Rothko, Twombly and Motherwell, are sharing the stage with Basquiat, Haring and Fab Five Freddy.
1 comment:
Fascinating blog!
Dean Hutchins
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