If you're a wage earner, a working class stiff, your boss tells you to do such and such and that's it. No negotiating, or not very much.
Some things are free or can be free without loss of value. Love, hate, beliefs, and all those meta-things that we like to say are what make living worth it. Somewhere along the line, art got mixed into that meta world and that's where Berg goes wrong. He equates the subjectivity of art as its meta value and as such it can't be merely a thing of monetary value. But it is. No matter what the monetary value of something we can perceive it as art in that meta sense. If you can be a weirdly associational as I am you'll see that this goes back to Aristotle's notion of fundamental Desire as part of consciousness. It's a complicated idea associated with perception and common sense, fantasy or imagination, and memory, like the driving force and the creation of belief. No matter how complicated it can't be conflated with the worldly material. Belief and love and all the emotions contained in desire may encapsulate reality but are not a part of it. We pretend otherwise to "create" material values. I never ever got enough money for any art I made. As far as I'm concerned whoever buys on of my paintings, or any sketch or scrap, gets the bargain of a lifetime. I sell it all cheap because I need the money now. They get something that's worth, what, a million, maybe more. My late pal Ed P. sold his work for cash, whatever he could get, when he was trying to pay round-the-clock nursing care for his long sick wife. Now Gagosian will maybe accept 130,000 for a P. painting, next year or the year after, 1 million will be likely. I've said it before. An artist who wants a decent middle class lifestyle, like his average lawyer friends, needs to gross about one million a year to end up with 200,000. Not many are doing that. wc ----- Original Message ---- From: Michael Brady <[email protected]> To: [email protected] Sent: Fri, December 10, 2010 10:29:44 AM Subject: Re: the boring false opposition between money and art William wrote: > Maybe artists should put one of those little > lawyer's clocks by their studio doors and punch in and out, and punch again when > unsolicited visitors stop by with Berg-like questions and comments. Everything involves economic considerations. Everything. Decisions about every aspect of life are influenced by whether a thing can be done, how much it will cost to do, how much it will cost not to do, what other things must be put aside or altered in order to do the first thing. These are fundamentally economic questions. So why does Berg imply that economic questions are antithetical to art Ultimately, it comes down to the agreed selling price between the artist and buyer. Even if the artist sells through a broker (gallery) who takes a commission, the artist agrees that the money he receives after the commission is acceptable. Whether it's calculated by a hourly rate, square inches, costliness of the materials, etc., the final transaction is an agreement by each side: the artist agrees that the price is an acceptable reimbursement and the buyer agrees that the price is an acceptable expense. All of the other stuff that William mentions, which are certainly germane and important, concern the ways in which the status of the artist/worker is established and supported. The buyer makes requirements on the artist, even though the buyer doesn't do the work. And reciprocally, the artist can make requirements on the buyer. | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Michael Brady
