The new auction records for Rothko, Newman, and other icon artists of the high modern period are disturbing even as they are expected in this age of 1 percenter excess. (See today's NYT). My problem is not with the prices as such but with the aura they cast around the art that is selling at those prices. It's becoming very difficult to look at a Rothko anymore as an artwork. These works are supposedly the inspiration works of an era, helping to define the best of the best in aesthetic terms. They've been the mile-markers ambitious young artists for two or three generations. But more and more they seem to fall flat for me. Dead. The more a Rothko sells for the less art it seems to be. I saw a few Rothkos at the National Gallery in D.C.. a few days ago. Admittedly, they are not the finest I've seen (the Phillips Collection, also in D.C. has better examples) but they looked very ashamed to me, so embarrassed, and dull; pompous but empty. I wonder if my aesthetic expectations for the Rothkos has been raised to a high level somehow analogous to their stratospheric auction records.
Nearby the National Gallery Rothkos is a small -- not bigger than 3 feet -- Bradley Walker Tomlin, tacked to the wall too near a doorway, as if it was crowded into position by a sympathetic curator. It's an astonishing painting, full of risk, wild technical abandon and yet so beautifully composed, as if it is paint caught in the wind and rain at the most perfect moment. Of course I've always loved Tomlin's work since I first saw one of his paintings back around 1948 in the Encyclopaedia Britannica Collection. I have no idea what his work sells for now but I'd bet that it's well within the comfort zone of prices we'd expect to pay tor, say, a pricey sedan -- something sensible in the public mind for a fine work of art. I can appreciate the Tomlin. I can experience it as an artwork, a source of aesthetic pleasure and a demanding intellectual and painterly object that has no other purpose. I don't think about its monetary value at all. But the poor Rothkos and their cohort, now turned to pure suffocating gold, have lost their vitality and their art forever, or until the bubble bursts or the world sinks into catalytic horror. Go look at a Tomlin. Go look at any of the art that can still be seen as art. That's where the future is, if there is to be a future. When an artwork -- especially a fragile painting -- sells for multiple millions, well beyond the cost of anything else that could be put into a room, it might as well be rolled up, tied, and shoved under the guillotine. wc
