You know, Mr. Berg, this debate goes nowhere worthy of our attention. One can go on forever lamenting the fragility of art as something easily ignored as useless or easily subsumed by money. The real conversations about art center on how and whether art stimulates intellectual and expressive meanings. Everything else is incidental and arbitrary. What the gossip about art and money does suggest, however, is the excessive role that mass culture plays in determining our reality. We can't exclude cultural perspectives and the conclusions they lead us to, of course, but the last twenty years or so of extreme faith in cultural contexts -- a sort of mass opinion surmised after the fact -- have obscured the integrity and creativity of an individual intellect and feeling confronting the world. Art is a human activity that commemorates that confrontation.
I agree with Michael in being annoyed by your incessant quoting of others out of context merely to imply that you have numerable worthy allies to back up what one guesses are your very conventional and conservative, unexamined and incurious views about art and aesthetics. Surely you can find a quotation that says something about the cowardice of not speaking your own mind directly. How about Priscilla Mullins telling John Alden to "Speak for yourself, John" when he came to deliver another man's love note? Lesson: When John did speak up, he had the hand of the lovely Priscilla; their many thousands of descendants are pleased he did. wc (a 12th generation descendant of John and Priscilla). ----- Original Message ---- From: joseph berg <[email protected]> To: [email protected] Sent: Fri, May 11, 2012 1:37:10 AM Subject: Re: auction prices On Thu, May 10, 2012 at 1:05 PM, joseph berg <[email protected]> wrote: > On Thu, May 10, 2012 at 4:50 AM, William Conger <[email protected]>wrote: > >> >> 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... > > > - Good art weathers the ages because once in so often a man of > intelligence commands the mass to adore it. > > Ezra Pound > That's why I previously asked: - Can art continue to exist without authority? Otherwise, won't the following result?: - ...When there is no impartial arbiter, one must consider the final result. (Machiavelli) And isn't the "final result" the size of price tag?
