‘The artist has more glitter, and would be open to installing the work in multiple locations.”
I responded with a thoughtful scowl and nod, as if considering which of my homes I might like to start with. I was standing in a prestigious Chelsea art gallery, dressed, apparently, like a man who might have $30,000 to drop on a smallish pile of blue glitter, or even $60,000 on two. According to the press release, the work was calibrated to “challeng[e] viewers’ perceptions” by creating “gradient zones between light and shadow, and opacity and transparency.” The artist had dumped the glitter herself, I learned, and spread it with her foot.
I left the exhibition, as many other visitors surely did, feeling too smart to fall for that and yet somewhat out of my depth. That was a few years ago. Since then, I’ve opened my own contemporary art gallery, and the questions of what makes a thing art and why art costs so much have, if anything, grown in importance to me.
Let’s begin with what we all know: An artistic masterpiece with a famous name attached to it can be fearsomely valuable. Last year, a not-unattractive painting of Jesus Christ that was very likely painted in large part by Leonardo da Vinci sold at auction for almost half a billion dollars. If Amsterdam were burning, it would seem reasonable for the Dutch to evacuate some sentient creatures first and the paintings of Rembrandt and Vermeer second—before any other material goods. This all might seem perfectly intuitive to an armchair economist; after all, Leonardo, Rembrandt, and Vermeer made only so many paintings and when you combine limited supply with strong demand you get high valuation and all the reverence that goes along with it.
But why, in the first place, is there such powerful demand for beautiful, useless objects like paintings and sculptures? This question may seem obvious and simple to answer, but it leads down into a fascinating warren of spiritual desire and physical intuition. In our increasingly secular age, the art gallery, museum, and auction house are almost religious institutions; the things they house are sacred to us for reasons that are very specific yet rarely spelled out explicitly.
Tellingly, the valuation of an artwork hinges on its authenticity, which matters very little for the visual appearance of the thing—especially now, in the age of digital reproduction. The knowledge that Leonardo or Picasso or Warhol laid his own holy hand on this particular object transforms an interesting or beautiful thing into a priceless treasure, whereas an art student’s copy—one of a kind, perhaps even more visually striking than the original—would be all but worthless.
The parallel to religious ritual is hard to miss. Walter Benjamin explored it in the 1930s in his famous essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. “The earliest art works,” Benjamin wrote, “originated in the service of a ritual—first the magical, then the religious kind,” and “the unique value of the ‘authentic’ work of art has its basis in ritual, the location of its original use value.” The idea is that if such-and-such a particular thing played some effective role in the task of the priest, shaman, or witch doctor, it has helped to traverse the divide between the realms of flesh and spirit, and it’s not really just a thing anymore; it is an instrument of the ultimate, longed-for traversal.
Even in our supposedly disenchanted age, this reverent posture survives in intuitions about the unique aura of an original piece of art. We don’t just pay a lot of money for it; we hush ourselves in its presence, let it speak to us, attempt to bring our thoughts and emotions into concord with it, and maybe, if we open ourselves nakedly enough to whatever virtuosic assemblage of wood or metal or paint or paper stands before us, we might hear something akin to what the poet Rilke heard, gazing at the archaic torso of Apollo: “You must change your life.” We might glimpse a path to some state of transcendence above the striving, preening, exhausted squalor of our normal reality.
The act of making art, even in our very sophisticated present day, is an act of prophecy, and the artwork is a tool of the prophet. There are two distinct, overlapping forms this prophecy can take. Each is present in both ancient holy books and contemporary art galleries.
The first kind is a seeing of hidden truths. Artists working in this mode look at trees and faces, at color and line and texture, and see something deep and vital that unifies and explains the chaotic flux of physical reality. It may be something redemptive like God or world-spirit or universal empathy, but it need not be. Maybe it’s universal emptiness and decay, as in the case of Lucian Freud; maybe it’s brashness and filthy vitality, as in the case of Willem de Kooning; maybe it’s squirming, sensual oblivion, as in the case of Cecily Brown. Looking at such art well executed we gain access to realities both deeper and higher than the concrete facts of rush-hour traffic and stiff new shoes and an aging body. We come to understand better—viscerally, intuitively—our existential condition, and through this understanding we become more able to navigate our world and feel at home in it. Art of this kind aims to change our posture toward reality, and then maybe, eventually, society. Better living through better seeing.
The next type of prophecy is less obvious as prophecy and provokes much of the befuddlement that is common when non-specialists tour a contemporary gallery or museum. It is the denunciation of injustice and the call to moral purification—prophecy in the mode of Jeremiah or Ezekiel. In today’s version of this prophetic mode, artists feel compelled to, say, “upend traditional notions” of masculinity or narrative or authorship or commodification or orgasm or whatever. Making art is a simple matter of finding the right target and assailing it with sufficient incisiveness and novelty, often by denouncing, flouting, or playfully remixing traditional aesthetic standards. The guiding assumption here is that the world as currently governed is evil, and so to make peace with it would be craven capitulation. The imagined world that we might create, however, by overturning current power structures (especially those related to identity categories like race, gender, and sexuality) will be good. This is the great hope that pulses through the veins of much “serious” contemporary art, and for the past couple of decades there has been something like consensus amongst elite art schools, galleries, museums, and critics that this is the vital, responsible kind of hope. The art it inspires is often intentionally ugly, puzzling, or childlike, meant to afflict the comfortable—and in so doing, goad us toward a world where the afflicted will be comforted.
Different as they often are in execution, these two types of prophecy share a motivation: Both aim to transform rough, raw matter to reveal in it some glint of a reality desired but too rarely seen—in one case because it is threaded only thinly through the coarse, bulky fabric of existence, in the other because it is held in abeyance by strong, power-hungry men. On this canvas, or in this wood or clay or metal, or nowadays, perhaps, this LED screen or discarded sneaker or pile of glitter, the prophet finds a glint, and if it’s a glint of what we too desire, we might be mightily moved—we might think this thing is one of the most momentous objects we could ever encounter. We might hush in its presence, or pay an exorbitant price to take it home. We might, if we’re honest with ourselves, also want to flaunt our cultivation or our wealth, but if we have any sensitivity we understand that this is not a simple object among objects. It has been party to something of the deepest significance.
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On the other hand, let’s not collapse a meaningful distinction. The two types of prophecy are vitally different—not only in execution but in desired effect. One is meant to inculcate a kind of understanding through an experience that is pleasurable and clarifying. The other is meant to provoke the viewer to action. James Joyce explores something like this difference in his Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, where Stephen, the protagonist, argues that true art is “static”—it moves the viewer to stillness, to contemplative satisfaction with the thing he beholds. Bad art, on the other hand, he calls “kinetic”—it provokes the viewer to action by exciting either desire or loathing—and is either pornographic or didactic.
One need not follow Joyce’s protagonist all the way in order to see something enduringly valuable in art that doesn’t immediately try to provoke political outrage or action, that allows us to stand still and silent in peaceful appreciation, to let ourselves be drawn slowly into harmony with the deep realities it gestures towards. If we achieve a perfectly just world, motivated by the proddings of a million works of political art, actualized via Twitter shamings and callouts, policed with perfect pronoun-parsing diligence, death and decay will still be with us. Relationships will still be prone to fracture and dissolution. Life will still be terribly, horribly difficult for the human animal, which wants so much more than it can have. When all the hierarchies have been toppled, and all the paradigms subverted, what will we do then? How will each of us live on this ridiculous planet, among these ridiculous people?
The answer is with great difficulty, and, let’s hope, also with some humility, gratitude, and joy. And this is where the first kind of prophecy—the attempt to help us see better, to love what we see every day—is so vital. Because in fact, none of us will live to see the promised land. Oppression and immiseration are stains on the fabric of our world and should be addressed whenever we have the wherewithal. But they will reappear roughly as many times as we scrub them out. If we are to have any kind of peace, we will have to locate it here, in this imperfect world. There’s plenty of room for art that aims to change things for the better. Make it; show it; let’s talk together about what has to be done. But let’s also make a lot more space for art that helps us understand how this world, unfinished and filthy as it is, peopled by hapless creatures like ourselves is, well, ok. And maybe even beautiful, in some deep, mysterious, partially hidden way.
