Inequality Made Visible
We have plenty of art, and important art, too…We have plenty of art in America. It is social justice which is in gruesomely short supply. - Kurt Vonnegut
The consequences for contemporary artists and their work in America’s predatory capitalist economy plagued by rising financial inequality and political polarization are the same negative ramifications of greed and unbridled exploitation that now undermine social stability worldwide and ultimately could threaten the very survival of the human species. Oxfam America reports that the “Richest 1% bagged nearly twice as much wealth as the rest of the world put together over the past two years…Billionaire fortunes are increasing by 2.7 billion a day even as at least 1.7 billion workers now live in countries where inflation is outpacing wages.” Meanwhile, the Credit Suisse Global Wealth Report revealed that 1% of the world’s richest individuals own half of all global household wealth and ten percent of these rascals accounted for a whopping 88 percent of it. This monstrous inequality and the social polarization that ensues has been reflected in the art market by the mega-sales of several exorbitantly expensive “trophy” paintings at auction. Two recent examples are a painting by Jean-Michel Basquiat, which sold at Sotheby’s for $98 million (110.5 m with fees) and Leonardo da Vinci’s “Salvador Mundi which sold at Christie’s for $400 million (450.3m with fees). Sales like these and the rapid commodification of art in recent years has made it clear that money trumps aesthetics, a process that has made a handful of artists very rich. According to Artnet.com, 25 big-name artists were responsible for more than 44 percent of all auction sales totals in 2007. Meanwhile, at the lower and mid-range sectors of the market, individual artists strive just to keep going, along with a once thriving American middle class that continues to shrink in tandem with working-class families struggling for basic survival.
Ever since the neoconservative coup d’état got rolling with a vengeance during Ronald Reagan’s administration, an elite cabal of wealthy neoliberal criminals has succeeded in transforming what was once a democratic republic into an oligarchy with an economic system that works well for a few folks at the top, but shamelessly oppresses and exploits those that Franklin D. Roosevelt called “the forgotten people at the bottom of the economic pyramid.” According to Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz, author of The Price of Inequality: How Today’s Divided Society Endangers Our Future, inequalities in America threaten to undermine the entire social order. Stiglitz cites the Walton family as an example of the egregious inequality that now prevails. Just six of the War-Mart corporation heirs, reports Stiglitz, command the wealth equivalent to the bottom 30 percent of American society. As ecologist David W. Orr points out, the twenty richest Americans have more wealth than the lowest-earning half of the population. Globally, sixty-two people have more net wealth than the lowest-earning 3.6 billion people.
Why does inequality matter? For one thing, when all the wealth is concentrated in the hands of the top ten percent of society, the other 90 percent is deprived of spendable income. Statistics released by the Social Security Administration reveal that earnings of more than half of all American workers fall below the poverty line for a family of five. A majority of Americans are barely making enough to make ends meet while corporate CEO salaries skyrocket. Figures like these indicate that not only does the US have the highest level of inequality in the world, it also suffers the least equality of opportunity. In his book Stiglitz notes that the neoliberal argument often advanced claiming financial elites deserve the Lion’s share of the spoils because they contribute the most is specious at best. In reality there is a “big disconnect between private rewards and social returns,” he says, a fact that undermines the neoliberal “trickle-down” theory that formed the basis of the casino-capitalist economy ushered in with the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act, a measure that separated investment and commercial banking activities. As a result, risk-taking rather than socially beneficial lending became the primary focus of financial institutions, which brought the world to the brink of financial ruin in 2008.
In truth, capitalism has historically never performed well for society without regulation, a bald refutation of the neoliberal view that sees the world exclusively through what John Ralston Saul calls the “prism” of economics.” Today’s obscene inequality, facilitated by the neoliberal delusion of endless economic growth, would serve as a warning for a wiser society that “The economy must conform to the rules set by the larger system in which it is embedded,” as ecologist David Orr notes, “or sooner or later it will cause its own destruction.” Understanding the economic patterns and social structures that connect human culture to the large bio-systems of nature, Orr further suggests, is paramount for survival. Unfortunately neoliberal policy makers are largely oblivious to ecological realities. The price for this ignorance could well be mass extinction unless human beings learn to operate in accord with nature’s limits. As E.F.Schumacher presciently wrote in his classic Small is Beautiful, Economic As If People Mattered, “Wisdom demands a new orientation of science and technology toward the organic, the gentle, the non-violent, the elegant and beautiful.”
Unfortunately, in our bourgeois acquisitive culture, wisdom that honors Schumacher’s orientation toward non-violence, elegance and beauty, as well as Kurt Vonnegut’s call for more social justice, is in short supply. The unbridled, reptilian spirits of exploitation and accumulation rule the behaviors of capitalist Homo sapiens throughout the world today, including their relationships with art. With an army of millionaires and billionaires spending twenty percent of what the Capgemini/Merrill Lynch World Wealth Report calls their ‘investments of passion” dollars on art, a flood of money has been vying for a relatively trickling flow of art works. After a slump in the 90s, the big art auction houses are offering more works at higher prices than ever before, a trend that may have inspired critic Robert Hughes to comment, “What strip-mining is to nature, the art market has become to culture.” Historically, art as a “product” has been valued in a context that transcends commerce. Pissarro, for example, viewed collectors who invested in a work of art as if it were a share of stock as “vulgar” and “degenerate.” One can only imagine what the great artist would think of art futures contracts sold by the Dublin-based Intrade’s Prediction Market. The idea, according to Intrade, was to create a ‘price-transparent, liquid tradable, art-based derivative” that would bridge the circles of collectors and financiers. If one shares Pissarro’s view of all this, remember that it was an artist named Andy Warhol who famously quipped back when the current art boom got started in earnest during the 70s, “I like money on the wall.”
Judging by the record sales of art at auction recently, so do a lot of very rich collectors. In view of the exponential rises in art prices since Warhol’s day, one can’t help but wonder what’s so special about art that people are willing spend as much as $100 million for it, as a collector once did for a diamond-studded skull by Damien Hirst. Well, for one thing, art tends to endure. What’s the saying? Life is short, but art is long!” You make some art and it’s liable to survive you, while that gourmet dinner you ordered at Le Bec Fin, no matter how artfully prepared, is consumed in an evening. Another special thing about art, of course, is that rich people are willing spend fortunes for it. That makes it very special indeed, at least if your name is Damien Hirst, Bansky, or one of the other ‘highly paid’ luminaries of the art world. David Rockefeller made Mark Rothko’s art very special, for example, when he sold an early work of the artist that he bought for measly ten grand for more than $74 million.
Alas, art prices, like prices in most commodity markets, are determined by the forces of supply and demand. The art market is unique, however, in that it is essentially supply driven since the number of works available for sale at any given time is always limited. The scarcity of high-quality art and the thirty-year market cycle tends to drive prices even higher. The total supply of paintings by a deceased artist, for instance, is fixed; no additional supply can be created to meet increased demand, a phenomenon economists call “zero elasticity.” Thus, when collectors compete at auction to acquire a particular rare art asset, the price can blast into the astro-sphere. Another factor that pushes prices up is a phenomenon art experts call the “Veblen Effect, nineteenth century economist Thorstein Veblen’s theory that equates high art prices with increased demand. According to Veblen, rising prices in the art market have a way of attracting buyers rather than driving them away. That Veblen was clearly on to something is reflected in Art Market Research’s index of contemporary art, which has shot up more than nine fold since 1997.
“The art market,” writes Robert Hughes, “is always converting works of art into passive fictions of eternity and immutability, of transcendent value for which no price may necessarily be too high.” Mind boggling rises in value for art at auction are legendary, but don’t depend on this process if you are risk adverse. Fluctuations in value are also part of the art-investment territory. For example, Victorian painter Lawrence Alma-Tadema’s The Finding of Moses sold for $25,000 in 1905, a lot of money then, but the artist’s pictures were so passe by 1942 that the painting sold for a measly $682.00. By 2010, in a rising market, the same painting became one of Hughes’s “passive fictions of eternity and immutability,” and was reevaluated, selling at auction for $23.5 million. In the same booming market, the work of artist Sam Gillian, whose canvases were priced around $1500, was “rediscovered” by a dealer and in November 2015 a Gillian painting sold for $315,000 at Christie’s in New York.
Human beings have been creating works of art for over 30,000 years as far as we know. Famous examples include the mystical cave paintings at Lascaux, the Great Pyramids and Royal Tombs of Egypt, the pottery, statuary, and temples of Ancient Greece and Rome, the cathedrals of the Middle Ages, the painting masterpieces of the Renaissance, and the vast proliferation of experimental forms of the modern era. This creative bouillabaisse, accumulated through the ages and now celebrated via the wonders of mass communications technology, has in many ways redefined social values and moral behavior, no small achievements. Indeed, the word “art” is imbued by our image-based culture with glitz and splendor. As previously documented, there’s more wealth concentrated at the upper echelon of society than ever before, so much in fact, that the folks controlling Lion’s share of it can’t seem to find enough ways to spend it. Luxury watches, designer handbags, elegant clothes, supersonic airplanes and magnificent yachts don’t seem to satisfy the lust for novelty among the rich so they buy art by the truckload as well. To satisfy the insatiable appetites of these high rollers for anything artistic, there is a great deal of crowding at the trough as artists multiply like horny energizer bunnies. Everybody and their brother, it seems, aspires to be an artist as art schools across the country turn out more than a hundred thousand graduates every year. The irony is, in a high-tech world where it’s easier than ever to market creative work, only about ten percent of the more than two million art school graduates out there in TV Land are actually making a living as artists.
After a generation of cultural Reaganomics during which the aesthetic “inner” meaning of art was eclipsed by greed and sensationalism, a sea change is in process. As the art world evolves beyond its obsession with what Robert Hughes described as the “shock of the new,” a phenomenon that perversely constricts both artists’ and collectors’ ideas about the meaning of art, there is a growing acceptance of the idea that the best works are those that reflect an attribute art dealer Brooke Alexander calls “genuine impulse,” a mysterious characteristic that he says ‘has to do with someone making an image which is really part of his or her character, what they’re really about.” Hopefully, the legions of artists flooding into the marketplace will use their creative skills for more compelling reasons than capital preservation for the leisure class. In view of the transformative power of Art to enlighten the human heart, illuminate perception and enlarge the aesthetic landscape, perhaps it can save itself, and us, from the destructive excesses of consumer culture. The imaginative tools of art and design thus defined could open new evolutionary pathways out of the current crisis by “Luring us into a different kind of knowing,” as the Mythos Institute expresses it, “calling us not to cling to the glittering image, but to follow our hearts and bring forth more beauty into the world.”