July 20, 2023 : Issue #47
WONDERCABINET : Lawrence Weschler’s Fortnightly Compendium of the Miscellaneous Diverse
WELCOME
Following on from our last Cabinet, a close look at another Hockney painting, on the eve of its record setting auction five years ago; and then: Sports Jesus!
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The Main Event
A few weeks back, when Gustav Klimt’s arguably final canvas, the luminously luscious (vaguely orientalist) Lady with a Fan of 1917-18 (still on the easel in his studio when the Viennese master succumbed to the globally rampaging influenza pandemic in February of that latter year)
sold at auction at Sotheby’s in London for $108.4 million (apparently to an anonymous Hong Kong buyer—granted, a delicious reverse-orientalist sort of outcome), setting a new world record for the artist in question in the process, I knew exactly what to expect. And sure enough, within hours my Berkeley kid (softball) brother Ray posted a veritable cri-de-Vesuvius on our family’s group email account, rumblingly decrying the sheer insanity and bottomless indecency of such sales, especially at a moment (this being a new feint in his ongoing grumble) when technology has reached such heights that mere photographic reproduction could easily match the most exacting details of any such canvas (so what exactly was all that money buying?). The next time you see a headline like that, you will know what I’ll be expecting.
As it happens, five years ago, a few days before a big Christie’s auction in New York City where the art punters were all predicting that a particular Hockney canvas was likely going to be setting a new world record for a work by a living artist, I’d contributed a piece to The Atlantic online, discussing both the work, its prospects, and the complex implications such an impending stratospheric sale could well be raising. (In the end, the editors there cut the last few stanzas of the article, but here follows the piece as I’d originally conceived it.)
From the Archive
THE COMING HOCKNEY AUCTION SALE
The Atlantic, November 11, 2018
It is being estimated that David Hockney’s 1972 painting, Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures), will fetch at least 80 million dollars at the upcoming Postwar and Contemporary Art auction at Christie’s in New York, on Thursday November 15, thereby shattering the previous world record for a living artist (Jeff Koons’s $58.4 million Balloon Dog back in 2013). The painting is undoubtedly a seminal work by one of the most celebrated artists of our times, but what do those kinds of prices say about the state of the art world, and the world generally?
It’s not that the painting in question isn’t an unquestionable and probably timeless masterpiece (arguably unlike the previous record holder’s). Indeed one can make an argument that it is one of the two or three most crucial canvases of the ever-youthful, {then-} 81{now-86}-year-old British master’s career.
As the folks at Christie’s are delighted to point out, it marks the only time Hockney combined two of his most popular subjects: a swimming pool, that is, in the context of a double portrait. For indeed, swimming pools had transfixed Hockney ever since he first arrived (out of cold grey Northern England) in sunny Los Angeles, in 1964, and, as with so much else about LA, the young artist began seeing, as if for the first time, the artistic potential in things which everyone else in the Southland had been taking for granted.
The way the turquoise water moved and gleamed and eddied was manifestly beautiful, but it was also, for Hockney, something altogether more fascinating, for what really interested him was the way light scattered across the surface of the water {see our last Issue’s Main Event}, a wide two-dimensional skin that could nevertheless be seen through—not unlike a painted image splayed across the canvas itself.
Meanwhile, for all its exquisitely colorful seductions, this particular canvas served as the ghostly culmination of a decade-long series of neorealist double portraits, studies of pairs of friends but at the same time searching investigations of the relationships between those friends. And in this instance that investigation was especially fraught. For this is in fact the second version of an image Hockney had by that point, in 1972, been working on for well over a year (he’d abandoned and destroyed the first version)—a year which saw the traumatic break-up of his five-year relationship with the image’s principal, Peter Schlesinger in that pink jacket, arguably the love of his life {see Jack Hazen’s A Bigger Splash, the achingly poignant 1973 fly-on-the-wall documentary film chronicling the year of that breakup}. In that context, what are we to make of the swimmer coursing underwater as he approaches the pool’s rim at Schlesinger’s feet? Just any old model, shimmering away (like memory itself)? Or the vexed fantasy of a specific new love interest on Schlesinger’s part? And what are we to make of the painting’s title, Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures), in this context? Might the underwater swimmer be a wistful stand-in for the artist himself? Or is the real relationship in question that between the artist standing outside the image and rendering it into being, and the painting’s principal subject, the pink-jacketed man now eternally removed on the far side of the picture plane?
This would prove the last of that particular series of double portraits, but in addition, curiously, it was to point the way toward a fresh Hockney passion, and arguably the hinge moment of his career. Because there were all sorts of complications in the production of this second version of the image. For one thing he was no longer in California at the time but rather back in London, so he had to travel to the south of France for the nearest approximation of such a sun-drenched pool; and since Peter was no longer with him, he’d had to use a stand-in for his quick photographic studies of the scene in question. Back in London, he’d then had to ask his estranged lover to don the pink coat for a photo-shoot in a nearby park (he’d also had to meticulously recalibrate the time of the shoot to match the shadow splay of the original southern shots). And the thing of it is that by then Hockney had come to understand that single photographic snaps of standing figures distorted the actual proportions of the figure trapped in their inevitably projected one-point-perspective. Therefore he’d begun stacking quick sequences of chopped-up details, an especially disconcerting procedure in this context, as was evident from the result (you don’t have to be Sigmund Freud to wonder about the third of those five shingled images).
And the point is that one can trace a direct through-line from that shingled column of snapshots to the Polaroid and subsequent photocollages that would famously come to dominate his career, several years on, and launch him off on the inquiry into and critique of the limitations of the one-point photographic perspective whose hegemony in European art over the past 500 years has come to constitute the focal point of much of his wider work ever since.
So, okay, the painting is doubtless very important. As is its creator (all the more so since his {at the time} recently concluded Tate-Pompidou-Met blockbuster retrospective seems to have won over the last of the remaining critics who still doubted his claim on being one of the most vivid and intellectually vigorous masters of our time, a worthy heir to Matisse if not Picasso).
But what about those predicted prices? On that question one can legitimately be of several minds.
For starters it should be noted that when it comes to assigning a fair and just monetary value, any and every work of art is somewhere between worthless and priceless, and any specific numerical assignation beyond that comes under the category of comedy—as in Puck’s insight regarding the eternal folly of mere mortals.
Having said that, it is an indisputable fact that there is such a thing as a market, and the immediate price of any given work of art depends upon what the current market will bear, a number which in turn depends on all sorts of variables. In the current instance, for example (in addition to the aforementioned undeniable importance of the piece and the recent validation of the artist in question by way of that much vaunted retrospective), there’s the relative scarcity of such blue-chip pieces when measured against the upsurge in the number of mega-millionaires from all over the world in a position to vie for individual works, many of their American number further vivified by those spectacular recent {Trump} tax breaks; the rise of contemporary art as a fungible commodity (perhaps no more precarious an investment than many of its alternatives, especially in the case of a record-setting work that then becomes even more valuable for being the one to set such a record); the seeming conviction among dealers and collectors that prices can only keep going up (although, granted, we all know where that sort of thinking leads); the specific ancillary value of the ownership of a work of art in validating—or should we say, laundering?—the cultural credentials of its owners, not to mention, in the current market, its value in actually laundering the monetary gains of some of its more shady international bidders; and so forth. In that sense, the market simply is what it is.
And yet, surely, the main word that the prospect of a single work of art by any living artist commanding these sorts of prices summons forth is scandal. The scandal that such an (almost by definition) iconic work of international culture will now be disappearing onto the walls of a private individual rather than a museum (since there are hardly any museums that can any longer afford to bid at such heights) or else into the vaults of some dedicated lockbox storage facility by the Frankfurt or Abu Dhabi or Shanghai airports, potentially not to be seen again in the flesh, as it were, for generations. The scandal that the artist in question him or herself hardly ever partakes in the profits of such a sale—these secondary purchases constituting transactions between idle millionaires, usually mediated by necessarily sycophantic middleman dealers or auction houses—though to be sure such auction validation can help jack up that artist’s own prices up ahead (which in turn constitutes its own kind of scandal in a hyper-charged and often seemingly arbitrary winner-takes-all art market, perfectly reflective of its wider context, where it is increasingly only the top one percent of players who can afford to make any kind of decent living). Which is not even to mention perhaps the most obvious scandal of all, how there are not just dozens but hundreds of individuals with so much disposable wealth (quite a pairing of words, that, come to think of it) that they can afford to bid one against the other, lustily cheering the prices as they climb higher and higher, in a world where millions go hungry every night, or more to the immediate point, thousands still go homeless, as temperatures plunge, many of them huddled, shivering, over sidewalk heating grates along the blocks immediately surrounding the casino.
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In the end, on a snowy New York evening a few days later, and following nine minutes of spirited bidding culminating with the packed trading floor’s erupting into ecstatic applause (talk about a Vesuviac response), the Christies Hockney indeed exceeded its high estimate, falling under the gavel at $90.3 million (well over the previous record for a living artist at auction, that Jeff Koons Balloon Dog, which had netted $58.4 million in 2013)—though Hockney’s distinction was to prove short-lived: less than a year later, another Koons, this one a gleamingly gaudy Rabbit came in at $91.1 million, which remains the record of record to this day, though who knows for how much longer…
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From Another Cupboard of the Archive
THE PASSION OF SPORTS JESUS, circa 1976, and other such possibly sacrilegious spectacles
Speaking of what happens to people who call into question the machinations of the money changers in the Temple, the other day I was clearing out some filing boxes from back in my days at the Oral History Program at UCLA, during the mid-seventies, when it appears (I don’t remember this aspect of things) that for a while there I was passing the time of day proto-Photoshopping all manner of press clippings, by hand, avant la lettre. I’m not quite sure what to make of the results (just one shy, I note, of the 14 original Stations of the Cross), but you decide…
[ONE]
[TWO]
[THREE]
[FOUR]
[FIVE]
[SIX]
[SEVEN]
[EIGHT]
[NINE]
[TEN]
[ELEVEN]
[TWELVE]
[THIRTEEN]
Before you start accusing me of sacrilege, consider this brace of figurines which you can purchase, for real, to this day, on the internet:
And for that matter, when it comes to such incongruously transcendent spectacles, God himself clearly has all the rest of us beat, as in this impeccably timed photographic capture by the Brazilian master Leonardo Sens, on The Colossal Website.
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ANIMAL MITCHELL
Cartoons by David Stanford, from the Animal Mitchell archive
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NEXT ISSUE
The first part of a new series: Art and Science as Parallel and Divergent Ways of Knowing.
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