Can art criticism guarantee the permanent value of the work of art?

44th AICA Congress, Asunción, Paraguay, 19.10.11

When we speak about the role of art criticism in evaluation of contemporary art, in the first place we have to consider the situation that dominates all the domains of our life today. In economy, the social standard of workers is sacrificed for the profit; in behavior, the moral values can be quickly sold and abused; in sports, the fair play declines under the demands of the wealthy club owners and sponsors; pharmaceutical industry and medicine earn a lot of money on behalf of artificially produced hopes of eternal life; in politics, as it always has been, the most decisive, globally important events and complots are so well paid that they are never revealed; our environment can be polluted without penalty and the drug market rules a lot of states. Lives have low price, children are sold to the rich parents, and human organs have a status of some ordinary merchandise. There is a new religion that conceals these brutal, but generally accepted facts. The euphemism for it is political correctness, and it has entered as a protective, apotropaic force also the art practice itself and justifies it. Contemporary art is no more one of sophisticated humanistic cultural activities above the banal reality; it is the practice submitted to the laws of our world directed by a mass media and globalized capital. My contribution focuses on the following question: What decides and guarantees today the value of the work of art? Is it still its aesthetic, its moral or its ideological substance that once guided art criticism or all this is replaced by art market and global capital?

Until the beginnings of Modernism the greatest masterpieces were recognized as such in the time of their creation or sooner or later after it. The factors that decided the fame, the quality and their eternal life were: their artist had an enormous reputation; the patrons assured enough money for their completion; the arbiters of taste recognized their great aesthetic value; the state or the monarchs were satisfied; the public spread their celebrity. With historical distance, all these factors guarantee to old masterpieces their fixed, permanent places in the heritage of mankind. They are anchored in the history of art forever as they are presented in books, museums, educative system, and therefore embedded in general consciousness. At the first glance, nothing changed with the Modernism, the Avant-garde and the postmodernism, it is only that we think that we, critics and curators, have a decisive role in defining what a masterpiece is and what will remain a masterpiece in the future.

However, is it really so? If it is, why the question ‘What is art’ is put so often? Why do people sometimes look for the answer even at the court? We know, for example, that in 1926–1928, this question was the central in the legal case that began the U.S government against Constantin Brancusi when he sent his Bird in Space to the U.S. Customs appraiser, “acting on the advice of ‘several men high in the world of art’ decided that that the statue was not properly the work of art and thus not entitled to duty-free entry into the country. Instead, he classified it as ‘a manufactured implement of bronze’ and assessed the 40 percent ad valorem duty prescribed for household and hospital utensils in metal. He reported that one of the men he had called in for advice had told him, ‘If that is art, then I’m a bricklayer. Brancusi paid the amount assessed $229.35”. Under the pressure of the media and other artists, in next two years, the U.S. customs agreed to rethink their classification of the items, and finally, they released the sculptures.

To further support my thesis, I’ll analyze another, I believe well-known case, when one of the most famous works, widely seen as an icon of the 20th Century art, was reconsidered at the court as well. First, it would be good to remember that in 2004 five hundred British art experts voted to determine the most influential modern art work. The choice was Duchamp’s Fountain. Next year the Fountain was included in the Dada exhibition in the Pompidou Center in Paris. Of course not the original of the Duchamp’s ready-made urinal, signed and dated R. MUTT/1917, as that specimen had been lost. Its second version was signed by Duchamp in 1950 for Sidney Janis, N.Y., and the third in 1964 by Gallery Arturo Schwarz, Milan, this time in eight replicas, signed and numbered by artist. Afterwards some more replicas were made, so the numbers of surviving copies, pretending to be original, vary from seventeen to twenty and we can found them in all of the most important art museums allover the world from Kyoto to San Francisco, from Ottawa to Stockholm.

When one of Milan’s replicas was exhibited in Nîmes in 1993, Pierre Pinoncelli, French performance artist, urinated in it. In the Beaubourg Dada exhibition, 2006, Pinoncelli damaged the same replica. Now the staff of the Pompidou Center, following the prices of Duchamp’s multiples of Fountain in the art market, estimated the sacrosanct, musealized “cornerstone that changed the course of art” to 2.8 million Euros. At the trial, the official attorney, consulting the catalogue of the factory for bathroom equipment and installation, estimated it to 83 Euros. The discussion opens: what does determine the value of an artwork? What one does pay for when paying the difference between the ordinary sanitary object, designed for mass production by an anonymous designer, worth 83 Euros and one of the multiples after the copy of the lost ready-made, worth nearly 3 million Euros? Is this the original idea, the provocation, the author’s personal touch, his statement, his signature, or maybe only the copyright?

As the exhibit was not completely destroyed, the experts determined that by this attack it lost exactly 15% of its value and estimated the real damage to 427.000 Euros. However, the iconoclast claimed that his act was neither insane nor destructive, but purposeful and creative. He said he wanted to “pay tribute to Duchamp, to make a post-Dada gesture, to give back to his work its provocative qualities”. Striking it with the hammer, the urinal was not damaged. It was only modified, which made Pinoncelli a coauthor in the creative process. He should not be a vandal but a mastermind that actually improved the genuine idea of Duchamp and even helped to raise the price of his work.

Nevertheless, Duchamp’s original idea, multiplied or not, was already proclaimed as art and recognized as such by all: public, art experts and market. Therefore only this very idea can be sold, and the artist’s heirs or dealers can earn with it a lot of money. Unfortunately for Pinoncelli, his idea of destroying Fountain was proclaimed as art only by him. It was not and could not be supported by the whole machinery of art world. That is why, also by the court, it was not recognized as an artistic gesture but as a harmful one. Instead of earning the money with it, he was condemned to pay 14.352 Euros for reparation.

Obviously, in this case, there are not only aesthetic and artistic criteria, we are acquainted with from evaluation of the artworks before Modernism, that are decisive. It is difficult to say whether it is good or bad for the art. However, I have found an interesting comparison that can be deduced from the judicial proceedings. Let’s say that somebody fills a small bottle, a phial, with some water and put on it the etiquette saying, for example, “healing or Milagrosas lagrimas de La Virgen de La Asunción”. As we know, this kind of liquids can provoke miracles, for better or worse; they can be placebo or nocebo. And let us imagine that this person starts to heal other people with it. If somebody among patients decides to accuse him, the healer would be condemned for fraud. Namely, for the judge, it is not the content of the bottle, which is decisive, but the goal, the intention, even the best one. So we can see that the ordinary water could have, only because of benevolent or malevolent gesture of a shaman (to whom so often contemporary artists are compared), much higher status. And so also the urinal could have a status of something more important: it does not only serve the aim of flushing away water (even more down-to-earth water, filtered by the male body); following the same logic with which drops of waters became medicine, the urinary became the masterpiece equal to the greatest ones in the history whose copy of the copy costs nearly 3 million Euros.

Of course, this price is high enough to save the Fountain also from another degradation, which could possible menace its respectable artistic rank, namely from doubt in Duchamp’s authorship. During the last decade, Irene Gammel, Amelia Jones and some others proved that the most interesting person of New York Dada around 1917 was Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven. An immigrant from Germany, she maintained a look of the later punkers. She was a free-liver with women and men, among them with Duchamp who was during that time bisexual. Her artworks were mostly ready-mades with scatological subjects and phallic forms. I have no time to elaborate it further here, but for your own conclusions, it is helpful to quote Duchamp’s letter to his sister Suzanne from 11th of April 1917: “Une de mes amies sous un pseudonyme masculin, Richard Mutt, avait envoyé une pissotière en porcelaine comme sculpture; ce n’était pas du tout indécent, aucune rasion pour la refuser. Le comité a décidé de refuser d’exposer cette chose. J’ai donné ma démission et c’est un potin qui aura sa valeur dans New York.”

There are not the publications written by art historians and critics that guarantee to the Fountain its honorable place in every, even the most simplified survey of art. Decisive are the overestimations of auction houses, high prices on the art market and the elevated evaluations of connoisseurs. And if our illustrious colleague Jean Clair warns today: Stop supporting the art of the traders! mentioning the artists as Hirst, Murakami, Koons and similar, we must be aware that Saatchi and the circle of the newly rich are buying next to the works of these artists also a number of lines and reproductions in the histories of art to be published. Here we are bumping against the almighty conspiracy of money again, and I shall stop here – as I started my contribution with it, and obviously have come full circle.

© Jure Mikuz

Back