Texts

Right now

True never meant nothing more than it means right now.
– Kate Tempest, The Beigeness, 2014 –

To feel like having something, to have an appetite for something means to crave something. To want something. And to want it in general. To be hungry, on the contrary, means to look for it. It means to be here and forever now. Having an appetite equals roaming, being hungry equals concentration. I am used to regarding art as aesthetics, as a commentary, and I look for the truth elsewhere. I am looking – and keeping a safe distance. I am thinking – and starving. Therefore I think even more – in vain. Eventually, I have figured it out. The truth has never been more real than now. Realism again, recovered, done. I can see it – but that is not all. I want it. I have it. At first the hangers seemed underwhelming to me, but now I know it is Kupka. Electricity box? Electricity box. The palm feels warm above the cheek, the cool light is pulsing under the skin, the chair is falling apart in stages, the sheets are breaking piece by piece, alternative versions of childhood are passing naturally alongside the real one. All of that is happening because of the single broken lightbulb up on the left side. It is neither much nor little. A picture. The reality. Now.
Veracity is the limit of all forms of realism in painting. To evaluate a realistic painting means to compare it to what it depicts – and the degree of likeness it achieves. The intuitive result is connecting the real world with the world imitated by the image – as if it did not have its own meaning or value. Veracity, however, is also the gauge of all forms of expressive abstraction. And to evaluate an abstract painting means to compare it to whatever it evokes – the degree of authenticity it achieves. The intuitive result is an association of a particular feeling or emotion with the impression the painting gives – as if it lacked its own identity or character. It is because of our lack of appreciation for a picture, our willingness to abandon it in favour of the “reality”, we are controlled by concept in the narrow sense – even if each work of art is conceptual by its very nature. With too much appetite the hunger is simply waning. Michal is an artist of middle aged generation. He studied painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague. He was taught by Zdeněk Beran, Pavel Holas (to whom he indirectly dedicated a few of his still life paintings – namely Space III and Identification dated 2018), and he learnt from many books, painters and works that he had the opportunity to read, know and observe. This intellectual background is clearly visible in his work – it shows in the manner in which he thinks, relates to other visual forms, insists on being pluralist, but mainly in the fact that he perceives art as “good or bad” – with no frills. He believes that a painting is a result of many decisions, some of which are intuitive but most of which are premeditated. And it is a product of an intentionally accomplished concept that corresponds with a predetermined goal. The painting comes first – however he faces the world in a direct way. This directness is what I appreciate about his work so much in the context of what I have said above.
Be it his hyper-realistic portraits or still lifes, expressive abstract compositions or interventions in public space – all of them kept strictly within those categories – sensory gluttony is what they have in common. Michal is a painter but he regards the eyesight as not just one of the senses, it includes all of them – “his” eyes feel, grope, taste, hear the grass grow – they think and make conclusions. He craves objects, colours, shapes, compositions, but his attitude to them is utterly cold and deliberate. For a painting to be “good or bad”, it must be made, executed, it must go through the stage of a negative, the gradual formulation that leads to a particular statement – to a particular positive – an equal manifestation of an object, emotion, thought, through the means available. Michal relates imagery both to paintings and to words and meanings.
The generation of New Figuration, the generation of Zaostalí (the Backward Ones), even the “post-modern” generation of the 1980s and 1990s, were gradually growing into realism and they used realistic principles in a rather loose way for their own subversive or cunning purposes – as an attribute. Those who started to create around the millennium, when the situation had already changed, in the stage of pure realism – those artists commenced and motivated their work with their fascination with the real, objective world. This approach still prevails in some of them, yet their personal inclination steadily becomes more evident. While Jan Mikulka is the only Czech hyperrealist, Zdeněk Trs uses geometry and illusionism, Jan Uldrych is inclined to mysticism, Martin Velíšek to poetry of subtle humour, Adam Kašpar to expression, and Michal is addicted to state, sensuality, the value of things as objects, their essence and corporeality, without which there would be no meanings. Hence his purity of forms in their plurality. And hence the difference from examples of similar style in the global context – the oscillation between social engagement, formal sumptuousness and conceptual aptness. His paintings do not live, they are life – they have weight, mass, shape, they grow or contract, they are fragile and are waiting for an intervention. They go against the world ostentatiously, yet inside they are soft like butter and under your hands they gently recede to the sides. Some part of them, however, always makes an unpleasant crunch between your teeth. They are not here for your taste or to satisfy your cravings – they are here because the hunger cannot be quenched, soothed, outwitted, it grows with each new painting. The truth has never been more real than now. Realism again, recovered, done. I can see it – but that is not all. I want it. I have it.

Accompanying text tábor exhibition Out there somewhere

What does it mean – to be a picture?
– Lambert Wiesing –

French author and essayist George Perec is famous for his simple narrative method – instead of events, he heaped up words, nouns that represented common objects, works of art, luxurious goods, fleeting things. In this way not only did he fill up the human world completely, but he materialized human life. A peeling wall, a metal box, a tag. How would Perec write today – buried not under things but under their images? The Renaissance saying, “the man stands in the middle of the world and to this world he relates” is clearly begging for an innovation – which could be, “the man stands in the middle of the world and to this world he relates through his pictures”. Plato comes to my mind, with his cautious approach to art, i.e. the illusion of the reality, the illusion of the truth, and the onset of an accentuated fear of their “post-versions”. At this point I am getting to the matter at hand, Michal Ožibko’s paintings.
The series entitled HUE (Electricity Boxes) created between 2009 and 2018 is a good example of what the “picture world” means – the reality as we know it, trivial, functional, invisible, is reproduced in a perfectly illusionistic way through painting and assemblage. It is also the subject of a highly aesthetic photographic reflexion. Two types of “copies” are created. In addition to that, the manner of installation deliberately accentuates the absence of the primary theme – the reality itself. The reality, taken out of its natural environment, goes through the “museum effect” and acquires the charm of certainty.
Depictive painting has its permanent position in the European tradition. Through imitation we can appreciate as well as get to know the objects because we assume their principles and mechanisms. In the Czech context, represented by artists such as Zdeněk Beran, Theodor Pištěk, and Bedřich Dlouhý, “advanced” questions are typical, asking about the source of life of the objects – what is inside. Michal represents a different, more “earthly” approach – a contemporary approach, even though his destination is the same. He claims that the core of the thing and its character, its existence, lies in the visuality itself, in that which is – in that which we can see. And thus not only does he place the reality before the picture but demonstrates that visual realism is not a fleeting trend, but a permanent appeal, to which we are attached as if to a mental, imaginative and conceptual limit. Yet, depicting something decidedly does not equal showing it. And that is another substantial feature of Michal’s work – his interest in the world, the effort to understand it, mediate it and thus protect and/or save it. That requires engagement, a true radicalism – the return to the essence and staying faithful to it.
Once again: Man stands in the middle of the world that consists of things and their pictures – and only rarely is he able to see the reality for what it is. That is the purpose of art, that is why we should guard and glorify it – it can distinguish between valuable and useless, between substantial and marginal, between authentic and reflexive. To see clearly and purely is an absolutely unique gift.

Part of the text from the catalog of the exhibition Other World held in the spring of 2018 at the Caesar Gallery in Olomouc

Michal Ožibko is an artist of borderline positions – exact, hyper-realistic figuration, and free, expressive abstraction. He is an artist not only metaphorically gripped: If yes, then like this – never like that. This is witnessed by his approach to the chosen technique, to canvas; more fundamental however is his choice of themes, which are often latently engaged. Certainly, every artistic work is finally in a certain way related to the world. Seldom does one come across an artist for whom this relationship is as important and natural as breathing. The result is an understanding of the image, of the painting (!), as the final version of the process of construction and contemplation, which has its course and forms itself in a complicated way. In other words, the treatment of the image as a fundamentally conscious expression into which – deliberately – reflected life experience is projected. To know where there are personal weaknesses and specifics, to be interested in the approach to them, meanwhile to eschew the cheap, therapeutic aspect and with this experience treat things more or less rigidly: this is a good strategy for focus. It is so radical that only with great difficulty can one distinguish the border between the work and the artist – which is obviously a cliché strongly indicating the weakness of the assessor. Despite this, in order to draw a conclusion from my own failings: I believe (still!), that the concept that affects this situation the best is none other than Romanticism: Here we have an artist who is a confident painter – who is a painter. The question of why paint (and not speak), in his case is quite pointless – the image is parallel to the living world. The hyper-realistic, radically realistic form meanwhile fulfils the role of a structure which keeps the whole together – it defines not only what the object is, but also its experience, and literally divides that which the image captures from that which a person sees in it. Hyper-realism is often – and correctly – connected with a distancing, with an alienating effect, with an objectivising notation principally similar to that which is produced by technical apparatuses. All the creative activity in his case is concentrated into the moment of the choice of what will be captured – the technology itself introduces rather the question of hand-crafted skill (upon which assessment of a work is often reduced). Nevertheless, seen in this perspective, for a similar type of painting, in truth for Michal’s type of painting, typically there is a high degree of expression. Its obvious quality, which is necessary to acknowledge, is that which is not seen – and that the eventual image introduces, similar as in the case of photography, the result of a process of naming and abstraction, upon which one can only infer. It is the logo, the pictogram, the symbol – a reduction of boundless infinity into a certain specificity. This is why it is so powerful – and why it necessarily and irrefutably introduces not the polar opposite, but the counterpart of the artist’s abstract position.

Excerpt from the book Life Writing and Memory Policy in Eastern Europe

Visual artist Michal Ožibko (b.1981) has chosen a different principle of reflection on people’s relationship to memory and place. He has loaded down the figure of the Memorial to the Victims of Communism with nine shopping bags filled with groceries. As the artist pits it:’In my opinion, the plastic bags loaded with groceries in the hands of those sculptures are an adequate reminder of lining up for oranges of 30 years ago as well as of the frenetic chase for cheap food today. the memorial dedicated to the victims of political regime has enabled the creation of parallel between the everyday lives of the people living in a communist and in a liberal damocratic system, which, according to the artist, shares the common trait of pursuing material gain. This happening can be seen from man perspectives. Besides the theme of the reproduction of generational patterns, the project also points to the phenomenon of shopping centres. In their present form, they have become a new type of place introduced by the political transformation after 1989. A shopping center usually represents a space we only pass through (unless it is our workplace, for instance). We do not take any emotional stand toward it and do not form long-term memories there. The place is merely a tool of entertainment or buying goods. The French anthropologist Marc Augé had noticed the specific (non)character of the shopping center already in the 1990s. However, it was not merely the shopping center but also other utility environments such as aiports, parking lots and fitness centres, that Augé embraced in his term non-place. He defined the non-place as a’space which cannot be defined as relational, or historical, or concerned with identity’ (1995, pp. 77-78). Unlike the memory of place, which represents a spece for the symbolism, identity, relationships and history of a nation on the level of cultural memory, a non-place is completely emptied environment without memory.

Introductory text by the curator of the Berlin exhibiton Art and Industry in April 2010

The raw power of industrial architecture cannot be questioned. These are buildings built for work. Their activity fuels our world and warms our homes. In Berlin the symbolic mean of such monumental structures cannot be separated from the history of their operation nor from the cultures and artistic movements that have been born within their cavernous expanses. In the vacant industrial parks of what was Europe’s largest manufacturing center, history has given us many valuable lessons on the virility of human creativity. Generations of artists and cultural producers have found their voice in the empty warehouses and abandoned industrial buildings of Berlin. It is a voice toned to the promise of power and virtuosity that these buildings architecture has achieved. Held with in the stern but beautiful facades of old power plants and transformer stations, the Arts and Cultural sector of Berlin has itself become the cities main industry. This exhibition is a survey of those spaces and those young innovators who are driving the Berlin cultural scene forward. Works by Robin Forster, Matthias Wolff, Philipp Fürhofer, Evol, Michal Ožibko, Antonis Pittas, Paolo Chiasera and a selection of photography from the Vattenfall archive and collection.

Opponent’s review of the thesis at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague

The virtually photographic realism of this painting stands in sharp contrast to the abstraction of much contemporary conceptual art, while its evident subscription to the painterly values of ‘high art’ marks an equally powerful contrast with the art of the readymade. Both these attributes enable it to achieve a significant measure of aesthetic distinction.
The familiar category of ‘still life’ is given fresh meaning in this painting. Traditionally, a ‘still life’ is composed of natural objects such as a bowl of fruit or a vase of flowers, which the painter captures – whether realistically, impressionistically or abstractly – for the purposes of visual contemplation. In ‘Escape’ we are presented with a more substantial conception of still life, as the subject of the picture itself, and not merely its classification. This is, we might say, a still life of ‘still life’
The viewing eye is most immediately caught by the female figure, partly because she is dressed in the most prominent shade. She sits in a pose of dramatic, almost perfect stillness, while nonetheless plainly alive. The male figure, though also still, is more ambiguously portrayed. He could indeed be still through sleep, but it is not fanciful to think of him as dead – a supposition confirmed to some degree by the apparent allusion to the body of Christ in the Pieta. However, either way, the female figure’s repose remains importantly unaffected, and this intensifies her own still life, as though in some way her tranquility is one that transcends the difference.
Placing these figures in a railway carriage brings a further contrast is brought into play. The context thus becomes a means by which both are rapidly in motion, yet without any alteration in their stillness. Their human stillness, whether by choice or death, is secured within a context that is not itself still, and thus at a different level wholly subject to that context. Combined with the allusion (if that is what it is) to the traditional pose of the Pieta, this gives the whole composition broader significance, and makes it a meditation on the human condition.
The 20th century movement to Abstract Expressionism arose from the supposition that the communication of significant feeling requires the abandonment of much that has been valued in the great art tradition, most notably realism and the painterly value of beauty. Conceptual art – which aspires to the communication of significant thought – takes that movement to its logical conclusion – the abandonment of the perceptual in itself. In ‘Escape’ Ozibko has shown that this is not so. For those who have eyes to see, naturalistic depiction can do the same, and by preserving traditional aesthetic values, more effectively connects with its artistic inheritance.

Excerpt from the book Fair of art published in 1936

In bourgeois freedom, art fell into another unfreedom: freed from the dictates of the nobility and the priesthood, it was subjected to the more relentless dictates of the market. It ceased to be a service to become a commodity. From the contradiction between the true freedom of creation and that bourgeois freedom of art, from the contradiction between being able to create what I want according to an inner necessity and being able to choose to do work for which I believe I am likely to receive money, came the realization that the true freedom of art does not only depend on freedom from censorship and from the ecclesiastical and secular police, but above all on freedom from capital, from the mystical space of chess, from commercialization. 一 The bourgeoisie has liberated the artist by making him either a free smallholder and small producer, or sometimes a free (vogelfrei) wage labourer. While this fact is, as we have said, historically progressive, it also means that in an age when the production of commodities is triumphant and generalized, the work of art is devalued and reduced to a commodity.
In the matter of artistic freedom we see how the progressive effect of capitalist society places art and artists in a situation that is extremely ambiguous for creation and for its truly free development. It was ironic to speak of the freedom of the artist, who, though freed from the whim of censorship and the command of priests, became a plaything of the moods, tastes and predilections of a social order of an aesthetically uncultured bourgeois public. All power over art passed into the hands of the bourgeois: a new audience, a new breadwinner, appeared. The customer has disappeared, and in his place the buyer or dealer has taken his place: instead of a product according to the individual order of a particular consumer, the work of art becomes, in the full sense of the word, a commodity, made for an indefinite sale, for an impersonal market, a commodity which the buyer chooses according to his personal predilections, like a wine or cigarette of his favourite brand. Previously, artistic production, like all pre-capitalist production, was made within a certain patriarchal relationship. The artist complied with a wish directly expressed to him by a customer, worked on commission, produced a certain painting for a certain customer, and the subject of that painting was predetermined by that customer. Now there was a distance between the two contractors of the painting or sculpture: the artist and the buyer. The buyer today has no direct personal influence on the artistic production, on the creation of specific works and forms, except in the case of decorative work and portraiture, which are, after all, atavistic modes in painting and sculpture today. The influence of the public is exercised today indirectly, through the abstract dictates of the market, with all the attributes of competition, speculation, and the disparity between supply and demand. But this indirect influence is, after all, no less imperative, and the dependence of the free artist on the ruling triad that buys works of art is, on the whole, no less than the artist’s former attachment to the church, the court, or the aristocracy.The free artist, if he wishes to sell his products on the free market, is obliged to give them such forms and such character as may win the approval of the bourgeoisie. The merchant-bourgeois encourages certain kinds, modes and expressions of artistic production by his purchases, and condemns others of which he disapproves, by refusing to buy them, as inferior to starvation. Art has become an object of absurdity under capitalist conditions. The commercialization of art brought about by advanced capitalism requires that the work of art, which has become quite a commodity, should be suitable as a commodity for all situations, that it should be as consumable as possible, as portable as possible, and that its outlets should be as wide as possible (panel painting, printmaking, cabinet sculpture, without being tied to architecture). The art audience is a detached buyer, the artist is an entrepreneur on his own, and the main link between the artist and the consumer is the money used to pay for the work purchased. The machinery of artistic operation and commerce, almost unknown to earlier ages, is set in motion. This situation, in which the product of artistic work becomes quite a commodity, is matched by individualistic free creation, practised in private studios and thence brought to the market; speculation reigns in the free market, and demand is determined by the thirst for peculiarity and sensation. Painters supply their canvases to dealers, just as tailors supply their products to fashionable salons. In order to make money, artists must listen carefully to the whims of fashion and the instructions of the painting merchants. In recent years, especially between the end of the World War and the outbreak of the current economic depression and crisis (1919-1930), the art trade has acquired the scope and importance of an important sector in international trade. Not only that, but new sectors of the arts have also emerged, giving rise to gigantic industrial and commercial enterprises (for example, film). The commercialization of the art business has created a relationship between the artist and the public that is not unlike the former relationship between painter and picture commissioner, but which is not even similar to the relationship that the Impressionist generation knew in the early days of imperialism. Back then, a few poor, enthusiastic and dedicated dealers, who were friends of modern painters, wanted to help the new art and allow its creators some kind of existence by trying to sell their paintings at relatively low prices to amateurs, most of them no less enthusiastic and dedicated.
The free artist, if he wishes to sell his products on the free market, is obliged to give them such forms and such character as may win the approval of the bourgeoisie. The merchant-bourgeois encourages certain kinds, modes and expressions of artistic production by his purchases, and condemns others of which he disapproves, by refusing to buy them, as inferior to starvation. Art has become an object of absurdity under capitalist conditions. The commercialization of art brought about by advanced capitalism requires that the work of art, which has become quite a commodity, should be suitable as a commodity for all situations, that it should be as consumable as possible, as portable as possible, and that its outlets should be as wide as possible (panel painting, printmaking, cabinet sculpture, without being tied to architecture). The art audience is a detached buyer, the artist is an entrepreneur on his own, and the main link between the artist and the consumer is the money used to pay for the work purchased. The machinery of artistic operation and commerce, almost unknown to earlier ages, is set in motion. This situation, in which the product of artistic work becomes quite a commodity, is matched by individualistic free creation, practised in private studios and thence brought to the market; speculation reigns in the free market, and demand is determined by the thirst for peculiarity and sensation. Painters supply their canvases to dealers, just as tailors supply their products to fashionable salons. In order to make money, artists must listen carefully to the whims of fashion and the instructions of the painting merchants. In recent years, especially between the end of the World War and the outbreak of the current economic depression and crisis (1919-1930), the art trade has acquired the scope and importance of an important sector in international trade. Not only that, but new sectors of the arts have also emerged, giving rise to gigantic industrial and commercial enterprises (for example, film). The commercialization of the art business has created a relationship between the artist and the public that is not unlike the former relationship between painter and picture commissioner, but which is not even similar to the relationship that the Impressionist generation knew in the early days of imperialism. At that time, a few poor, enthusiastic and dedicated merchants, who were friends of modern painters, wanted to help the new art and give its creators a chance to exist by trying to sell their paintings at relatively low prices to amateurs, most of them equally enthusiastic and dedicated. This type of dealer and publisher, who risks his existence and who wants to be a comrade-in-arms and collaborator of avant-garde art, who sees in his work above all a cultural mission and not a means to get rich, is possible today almost only in countries where the art trade has not developed into larger forms (e.g. Prague), whereas where a monstrous wholesale trade in paintings has emerged (e.g. Paris), such an amateur dealer is sooner or later threatened by competition from large companies. Art values are now also listed on international stock exchanges, just like Royal Dutch or Suez Canal shares. An art exchange is emerging. A few Parisian wholesalers dominate the world art market. However, works from past eras are also becoming commodities on the bourgeois art market, whether they are altarpieces or negro sculptures. Art is at the mercy of the moods of the stock market, speculations are made on unknown geniuses, on the fact that the death of a young artist or just his serious illness will cause a price hike for his paintings. It works with subtle and ramified propaganda and advertising, corrupting the press and the critics. In Paris to-day all the art reviewers in magazines of commercial importance and influence are either paid agents and exponents of certain art wholesalers or theatrical entrepreneurs and film trusts, and their commissions are an open secret, or at least they are bribed occasionally, from case to case. One does not write about art in such papers without payment. If the reviewer is not bribed, the editor is bribed with commissions, who will give his paper’s critics precise directives about what they may think of this or that work of art. The judgments of “totally independent and incorruptible” critics are the most expensive to pay for. The beautifully produced art magazines are often nothing more than cleverly edited representational and promotional forms, brochures and catalogues of companies dealing in art. 一 The commercialization of art has reached the point in post-war times where it could be said that it is the picture dealer or the speculating collector who makes art history next. Just as the trade in products, independent of production itself, is governed by its own laws, which are inherent in the nature of this new factor, and exerts itself retrospectively on production, so too the art trade dictatorially influences artistic production, promoting certain artistic trends and driving others into the background, silencing them and condemning them to oblivion. In the not-too-distant past, at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, it happened that enthusiastic picture dealers, as comrades-in-arms of modern art movements, also became art theorists.
Later we saw that art theorists and critics started to trade in paintings, thinking that it was more profitable. Nowadays, everyone is involved in the art business: dealers buy, sell, criticize, dissertate and write about paintings, and since many critics and painters have also become dealers, it can be said that dealers even paint paint paintings. To paint, to judge, to sell, to buy 一 these were formerly distinct functions; now they are all done by the same person. The distinction between the art critic and the dealer has almost been blurred. Albert Gleizes in his book Cubism (Bauhausbucher 13) points to the unfortunate role of the mutually structured art trade, whereby art dealers write about art under their own or a false name in order to deceive the reader, articles and entire books in which they praise artists whose works they own or which are owned by their associates. In this situation, the authority of the merchants in artistic life is growing, and they have gained access to the highest positions in the social hierarchy and the state apparatus, as well as to the rente bourgeoisie, who have become the main customers at the art fair. How the speculation of the art market can make art history can be seen in the example of the famous post-war auction of the Kahnweiler and Uhda collections of Cubist paintings in Paris. In some post-war auctions, by coincidence and due to competing interests, paintings by Picasso and Braque were sold at ridiculously low prices, causing great pessimism among dealers and collectors towards Cubism. There was a mass defection from Cubism. Painters, sculptors, art theorists, dealers and collectors fled from Cubism. In every postwar Autumn Salon in Paris (1919-1923) there were always new renegades, yesterday’s Cubists, who suddenly returned to academic classicism or naturalism. The picture dealers began to promote and lance the Impressionists and their epigones, and the bribed critics wrote of the demise of Cubism. The credit for the fact that in a few years Cubism blossomed with a second, late and rich flower goes to the owner of the Paris gallery “L’Effort Moderne,” the picture dealer M. Léonce Rosenberg, who bought many Cubist pictures in their heyday and ably contributed to the new house of them. By means of a considerable promotional apparatus of exhibitions, revues, monographs and auctions, the art market has succeeded in expanding to an unsuspected extent in recent decades. The ramifications of art propaganda have meant that there is no bourgeois today who is a little more affluent than he is not buying paintings. Public institutions and the state have also been forced to buy more art, as the large firms dealing in paintings and art objects have merged in the era of finance capitalism, through the banks, with the state, with the ministries of art. Just as during the war speculators took ministerial seats into their own hands so that they could better direct the running of their businesses from there, instead of remaining hidden behind the scenes and pulling the strings of political puppets, so it was the same after the war in the field of art, where, with the same cynicism, the painting merchants took over the reigns and, under a pseudonym, orchestrated the criticism and the official picture houses. Purchases from state and public funds are most often made on the recommendation of critics or official committees; these critics and experts often show that they have a better sense of money than of paint.
The commercialization of art is proof of the bourgeoisie’s contempt for spiritual values if they cannot be monetized. The only and very compelling criteria for the “qualities” of art today are: the number of copies of a book sold, the prices at auction, the bids of amateurs and collectors, sold-out houses at the theatres, and similar box-office and quantitative measures. Criticism is giving way to advertising, magazine coverage is turning into advertising, being evaluated as advertising, and the shrewd speculation of the gossip columnist is replacing the spiritual evaluation of artistic goods. Commercialization has driven the prices of works of art to dizzying heights through public auctions: if a painting was sold by a painter directly to an amateur artist who was using it to buy for himself a source of certain aesthetic pleasures, its price was a few tens or hundreds of francs. Once the paintings became the subject of a complex conspiracy, their prices soared into the tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands. The pursuit of profit could do wonders. Works of art as “the highest modes of spiritual production are at the mercy of the bourgeois only when they are passed off as direct producers of material wealth.”/Karel Marx, Theorlen uber den Mehrwert/
At the same time, the type of collector has changed: gone is the amateur, the art lover, even if not very wealthy, who collects works of art in his home for his own pleasure of aesthetic contemplation. The new type of collector is the speculator: he buys cheaply, speculates that he will sell dearly later, bets on the price rise of certain artists like a horse at the races. He trusts this or that jockey, namely the art dealer. In order to be a successful speculator, he must become to some extent a connoisseur. He studies literature on art, such as economic bulletins and stock exchange reports. He buys works of art like securities: although one cannot cut coupons off a painting, one can hope that its price will one day go up. A happily bought painting is not only money well and safely saved, but the promise of a smaller or larger prize. It is the inflationary collapse of the currency that has made art collections a storehouse and treasury of precious commodities of fairly constant price, often more reliable than the gold standard. Owning works of art became not only a sign of dignified social status, but also a solid store of money. Works by Old Masters were already being speculated on before the World War. When inflation increased the demand for precious stones as well as paintings and sculptures, the works of living artists were also drawn into the sphere of gossip.
In addition to the collector-speculator, who will one day sell part or all of his collection in a well-arranged and sensational public auction, our time has created another type of collector, the collector-snob. The collector-snob, however defined by being “sine nobilitate”, without nobility and therefore without a noble relationship to art, is in fact a democratized type of those aristocratic art collectors, founders of family and noble galleries and castle libraries. The snob next to the speculator is the Pharisee next to the publican. He does not speculate in art, he speculates and deals only in his civil occupation; in artistic traffic, on the contrary, snobbery is the object and often the victim of speculation. Snobbery is the soil from which the fantastic profits of art dealers have sprung, and it is no accident that the classic country of the picture trade is France and the chief market for this trade is North America: in no country is snobbery so entrenched as in France, where it is a directly social phenomenon and where its bearers are the aristocratic and rentier bourgeois classes, and in the United States of North America, where it is chiefly the disease of the ladies of a select plutocratic society whose occupation is recreation. Snobbery was formerly a manifestation of the vanity of the bourgeois to resemble and equal the aristocracy. Today, snobbery is definable as an expression of the need to seem and not be, the desire to look different from what we really are, to imitate another social class, the majority or rather the minority; there is conservative snobbery and snobbery that chases the latest fashion, there is artistic snobbery, sexual snobbery, sporting snobbery, Pacific snobbery, travel snobbery, and even revolutionary snobbery, but it always fades very quickly when a right-wing government or a vapid police chief comes in. Snobbery, which seeks out the peculiar, the exclusive and the apart, has alerted the image merchants to the possibility of profiting, if necessary, from avant-garde art. In the memoirs of the picture dealer Ambroise Vollard, one finds apt snapshots of collector snobbery. For example, a conservative snob, such as the banker Pillet-Wille, who was looking for a portraitist and who said to Renoir: “You know, I don’t know my way around, and even if I did, my position obliges me to have paintings in my house by people who sell dearly. I must therefore turn to Bouguereau, unless I discover a painter even more expensive.” M. Chauchard, the owner of the Grands Magasins du Louvre, whose collection of painters of the Barbizon school, embellished for greater effect by Henner and Meissonier, was a similar great amateur, who sold a square inch of his paintings at 100 francs a square inch, is now in the Musee du Louvre, the Chauchard who, “to keep the reputation of his millions alive, wanted the most expensive painting to be carried before his hearse”… A type of modernist snob was, for example, M. de Camondo, who said to Vollard: “I cannot include in my collections works still in dispute. I have a painting by Cézanne, but I am covered: I have received a handwritten letter from Claude Monet, who guarantees me with his word of honour that this painting will one day be famous. I have this writing in a small box nailed behind the painting, available to any malcontents who would shout me down because I have a Cézanne in my gallery.” Also, the collection of Isac de Camondo is now in the Louvre: there are paintings from Delacroix to the Impressionists to Gogh and Cézanne. The snobs are both the “precieuses ridicules” and the “precieuses radicales” of today’s artistic life. 一 Where the collector has turned into an art market gambler or a snob, another traditional figure of the artistic tragicomedy, the patron, has necessarily changed as well. The Maecenas, as he is traditionally and perhaps idealized by history, was a connoisseur, a man of learning, a true amateur, who more or less generously supported artists and art with a certain refinement. The bourgeois patrons are connoisseurs of wines rather than of paintings; they are, again, mostly snobs, who believe that to understand art and to criticize it has become the “right of man,” and are convinced of their inalienable right to judge art according to their backward, unprofessional, semi-metaphysical views of art and beauty. Some patrons maintain ballerinas; others, less selfish, will occasionally pay the debts of some bankrupt artistic enterprise; and others will eventually donate a portrait of their wife by a famous sculptor to the municipal museum. The commercialization of artistic life has relegated works of art to commodities, critics to agents and promoters, and artists often to wage laborers. Capitalism has succeeded in making even artistic creation “production work” a money-making machine. While painters have not been dispossessed of their brushes, palettes and paints, the painter as private entrepreneur could not exist without the vast apparatus of artistic operation and commerce in the hands of internationally organized and shredded capitalist firms. And here the painter 一 like the writer, beholden to the publishing concern 一 was forced in factory fashion to work for his dealer, who no longer bought paintings but also paid the painter a certain monthly wage, and for this wage the painter is obliged to hand over to the dealer everything he paints, but at least as many and as many of this or that kind of painting per year as the contract stipulates, say ten still lifes, ten nudes, twenty landscapes and I don’t know how many prints per season. The dealer here becomes, in effect, an entrepreneur and impresario; the works of art are produced at his behest in the artists’ studios for the purpose of producing capital for him. The artist, therefore, becomes a productive worker, since his work is here from the first subjected to capital, and is carried out only in order to increase capital. The artist’s wage fluctuates here within a very wide range, according to the situation of the art exchange or the book market, according to the size of the stock of paintings in the dealers’ warehouses, according to the fashionable predilections of the buying public: the considerable variability of these predilections often causes both an increase in sales and a crisis in the art market. Alongside this, of course, are individual differences in the level of this wage, depending on the extent to which a particular artist is favoured by collectors. Some work for a starvation wage, others have a luxury limousine and a liveried butler. In the art world, fame can turn into capital and pay great interest. We can perhaps say that fame is capitalized in the art marketplace, that it is a privilege that allows the famous, the popular, and the established painters, the certified kitschers, and the tabloid writers to share in the profits that the golden calf of the art trade pours in. The commercialization of the art business has increased the sales of art. However, the great consumption of art that today’s society boasts of is essentially a lie, a sham and a fraud.
Works of art, we said, have become storage values and well stored money. But just as the trade in money and the introduction of money have given rise to money-grabbing, so the commercialisation of art has given rise to a phenomenon unknown in the past: the falsification of paintings, which in our time has assumed an enormous scale, so much so that it has even shaken confidence in one of the important branches of commerce, the trade in paintings. Image forgery 一 and not only the forgery of works by old and deceased masters 一 is a hideous product of commercialisation. As long as the demand for art was not so great and so differentiated, the production of consumerism was enough. Today there are so many Corotes on the art market that an old master could not paint so many pictures even if he had lived for a hundred and fifty years and painted thirty pictures a month; there are too many Van Goghs, Utrills, too many suspiciously restored pictures by old masters even in the state picture houses 一 with every purchase there is a justified scepticism about credibility and a distrust that undermines the picture trade. Private property is wounded by the forgery of works of art in a very sensitive and “unglamorous” place, and the art market is threatened with grave danger. Just as dealers in paintings bribe critics, forgers and dealers in fakes bribe connoisseurs. Just as there are paid critics, there are paid experts. This is why paintings supposedly by famous old and young masters are nowadays examined chemically, microscopically, radiographically: this is not so much a historical or aesthetic interest, for it would be hard to argue that a forgery that is indistinguishable from a genuine work would be of less aesthetic value and emotional impact, and that the x-ray and microscope could assure us of the aesthetic value of a particular work 一 but business is business. A painter’s handwriting is examined under a magnifying glass like a signature on a bill of exchange. After all, even for those paintings whose authenticity is beyond doubt, the signature determines the sale price. It would be said that it is signatures that are sold, not works of art, and that snobbish collectors acquire collections of autographs, not art galleries. In today’s art market, a painting is a signature of the artist, with a little painting around it. Different signatures have different prices: the retail price of a painting, and therefore the painter’s fee, is determined by the dimensions, the square decimetres of the painted canvas, and the price index corresponding to the signature in question.
Paintings and sculptures have become a special kind of commodity, a kind which, of all branches of production, is closest in nature to the products of the luxury industry, jewellery and haberdashery, 一 that is, a commodity of a special nature and a special purpose. The economic peculiarity of artistic operation and commerce is the fact that works of art are unique, essentially irreplaceable and irreproducible, and that they cannot, or at least should not, be mass-produced in series. Any craftsman can work eight hours a day: a painter who has produced an excellent painting today is not always able to paint again tomorrow. Works of art are marketable because they can not only, thanks to their unique qualities, be the object of a deposit of money, but they can also be the food of snobbery and manifest the predilections, luxury, luxury and social rank of their owner. The mode of modern luxury plays a large role in the sociology of modern collecting.
Different kinds of luxury are always in relation to certain systems of production and correspond to forms of wealth accumulation in different periods of social development. The feudal period is characterized by the most colossal luxury, because the nobility did not use their profits to expand production but to increase personal consumption and comfort, whereas in capitalism the portion of surplus value devoted to the personal consumption of capitalists, however fantastically high, is less than the portion devoted to the expansion of production. The bourgeoisie counts art among its luxuries, and here “at a certain stage of development a certain conventional extravagance, which is at the same time a conventional index of wealth and consequently a means of credit, becomes a natural necessity for the unfortunate capitalist: luxury is included in the representative expenses of capital. After all… however much capitalist profligacy always hides at its deepest bottom dirty avarice and low calculation, it multiplies with the accumulation of capital without harming each other.” /Karel Marx: Capital/ If we speak of the work of art as a special kind of commodity, we must here include, alongside the category of use and exchange value, the category of praetium affectionis. In the capitalist epoch, the work of art has become a means of entertainment, pleasure, adornment and pastime, a manifestation of excess, vanity, boasting and whatever you want. In a private property regime, the artist produces his works for the market, and to be alive he needs a buyer. The artist finds himself ruled by a small privileged minority, the rentier bourgeoisie, who collect art. If he wants to sell his works to them, he must obey their tastes and their prejudices; otherwise he is free to languish and even starve. Immensely robbed by middlemen, publishers, merchants and impresarios, he struggles desperately to escape poverty and humiliation, or he prostitutes himself and makes himself the jester of the rich. At the art fair, the snobbery of the rich is exercised, and the exhibitions, opened by speeches from official politicians, are fashionable gala shows, salon events, a gloss over the spiritual and sometimes material misery of those aesthetic courtesans that many “successful” artists have become. If the economic peculiarity of artistic products is the circumstance that they are irreplaceable and irreproducible singularities, if the praetium affectionis plays a great role in their evaluation, it was nevertheless only the quantitative development of the artistic traffic and market that produced today’s “economic numbers” of paintings and sculptures. The market prices of works of art may not be proportional to their aesthetic and poetic qualities, which, after all, cannot be balanced by a jingling coin. In the art market, the reputation of an artist determines the price level, and this reputation may not correspond to the aesthetic qualities of his work; it may be created artificially, thanks to sophisticated advertising, and nowadays it is almost a rule that the price level and popularity of a living artist are inversely proportional to the value of his work. If today the paintings of the avant-garde of the end of the century, namely, those of the French Impressionists, are paid for with sums of hundreds of thousands of dollars, it is not because of their painterly qualities, admittedly marvellous, but because these paintings were taken up in due course by an intelligent dealer who understood the genius of the Impressionist painters and who was clever enough to store a large part of their production with himself and to market and circulate these works in measured doses, according to the rhythm of skilful propaganda. Having already succeeded once in putting unofficial, oppositional, avant-garde art on the official market and selling at staggering prices works by modern artists of the past generation, bought for a few hundred, there appeared no reason not to believe that the contemporary avant-garde would also, which the conservative public still considers crazy, if well exhibited and promoted in the rue de la Boëtie in Paris, would not find its way into the salons of the bourgeois merchants and the official picture galleries and be paid impressive sums.
The development of the art market has acquired such power that traders can nowadays vigorously influence not only the production of paintings 一 if a certain painter, bound by a contract, was once successful with a painting of a snowy landscape or a female semi-nude, he would be forced to, in order to maintain the favour of the art dealer, to fabricate winter landscapes and various poses of undressed models to exhaustion 一 but also to orchestrate the demand of the buying public, forcing more or less distinctive avant-garde works on people who wanted to buy lemonade kitsch. In 1932, the international centre of the art trade that is Paris was home to some 20,000 painters of all nationalities and races and some 500 art dealers, not including the numerous commission agents, agents, critics and brokers. If we think of the industry of painting supplies and the number of printers employed by the international art operation, we see that the “productivity” of the beautiful today is quite extensive.
In such an expanded art market, the bourgeoisie is reinforced even by those artistic values that were created outside the sphere of official ideology 一 and in opposition to it. The artist is forced to look for buyers, and the bourgeoisie is able to appropriate works of art that have grown even out of the fire of revolting, anti-bourgeois hatred, once a situation arises in the art market where even such works can be well monetized. Then the official journalists do not shy away from the most outrageous falsifications: after all, they were able to declare Baudelaire and Rimbaud to be Catholics and, in our country, Wolker to be a national poet. And so, alongside paintings produced for the art market, and therefore respecting the tastes, predilections and ideological interests of the bourgeoisie, there are also works on the art market which were produced as works in themselves, without any regard for the situation of the art market and anti-bourgeois ideology and beauty, and which nevertheless find their way into the collections of snobs or speculators. The liberalism of the buying bourgeois was not easily intimidated when it came to the possibility of good speculation. After the commercial success of the Impressionists, which came within a few decades of the emergence of the movement, speculation was also made, not without success, on the commercial success of the Cubists, the Abstractionists and the Surrealists. The commercial success of the avant-garde sometimes becomes the undoing and corruption of individual avant-garde artists. Indeed, such is the state of the art market today, despite the considerable price decline caused by the current economic depression, that many modern scalped artists would smile contemptuously if they were offered prices for their canvases that the founders of Impressionism would have settled for at the end of the last century. In the art market, paintings are for sale, but so are artists. Here art is in the snares of the selfishness of profiteering amateurs who not only exercise their uncultivated taste, but cause corruption and betrayal of artists.
The power of the commercialization of the art operation is such that even the industry producing everyday utilitarian objects has seen that the market price and marketability of its products will increase if these utilitarian objects are branded as art and placed on the art market. Thus arose the modern “art industry,” the most typical organization of which was the Reich German Werkbund, which systematically exploited artistic labor in the struggle to control the markets and to increase the exports of German industry.
Free art, which is by its nature a gift, was made by the bourgeoisie an object of glamour and a fashionable commodity with a market. In the art market, art that wanted to be art for art’s sake has been made into art for money’s sake. Commercial and publishing speculation sterilizes the artist’s revolt, rendering the work of art, originally a rebellious field to social taste, beauty and official ideology, a harmless neutralized product. Artists are powerless to prevent it. The art market has introduced into the criticism and evaluation of art such standards as it needed to expand its sales; and beyond the terms “talent”, “virtuosity”, “originality”, etc. the social role that this talent, this virtuosity and this originality serve, or even that avant-garde art takes advantage, for good reasons, of the democratic liberalism that reigns in the art and book trade and that it allows, that oppositional, and 一 much more often 一 reactionary and conformist books and paintings can also find a place in the market, since they are said to be, regardless of their conformist or non-conformist character, the product of talent, virtuosity, originality. In the commercialization and cynical corruption and depravation of art, capitalism’s hostility to genuine free poetic values manifests itself. The production of art for the market, the wholesale capitalist trade in art, the super profits of merchants and publishing concerns, the prostitution or starvation of artists in attics and studios 一 these are the open wounds of bourgeois artistic culture:
“Later came a time when everything that people had hitherto considered unsellable became an object of exchange, of chitchat, could be alienated. It is a time in which everything began to be traded 一 even things that had hitherto been handed down but never exchanged, that had been given as gifts but never sold, that had been acquired but never bought virtue, love, conviction, conscience, etc. 一 in short, everything eventually became an object of trade. It is an age of universal corruption, of universal marketability, or, to speak in terms of political economy, an age when everything, moral and physical, has become a commercial value, and is brought to the market in order to estimate its value as accurately as possible.” /Karel Marx,Das Elend der Philosophie./