The Vanishing Benefactor

THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
JANUARY 14, 2010

The Vanishing Benefactor
By James Panero

The six-month disappearance of Harvey S. Shipley Miller, the sole trustee of the Judith Rothschild Foundation, reported in Wednesday's New York Times, shows us the perilous nature of charitable governance and the surprisingly limited oversight through which foundations, especially charitable trusts, can operate.

Before a little-known abstract artist named Judith Rothschild died in 1993 at the age of 71, she tapped Mr. Miller, her best friend, to be the one trustee of her multimillion-dollar charitable trust. Its mission was to promote her reputation and support artists of her generation. The appointment left Mr. Miller with a six-figure salary, free room and board in the artist's Park Avenue townhouse, several million dollars in cash to advance the foundation's mission, and several million more in real estate and fine art that could be liquidated for foundation purposes. The story seemed to have all the hallmarks of a feel-good movie. But it has taken an unpleasant turn for the people who were promised the foundation's help.

According to the Times story, Mr. Miller had neither been seen nor heard from by his grantees from July of last year until this month, and none of the foundation's 17 grants for 2009, totaling more than $100,000, have been paid. Grantees discovered that the Rothschild Foundation's telephone was disconnected and that registered mail was being returned. Emails to Elizabeth Slater, the foundation's grant-making officer and its only other employee, bounced back. Ms. Slater, the Times reported, had been dismissed in a cost-cutting move early last year. Meanwhile, the foundation's troubles have refocused attention on a controversial foundation gift of drawings to the Museum of Modern Art. Mr. Miller's curious behavior has renewed scrutiny of how this charitable trust has been managed, with the New York state attorney general's office having contacted the foundation's attorney.

"We are a very small institution," says Tim Detweiler, who runs the James and Janie Washington Foundation, a 2009 grantee based in Seattle dedicated to the work of James W. Washington Jr., a self-taught African-American artist. "It would have been very helpful to have that $4,000. They have done a lot of good, but with no communication you fear the worst—that someone ran off with the money."

The primary mandate of Rothschild's bequest has been the promotion of her posthumous reputation through the exhibition and sale of her art, followed by management of other art in her collection and "facilitating and funding the acquisition by public galleries and museums of work primarily by contemporary American artists who died after Sept. 12, 1976 and before March 6, 2008"—artists of her own generation—according to the foundation's tax returns.

As the foundation's only trustee, Mr. Miller enjoyed broad discretion to use the funds as he saw fit. With the power to buy, sell and donate art, he became his own cultural force. Since he assumed his position at the foundation, MoMA and several other major institutions invited him to join their own boards of trustees.

Between 2003, when he joined the MoMA board, and 2005, Mr. Miller used foundation funds to buy 2,500 drawings by nearly 700 mainly contemporary artists. He hand-selected the works—by very well known older artists such as Cy Twombly and several hundred younger artists entering the MoMA collection for the first time—through an $18 million run through commercial galleries and art fairs. His supermarket sweep, subsequently gifted to MOMA, became the Judith Rothschild Collection and the subject of the show "Compass in Hand," which closed at the museum on Jan. 4.

"Judith Rothschild was concerned with a community of artists she could have known," says Christian Rattlemeyer, the Harvey S. Shipley Miller Associate Curator of Drawings at MoMA and the show's organizer. (Asked about the endowed curatorship, a MoMA spokesman said it was funded with a donation from Mr. Miller's personal funds.) The collection is in the spirit of "a community of living artists who have a dialogue with each other." Erik J. Stapper, the attorney for the foundation and Rothschild's estate, concurs that Mr. Miller's actions were consistent with the foundation's mission. "We had long discussions with the attorney general's office about this kind of program: How do you advertise an underrecognized artist? Judith had the fullest confidence that Harvey would be the one to do it."

Not all observers familiar with Rothschild's life believe it fulfilled the spirit of her wishes. "This was the worst of the excesses of art-market gambling, of young artists and helping their careers and putting them in the museums," says Wendy Snyder, who represents the estate of the artist Sam Glankoff. "Nowhere does the mandate mention gleaning public recognition for Judith Rothschild by giving drawings of young contemporary artists to one of the most elite museums in the world." Other than the mention of her name, visitors to "Compass in Hand" were left with little sense of who Judith Rothschild was or what she had done.

Natalie Edgar, director of the Pavia Trust, was moved to contact the New York state attorney general, whose office has oversight over charities and foundations. "Harvey Shipley Miller [has] been spending foundation assets on a shopping spree to buy 2,500 drawings of emerging artists," Ms. Edgar wrote shortly after the new year. He could not pay the grantees, "but he could spend millions on the shopping spree for the MoMA."

Unusual for a donation of this kind, the manic speed with which the gift took shape and entered the museum presented its own problems. Even Mr. Rattlemeyer remarks on the unorganized assortment he first confronted. "If you acquired 2,500 works in two years, you acquire three or four a day, which means they come, they go to a warehouse, and they move to the museum and the museum received 2,500 pieces at once."

Finally there is the question of a single trustee leveraging resources of one charitable organization to benefit another where he also maintains a board seat. "When you are sitting on the board of two different organizations, you really ought to be careful to avoid even the appearance of a conflict of interest," says Raymond Dowd, a lawyer at Dunnington, Bartholow & Miller who specializes in art law. "Usually that is resolved by recusing yourself or getting an independent judgment of counsel."

Just this week, Mr. Miller re-emerged after several more grantees began filing notice with the Charities Bureau of the New York state attorney general's office. But the circumstances of his disappearance remain murky. "He was very seriously hurt in a car accident," just before Christmas, Mr. Stapper says. This account contradicts Mr. Miller's own account of his convalescence. In a phone conversation on Tuesday from his home outside Philadelphia, he said he had slipped on a waxed floor. "I fell in my house. I broke my neck. Then it turns out the halo they put on my neck didn't work. Then they had to operate with bone chips harvested from a corpse. Oh my God, I am Frankenstein! Really, it was just insane. I was so out of it."

Mr. Miller says the checks did not go out earlier because the foundation's assets are mainly illiquid and he was waiting for the proceeds from the sale of work. He now promises to honor the grants within 30 days. "Our big problem is we have assets but we can't sell them easily. I haven't been paid since [last] January." Neither story takes into account the months of silence from Mr. Miller.

What is clear from this episode is the danger of unaccountability in single-trustee charities, which lack the kinds of checks and balances provided by the presence of a full board of directors. "It is really difficult when you have a board of one," says Mr. Detweiler. "A lot of things can happen. That's why most nonprofits have larger boards, so decisions are not made on personalities."

To his credit, Mr. Miller has fulfilled his mission of bringing greater attention to the legacy of Judith Rothschild. Just not the way she fully expected.

Gallery chronicle (January 2010)

Gerhard Richter, Abstract Painting (911-3)(2009), © Marian Goodman Gallery

THE NEW CRITERION

January 2010

Gallery chronicle
by James Panero

on “Gerhard Richter: Abstract Paintings 2009” at Marian Goodman Gallery, New York, “Pearlstein/Held: Five Decades” at Betty Cuningham Gallery, New York & “Ray Parker: The Simple Paintings” at Washburn Gallery, New York.

The abstractions of Gerhard Richter tend to be mediocre paintings and polarizing works of conceptual art. An aura of academic theory surrounds them. To first encounter them in person is generally a so-so affair. There is much to look at but little to see. Once you get to know them, however, and to know about them, you either love them or hate them. (I have always come down in the latter camp.) The artist has built his career around this response. Now, an exhibition of several large new “monochromatic” abstractions at Marian Goodman Gallery has put this model of response in doubt, because I liked seeing some of the work in the show.[1] It left me wondering whether the aging German is off his game.

Born in Dresden in 1932, Richter escaped the RAF firebombing and later the Eastern Bloc to renounce all ideology. “I believe in nothing,” he said. This nihilistic position encouraged him to construct an artistic system out of (he claimed) moral and aesthetic equivalents. The traditional distinction between abstraction and representation became one such example. Here Richter took pains to occupy a middle ground, actively painting in both modes for much of his career. On one side, he appropriated a wide range of desultory images, often settling on the macabre, to create photo-realistic paintings of Allied bombing raids, Nazi relatives, Leftist German terrorists, snow-capped Alps, and burning candles. On the other, he labored to create facsimiles of mid-century gestural abstractions—like what is now on display at Goodman. In both approaches, Richter scrapes and pulls his paint across the canvas to blur the particulars, a process that effaces his hand from the work’s creation.

Self-effacement has enabled Richter to be taken up as both a Dadaist trickster and a top-selling commercial painter. He can bemoan the death of painting while making a living out of manipulating oil on canvas. He can leave his visual questions unanswered knowing that others will answer them for him. A cadre of theoreticians follows Richter from show to show, adding their own layers of varnish. The Dean of the Yale School of Art, Robert Storr, and the Harvard savant Benjamin Buchloh have been long-time boosters—Storr curated Richter’s large touring MOMA retrospective in 2002; Buchloh has recently worked at the American Academy in Berlin on a monograph of the artist. As an indication of what is to come, in the catalogue essay for the Goodman show, Buchloh shills for Richter with an opacity of language that reflects the artist’s own handling of paint on canvas.

In his essay, Buchloh attempts to link Richter with the history of avant-garde monochrome painting. The comparisons seem forced, because Richter’s one true antecedent has always been Andy Warhol. Richter saw his first Pop paintings in reproduction in 1962 and identified himself as “German Pop” a year later. His images of ruin, his aestheticization of violence, soon reflected Warhol’s, to the point where they both painted grieving portraits of Jackie Kennedy in 1963. Richter’s machine-like paint handling, which emerged from his training in Soviet Realism, also finds parallels in Warhol’s silkscreens (as do his exorbitant price tags).

Clement Greenberg once identified a certain style of paint handling as the “Tenth Street touch,” after the abstract artists who congregated on that block in Manhattan. “The stroke left by a loaded brush or knife frays out,” Greenberg explained, “when the stroke is long enough, into streaks, ripples, and specks of paint. These create variations of light and dark by means of which juxtaposed strokes can be graded into one another without abrupt contrasts.”

In his repetitive pulling and stripping of paint, half a century later, Richter takes the intentionality out of Tenth Street brushwork. Richter’s extended output of abstract art has made him into one of the most high-profile abstractionists working today, but he has mostly created Pop serializations of Abstract Expressionist gestures—work where the humanizing freedom of abstract paint handling has been numbingly beaten down and stripped away.

When Richter’s abstract paintings began appearing in galleries and museums, they resembled the rusting hulks of high modernism—another cold-hearted depiction of a ruined empire. What surprised me, and undoubtedly other observers as well, was the intensity with which Richter went on to develop his abstract idiom. You would think that once you’ve seen one Pop appropriation of an Ab-Ex painting, you’ve seen them all. Moreover, the evolution of an abstract style would seem to cut against Richter’s pose of non-belief. It would reveal an artistic mind making conscious decisions in the studio.

But Richter’s abstract work has evolved to display greater thickness and I might even say painterliness over the years. In his latest large work at Goodman, all from 2009, Richter took a series of polychrome paintings in the making and worked them over in a gauze of white oils. Bits of old colored paint show through where his knife cut down to the under-layers. Abstract Painting (911–4) (2009) even displays areas of wavy brush handling that seem to be nothing less than personal gestures. (The title's oblique reference to September 11, 2001 strikes me as a failed attempt to impute the painting with political significance).  

Buchloh goes to great lengths to justify Richter’s studio decisions as just another goose step in the march of the avant-garde. If Richter had left the polychromatic paintings as they were, Buchloh argues, the “obsolete chromatic constellation … could have been easily associated with a tradition of multi-chromatic abstraction that continued to govern long and large segments of twentieth century and pre- and postwar art, ranging from Hans Hoffmann [sic] to Howard Hodgkin, all of whom had claimed Henri Matisse as their legitimizing ancestor… . Contemporary spectators would inevitably have felt deceived by a color scheme that shows no evidence of any reflection whatsoever on its deeply problematic illusionistic desire and unconscious naturalistic agenda.”

Buchloh’s academic dialect requires trans- lation. Once deciphered, his argument reveals its flimsiness. “Problematized” art is great for what I might call “solutionatized” academics, those who spin political theories of the visual world, but I wonder if the mind games grow wearisome for the artists who supply them.

In his monochrome series, Richter seems to luxuriate in his own paintings. The sensuality of the finished work, which still reflects a high gloss shine and has not been worn down through the usual effacement, moves closer to Matisse, not further away. Has Richter found faith in the enduring life of paint? His latest work seems less like Pop appropriations and more like straight abstract canvases. He would probably consider this conclusion a failure. I consider it a success.

The pairing of Philip Pearlstein (b. 1924) and Al Held (1928–2005) in a comparative show makes more sense than you might think. Both artists arrived in New York around 1950 and exhibited in the same circle of Abstract Expressionists. They also became friends. Most significantly, they both matured from an early apprenticeship in the thick paint handling of the Tenth Street touch to a cooler, more hard-edged style. A five-decade side-by-side survey of notable work from each of their careers is now on view at Betty Cuningham Gallery.[2]

What becomes immediately clear from the Cuningham show is the importance of stylistic evolution to both artists, and how well this evolution has been documented in the selection of work assembled for the exhibition. These artists have confronted a similar set of challenges and arrived at different solutions (but not all that different, it turns out).

As evidence of their similar beginnings, the exhibition starts with a brushy figuration by Pearlstein (The Capture [1954]) and a thick abstraction by Held (Untitled [1958]). A decade later, both artists had already developed what we might consider to be their signature styles: Held’s hard-edged, rounded color abstractions (Echo [1966]) and Pearlstein’s domestic portraits of coolly aloof nudes (Female Nude on Yellow Drape [1965]). As if to complete the circle, there is also Pearlstein’s (clothed) portrait of Held and his wife Sylvia Stone from 1968, on loan from a private collection.

In the decades that followed, both artists went on to complicate their pictorial arrangements within their particular systems. Pearlstein increased the sharpness of his perspective angle, twisting and cropping his Female Model on Ladder (1976) against the picture frame. From the 1980s through the present day, Pearlstein filled his paintings with artifacts to make them into more complex tableaux. Held followed suit in his own way. By the 1970s, he also introduced volumetric space, first in black lines on white canvas. In Northwest (1973), he suggests a puzzle of three-dimensional geometric shapes that never fully break with the picture plane. His most accomplished and largest work, Roberta’s Trip II (1986), follows on as a tour de force of spatial architecture and color flatness.

Pearlstein’s paintings from the same time period looks right at home alongside it. When you see their shared infrastructure, these artists’ individual developments stand out in even greater relief.

Ray Parker (1922–1990) was the master painter of the edge. A second-generation Abstract Expressionist, sometimes called a Lyrical Abstractionist, Parker made his most well-known work as part of a series he executed in the 1960s called “Simple Paintings.” Many of these paintings are now on view at Washburn Gallery.[3]

Simplicity is a gift. It also requires a command of complexity. Parker’s great talent was to activate the edges of a simple arrangement of two or three color-forms in a white field through complex yet subtle means. The results are lush, energetic, and gestural but also naturalistic. Many of his shapes recall the pleasantness of clouds. The living quality of the work emerges from the careful arrangement of forms to each other (the color harmonies combined with the white space between them), as well as the modulation of paint around their edges. The underlying colors peaking out behind the forms speak to the history of a developing composition while also giving the forms extra chromatic resonance. In For My Love Denise (1961), reds, tans, and browns all emerge from what we first take to be a shape created by a single color. The results influenced decades of post-painterly and process artists. They remain as fresh today as they were nearly fifty years ago.

Notes

Go to the top of the document.

• “Gerhard Richter: Abstract Paintings 2009” opened at Marian Goodman Gallery, New York, on November 7, 2009 and remains on view through January 5, 2010. Go back to the text.
• “Pearlstein/Held: Five Decades” opened at Betty Cuningham Gallery, New York, on November 19, 2009 and remains on view through February 13, 2010. Go back to the text.
• “Ray Parker: The Simple Paintings” opened at Washburn Gallery, New York, on November 5, 2009 and remains on view through January 9, 2010. Go back to the text.

The Art Market Explained

Why the bubble won't pop for Pop.

Sale of 200 One Dollar Bills, Sotheby's, November 11, 2009, c/o Sotheby's

THE NEW CRITERION
December 2009

The art market explained
by James Panero

As the auction commenced on the evening of November 11, 2009, the elbows of Tobias Meyer, the auctioneer and Worldwide Head of Contemporary Art at Sotheby’s, ascended to a position in line with his shoulders. “600,” he said in his steely continental accent. His right arm pointed in the direction of the current bid—$600,000. His angular face turned in the opposite direction. His left arm ratcheted back close to his chin like a spring-loaded trap, palm out. Led by his forehead, Meyer’s torso leaned towards a potential bidder. It seemed as though he was attempting to pull up the current bid by a long string wrapped over his left forearm. As he entered maximum tilt, a 66.6-degree angle formed between his right hand, his head pointing to the left, and the button at the center of his bespoke suit, which had puffed out slightly around the lapels.

“650!” Meyer’s arms immediately reversed directions. He tipped the other way. On the auction block, Tobias Meyer moves only in equilateral triangles.

“Not your bid, China… . Against you, Ollie… .”

The wall of art to Meyer’s right rotated like a game-show display revealing each new lot. Gentlemen and ladies on telephones with extra-long novelty handset cords gesticulated from the side boxes. Whether watching in person from the auction room or by live webcast several continents away, the art world hung on Meyer’s chain of numbers, his bouncing figure, the specter he was conjuring up.

By the end of the evening, the Sotheby’s auction of contemporary work had added another chapter to the story of the art market. The auction house had kept the estimates artificially low. Their “buyer’s premium,” which is not factored into price estimations but counts in all reports of final sales, gave the final numbers an extra boost. Syndicates of investors can try to control an artist’s prices. Shill bids and chandelier bids always give the false sense of competition.

An art auction is less transparent than it might appear, but appearances are what mattered on November 11. Defying expectations, even after the fall of Lehman Brothers, the price bubble that had been inflating for post-war and contemporary art refused to pop for Pop. A silkscreen by Warhol, 200 One Dollar Bills from 1962, a large canvas of facsimiles of dollar bills arranged across it, brought in over $43 million, far exceeding the pre-sale estimate of $8–12 million and more than five times the price paid for any other lot. Four other artists attained record prices for their work. In a human-interest angle, a small self-portrait that Warhol had given to his young secretary, Cathy Naso, forty years ago, and which she kept in a closet, went for over $6 million, more than quadrupling the pre-sale estimate of $1–1.5 million. “Andy has made me famous for fifteen minutes,” Naso told the auction house, “and I’ve come to realize that fifteen minutes of fame is more than enough.” In total, the auction brought in over $134 million. The pre-sale estimate had been only $67.9–97.7 million.

The best explanation of the art market may be that it is inexplicable, which is one reason its alchemy continues to fascinate and capture headlines. In no other market do we lavish wealth on such useless and arbitrary things. Advanced systems of trade that are usually the facilitators of market intelligence—international public auctions and historical price indexes—only offer a false sense of comprehension while further distorting art’s valuation.

Yet if such things could be measured in degrees, the art market of today seems more unexplainable than ever. The prices paid for certain types of post-war and contemporary art continues to outpace prices for older work as well as recent art of greater nuance. Tens of millions of dollars may still chase after art of dubious formal qualities—factory-made work by Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst, smears by Francis Bacon and silkscreens by Warhol.

Big money’s relationship to “cheap” contemporary art is a recent phenomenon. It began in the 1960s, as Pop Art commercialized the avant-garde—not just selling the avant-garde, but also involving commercialism in defining the avant-garde. Whereas many Abstract Expressionists died before striking it rich, several of the avant-garde artists who came of age in the 1960s experienced a more profitable fate. In 1968, in a lecture at MOMA, Leo Steinberg prophetically observed:

Avant-garde art, lately Americanized, is for the first time associated with big money. And this is because its occult aims and uncertain future have been successfully translated into homely terms. For far-out modernism, we can now read “speculative growth stock”; for apparent quality, “market attractiveness”; and for an adverse change of taste, “technical obsolescence.” A feat of language to absolve a change of attitude. Art is not, after all, what we thought it was; in the broadest sense it is hard cash. The whole of art, its growing tip included, is assimilated to familiar values. Another decade, and we shall have mutual funds based on securities in the form of pictures held in bank vaults.

Steinberg may have been wrong about many things, but he was correct about art’s direction. The point of sale, rather than the point of creation, came to take precedence in determining the primary meaning for certain works of art. In fact, price took on a more prominent concern in evaluating all works of art. More importantly, the art that proved to be most amenable to market manipulation was often work of the most uncertain initial value. Art depicting quick punchlines of cheapness and death shot up in price, while more traditional work, which might unfold through years of visual contemplation due to the complexity of its formal qualities, did not experience the same market uplift. Profit-minded artists like Warhol understood the difference. The crudity and ubiquity of Warhol’s silkscreen process, for example, removed the artist’s well-studied commercial hand from what is today his most valuable work. Warhol’s choice of demotic and lurid subject matter—dollar bills, soup cans, photographs of car-crash victims—further left the value of his art to be determined by his collectors rather than by critics and connoisseurs.

A consequence of this dynamic is that certain work—especially art unencumbered by a density of formal concerns—continues to attain new meaning with each turn on the open market, no matter the age of the piece. Top dollar has long been paid for work by living artists, but this is different. A Titian is a Titian regardless of the price. Today’s $300,000 Warhol is transformed into tomorrow’s $40-million Warhol, and a painting as significant as a $40-million Warhol must be worth $50 or $60 million at least. Certainly, it may be more desirable to explain the contemporary art market as a speculative investment or a tax dodge, some extension of intelligent investing, but the reality is tied up more intimately in the recent history of the avant-garde.

This history officially began at another Sotheby’s evening: October 18, 1973. Amid a circus of publicity and protest, Sotheby Parke Bernet, as the auction house was then known, held its first major auction from the collection of Robert C. Scull, a parvenu who had married into a taxi-cab fortune. The event marked not only the rise in prices but also the dominance of money in any discussion of contemporary art.

The prices achieved at the Scull auction may be a pittance by today’s standards, but many were records for the artists on the auction block. Each new bid was met by a cheering audience: Jasper Johns’s Double White Map, originally bought by Scull for $10,500, went for $240,000, the largest sum at the time for a living American artist; a Cy Twombly, originally purchased for $750, went for $40,000; Rauschenberg’s Thaw, purchased in 1958 for $900, went for $85,000; Warhol’s Flowers, originally acquired for $3,500, went for $135,000; the night’s total take came to $2,242,900. But the numbers tell only half the story. The other was the public spectacle of rapid profit-taking by a shameless self-promoter and his wife—Robert and Ethel Scull, known as Bob and Spike. “The Sculls learned everything they know from Andy Warhol,” wrote Barbara Rose, reporting on the auction for New York magazine:

They learned, for example, how to turn themselves into objects through packaging (Mrs. Scull appeared to have had everything lifted for the occasion), media exposure, and sheer, unadulterated chutzpa. The Sculls transformed their banal, nouveau riche selves into personalities by not being afraid to own up to being all that was considered lowbrow, déclassé, grasping, and publicity-seeking. They made a thing out of being vulgar, loud, and over dressed. They were, in short, shameless; and it was their shamelessness that finally got them the spotlight they ached for.

The artist Jack Tworkov made a similar observation of the Sculls in his journal back in 1962: “New People, like cheap bright aluminum pots. For whom is ‘Avant-Garde’ art intended… . They [are] embarrassed with their own status, eager to acquire through culture what has been denied to them because of family background, race, religion or the unaccustomed use of recently acquired wealth.”

Spectators at the auction were equally dismissive. Drivers from Scull’s taxi service protested in the sleet outside with signs that read “Never Trust a Rich Hippie,” and “Robbing cabbies is his living. Buying artists is his game.” Some artists purchased snow shovels at a local hardware store and began selling them in mock sales outside—a reference to the work of Marcel Duchamp and a commentary on the neo-Dada art- ists being horse-traded within. One neo-Dadaist at the heart of the auction, Robert Rauschenberg, allegedly arrived drunk and furious. “It was only love. This is the divorce,” he remarked of the sale. He shouted at Robert Scull: “I’ve been working my ass off just for you to make that profit.” Scull responded: “It works for you too, Bob. Now I hope you’ll get even bigger prices.” According to Ethel Scull, Rauschenberg then punched her husband in the stomach and walked off. The two never spoke again, but Scull proved to be right. Although the night’s sale did not directly benefit the artists, the consequential rise in prices for future work made Rauschenberg, Johns, and Warhol rich men. Warhol, the market savant, was singularly elated by his prices at the auction, and disheartened only that other artists had done better.

The late dealer André Emmerich was among the many luminaries in attendance that night. Recalling the event, Emmerich remarked: “In my life there have been very few watershed moments. One was the Goldschmidt sale [the 1957 London auction of eight Impressionist paintings that put Sotheby’s on the map], which I attended as a very young dealer. The Scull sale was a comparable watershed. I felt awe and shock—that pictures could be worth that much money. And a certain embarrassment—that the Sculls should have to sell in this way.”

A bubble with unique physical properties surrounds certain types of contemporary art. This fact becomes apparent when the November 2009 auctions are processed through the memory of the 1973 Scull sale. The contemporary art bubble has been inflating for nearly forty years. The larger this bubble gets, the more indestructible it seems. Of course, the bubble inflates for some but not for others. In 1973 not all artists fared as well as Warhol, Rauschenberg, and Johns. The abstract painter Dan Christensen had done well, but the temporary rise in prices only flooded the market for his lyrical work, which eventually tanked. This was a typical price bubble—a short-lived over-evaluation, followed by a crashing correction.

While the market came to agree upon a certain value for Christensen’s painterly content, art determined by the context of sale remains open-ended. Recent history demonstrates that the prices paid for Pop-style work show little sign of letting up. On the upside, great art of the highest traditional quality, from representational to abstract, continues to be available at very reasonable prices. On the downside, the resulting growth of market-driven art looks less like a bubble and more like a contagion, threatening to overtake more traditional styles of art. This process occurs in several recognizable ways.

In 2006, Tobias Meyer infamously remarked that “the best art is the most expensive because the market is so smart.” The quote received wide circulation because of its patent absurdity. A market is only as smart as the people who control it, and the art market has proved to be a dull creature when it comes to appreciating a broad range of artistic qualities. But to give Meyer credit, the market can be very smart about the art that speaks to it.

The art market has a unique talent for promoting art about the market. Since exhibition history enhances value, the collectors of what we might call “market art” have a vested interest in seeing their work take up space in traditional public collections. They often have the financial leverage to make it happen. In this way, the hedge-fund collector Steven A. Cohen could place Damien Hirst’s shark tank on temporary loan at the Metropolitan Museum. The oversized trinkets of Jeff Koons start appearing at the same time in the museum’s rooftop gallery.

Curators defend such expensive contemporary work as relevant to the commercialism of the age: the market gives meaning to the art. Through their acquisitions, international collectors can demonstrate their membership in the social club of market excess. Many museums will even sell off low-priced traditional art in their permanent collections in order to purchase a single overpriced contemporary piece. The public meanwhile gravitates to such contemporary art because the public sees its own profligacy reflected in it—an attitude that the public then feels justified in maintaining.

From toxic assets to deficit spending, representations of value can be more appealing than the solidity of wealth. The irony of the November 2009 Sotheby’s sale is that the returns were buoyed by the weakness of the dollar against the relative strength of international currencies. Warhol’s 200 One Dollar Bills—which was originally owned by “the legendary collector” (according to Sotheby’s) Robert C. Scull, and sold at the Scull estate auction in 1986 for $385,000—is more appealing to its new undisclosed collector than the $43 million dollars given in exchange for it. In the sale of 200 One Dollar Bills, could it be that representations of representations of wealth mean more than money itself—even more than the supposed national treasure that money signifies? As the dollar continues to depreciate, a crude illustration of money becomes a highly prized representation of value. Warhol’s 200 One Dollar Bills goes up in price by tens of millions of dollars. Two hundred actual one dollars bills, meanwhile, become more and more worthless—just like the excellent art that $200, $2,000 or $20,000 can still purchase. Take that to the bank.