 designboom image © alessandro ghirelli |
Going through My Modern Met today, I was drawn to an exhibit at the Guggenheim called “All” for Maurizio Cattelan‘s swan song in the art world. Clever art is always so intriguing, and presentation helps develop the cleverness of the conversation that the artist wants to have with his viewers. Maurizio’s works speak with a sense of the “political” as they discuss the chaotic world that is human society in a humorous and yet emotion-provoking manner. And that he thought to showcase his life’s (to date) work as though they were hanging effigies to his thoughts at a particular moment in time is brilliantly unhinged and delicious.
When I went to read up on him, I came across a Guardian UK interview from 2004 where I read the following disturbing words: “One of his best-known older pieces, a suspended, taxidermised horse titled The Ballad of Trotsky, was auctioned in New York for $2.1m (£1.15m). Cattelan claims he won’t get a penny of that money – he sold the horse in 1996 for $5,000.” And that brings me to today’s thought on an unbalanced world.
Creatives still struggle to earn any kind of worth that is equivalent to the thought and effort that they put into their work. The same is not true for most other professions that have reached a level of acceptance for their perceived value to society. It would be unfair to compare one job to another as you would apples to oranges, because the comparison is impossible since everyone has a different standard for what is important to them. But that one sentence in an article that was describing a man’s life work just screams of the unjustness that we are all facing now.
Crowd-sourcing, spec work, internships, and other forms of opportunities to get oneself known runs along a precarious fence between hopeful and hopeless. I guess it depends which side of the fence you are willing to stand for. But when an entire group of people cannot get a fair shake because of an unbalanced system in a hyper-focused world that only drools about profits, then it is beyond time to develop a system where people get the respect they are due without any need to demand it.
Frankly, I can’t imagine that a bean counter would have the patience or the understanding to delve into the depths of any thought and try to turn their idea into a coherent physical representation that tries to move others. And that those in the profiteering segment of the world can live with themselves as they rip away a person’s due based on some nonsensical value system developed by people with little understanding of that creative work goes beyond belief.
Sure, Maurizio and artists at his level of popularity now command a much larger sum than they did when they started, but how does anyone get a true sense of their value when people only choose to offer money signs as the absolute standard of worth? It’s no wonder we’re in the straits that were currently drowning in. It’s not fair to the artist, and it’s not fair to the artist’s fans, because both sides lose out in this monetary game of art as a collectible.
Just a thought: If a rich man is in the desert, dying of thirst, and comes upon a person who can sell him water, does he really expect that person to just take his money because a group of people believe in its inherent value? I’m pretty sure that the man with the water would probably want something of greater value to him so that he can continue to exist in that environment – like a tent, or a water source, or even something to help him move through the desert safely.
It’s funny that the value of money depends on its location and another’s acceptance of that value. When the weight shifts so that value is decreased or disappears, then suddenly common sense takes on a whole new meaning. It would be ironic if we weren’t all living in the irony that we created.
From what I read about Maurizio’s own viewpoints, I would hazard a guess that he agrees: “I’ve never worked so hard… I have become an employee of art.“
