The big fall auctions come up in New York this week, and the elite of the art world will be gathering there for the twice-yearly orgy of power and wealth. It's a good moment to remember that money is not everything, and that bigger is not necessarily better, at least when it comes to painting. No great surprise, perhaps, but this thought recurs as I arrive back in Los Angeles after a long-weekend visit to New York.
No matter who you are and what your prejudices, there's no way around it: New York remains the power seat of the art world. Consider this: an incredible exhibition of Seurat drawings at the Modern, alongside a retrospective of the mightily odd and idiosyncratic, the elegantly assembled constructions of Martin Puryear; at the Whitney, the angry, passionate, satirical work of Kara Walker, who boldly addresses two hundred years of racial injustice and oppression in (mostly black and white!) drawings, cartoons, puppetry, and movies that should strike the American conscience to the core; at the Metropolitan... everything! Greek and Roman, Egyptian, Asian and, yes, Buddhist... all this, along with a stunning collection of choice contemporary works.
Such food for the eye and the imagination -- let alone for the human soul, which needs to breathe this heady air of human cultures as much as it needs life itself.
So much for the context. What I set out to talk about was the contemporary art scene. Because what struck me as I made the rounds of the New York galleries was the distinction between what I call "power art" and simply powerful art. Chelsea has long since replaced SoHo as the center of it all. There, the power brokers thrive in their vast spaces alongside the numerous smaller galleries that line the streets of a ten-block area of town; their spaces, huge, cavernous -- "imposing" is too small a word to describe these mausoleums -- seem designed to strike awe into the hearts of the humble in much the same way as those cathedrals of the Middle Ages. The message is unmistakable: here is the seat of power, here is the repository of prestige and wealth, here is the temple of the ego. You have only to submit.
Thus, for example, the Cy Twombley exhibition at Gagosian, whose proprietor, Larry Gagosian, is most often described in the media as "the most powerful dealer in the world." (He started out with a tiny print gallery in Westwood, chiefly known as UCLA's home town.) Or Georg Baselitz -- he of the upside-down expressionist figure paintings, now right-side up and discomfortingly Hitlerian -- at the OTHER Gagosian, a couple of blocks distant. Or Ross Bleckner at Mary Boone. Or Pat Steir at Cheim & Read. Massive paintings, all of them, inconceivable for any walls but a museum's -- or those of a major corporation. One wonders to what extent the area of gallery wall determines the size of the painting -- or vice versa.
I realize that I risk sounding cynical. I don't mean to. I myself can be awed by large-scale paintings; and the Buddhist teaching that I follow -- and try to practice -- does not preach that small is necessarily better. Those Bamiyan Buddhas were pretty darn big, remember, before the Taliban blew them to smithereens. But size does not necessarily make a painting powerful, nor does the imposing gallery space necessarily assure the quality of the art on its walls. As an artist friend remarked at Gagosian, the gallery space "sucks all the air" out of Cy Twombley's paintings. They look hasty, perfunctory. I guess what I'm looking for is a different set of values than the ones that seem to hold sway in the art world at the moment, where power and money far outweigh the creative spirit of the vast preponderance of working artists. But maybe, on that score, I'm just pissing into the wind.
If you're looking to spend some big money, good luck at the auctions this week!