At the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, there is a piece by Damien Hirst entitled The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living. I call it The Shark Tank. Why? Because it’s a shark in a tank and nothing more. See, I don’t find anything worth my while in art that relies entirely on metaphor and symbolism to be interesting. That’s not to say metaphor shouldn’t be a component of art. In fact, the opposite is true; a successful piece of art functions on two levels, one of which is its subtext. The second and more significant level is the response a piece is able to engender based solely on its physical characteristics, its concept, execution, craft, originality. In other words, the ability of a piece to make someone stop and look.
The same is true of a piece of fiction. A former professor of mine applied what he called the Mark Twain test to each story submitted in his workshop: he would ask us to summarize the essence of our story in one sentence, and if we could not, the implication was that we had gone awry. It was the Twain test because The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was the example he used to illustrate his point. The novel is a symbolic critique of many of things Twain disliked about the South, and yet if someone happened to pick up the novel with no idea of the metaphor at work, the story was engaging enough on its own to hold their interest.
Art can be successful absent any subtext (see: Shakespeare, William), but it cannot succeed on subtext absent a compelling narrative (see: everything I wrote before I was twenty-three). My favorite quote about Ulysses—and I can’t recall, nor seem to find who said it—is that “Ulysses is not about anything, it is the thing itself.” See, so many people concern themselves with trying find out what meaning of this book or that painting is, and the truth is much of the meaning given to art is invented by the viewer and was never intended by the artist. I’ve heard this referred to as the second life of art. The first life is the meaning an artist injects into a piece as he creates it, and the second life is the meaning a viewer or reader, who brings their own frame of reference to the work, finds in the art. An example: the feeling I get from viewing Vincent van Gogh’s The Starry Night, for example, is most likely diametric opposite of the emotions Van Gogh put into the painting. Van Gogh was troubled and disturbed near the end of his life, when this painting was created, and the sense of the wonderment and beauty of the natural world that the painting fills me with was probably not shared by the artist. This is one of the aspects of an artist like Van Gogh that I find so interesting. His paintings reflect a brilliant level of conception and craft, and are so affecting at the same time that they elicit a range of justifiable responses and interpretations. The same is true of Joyce.
The Physical Impossibility of Death… fails as a piece of art, because removed from the symbolism explicitly laid out by Hirst’s clunky title, the Shark Tank is less interesting than just about anything you’d find at the local aquarium. That being said, I do credit Hirst for being a successful artist. See, on the most basic level, an artist is nothing more than an extremely talented con man. Really, what name can you ascribe to someone who convinces another person to pay them thousands (or, in the case of Hirst, millions) of dollars for something that has no practical purpose and whose ostensible value is defined by such vague characteristics as its composition, execution, uniqueness. The Shark Tank was produced at a cost of £50,000 and then sold by the dealer who commissioned the piece for £6.25 million. That’s a mark up of 12,500%. If someone offered to sell you a copper engraving of Abraham Lincoln called The Necessity of Sacrifice to the Mind of Free Men for $125 dollars, then gave you a penny, you would call it a scam, right? How is what Hirst did really that much different?
The notion of value as applied to art, brings me to one of the most interesting aspects of the art world: forgeries. (I was going to use this as a bridge from an essay on art to the review I wanted to write about an almost unrelated book, but at this point I’m much more interested in sticking with the theme of reality and the manipulation of value.) Earlier this year I attended an exhibition of Egyptian antiquities at The Brooklyn Museum which included some pieces that were known to be modern forgeries. The fakes appeared identical to the authentic pieces alongside them, and in most cases the forgery was only detectable through inconsistencies—such as the carving having been made from stone unavailable to artisans of the time period, or chisel marks that were too smooth for primitive tools—which have no bearing on the beauty of a piece. At that level of scrutiny, the difference between valuable art and a well executed forgery seems to be no more than the difference between brand name and generic shampoo: each is comprised of the same ingredients, but one is more costs more than the other because there are enough people willing to pay more for the name on a label.
A revealing example of the less-than-scientific valuation of art is detailed in the documentary Who the #$&% Is Jackson Pollack?, which chronicles the attempts of a truck driver to authenticate and sell a painting resembling a Jackson Pollack that she bought at a second hand store. Tests were run that concluded the paint used in her piece were consistent with paint samples taken from Pollack’s workshop, but the documentary is filled with experts—my favorite is a former curator of the MoMa who reacts to the painting as though someone has tricked him into evaluating their child’s finger painting—and the experts dismiss the painting as an imitation piece that lacks the energy and life (and so on) of Pollack’s work. Wait, the difference between something being worth millions and next to nothing is whether or not the right person believes it exudes the appropriate amount of energy? I’ve never seen the show, but isn’t that how American Idol works?
