If there is one thing that characterizes twenty-first century modernity is the criminality. There is no restraint, it’s embedded within culture, (Washington Post):
Warhol Foundation to sell off collection through Christie’s, raising money for endowment
NEW YORK — The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts in New York is selling its collection of the artist’s works through Christie’s auction house to raise money for its endowment.
‘Endowment’. That’s what they call it …
The foundation and the auction house announced the agreement on Wednesday. Christie’s will hold a series of auctions, private sales and online events over the coming years. Christie’s CEO Steven Murphy says the sales will bring Warhol’s work to people “who never before imagined” they could own any.The foundation says the money raised from the sales for its endowment will allow it to expand support of the visual arts, fulfilling Warhol’s purpose in establishing it. The foundation says it also will make donations to museums.
The collection includes items ranging from prints to photographs, some of which have not been seen by the public.
The plan is to sell Lower-priced Warhols at auction to gain an estimated $100 million in funds for the Warhol Foundation. What happens next? Who knows? Money is fungible, if Swiss accounts are out of bounds for one reason or another there are accounts in Panama, Singapore, Dubai and elsewhere.
This is not to say that the Warhol Foundation will abscond with the funds, but in a culture where everyone else is doing so, why not?
Warholism certainly defines the American experience at its pinnacle (?) of decadence and entitlement, just like Hitlerism defined modernity and its foundational corruption in the first half of the 20th century. One was the precursor to the other, both were artists, both manipulated/fetishized glamor, both were outlandish buffoons who impressed the impressionable, both were psychopaths, both were lackeys of the wealthy, both were nearly assassinated, both dominated their particular cultural spheres: Americans live in decrepit Warholandia. Both outlined modernity by way of sexualized imagery combined with machine-processes. Warhol demonstrated that actual power was never necessary, the images were enough.
Figure 1: Both admired regimentation and uniformity for its own sake. To both, humans were simply interchangeable, discardable parts of machines.
Warhol inverted cultural virtue, art became another banal commercial enterprise, just one of a multitude. Taking money became the subject/subtext of Warhol’s art. Unsurprisingly, civic virtue also became taking money.
Figure 3: How the money is taken is never questioned, one form of fraud (art) is just as good as another (finance market manipulation/outright thievery). Criminals never have to be led, they only require sanction, one form (cultural sanction) is as good as another (political). At the end of the day, the criminals are given their 15 seconds of fame … when they deserve to be broken upon the wheel.
It’s apt that the Warhol Foundation is ‘cashing out’, getting while the getting is good, like the Chinese leadership-kleptomaniacs flying to Vancouver and their multi-million dollar crack houses. The Spanish bank depositors are cashing out of the euro at the same time the Wall Street racketeers turn to the Federal Reserve with their worthless bits of market-paper, receiving non-sequential $100 bills in return. The rats are fleeing the sinking ship, why not Warhol, in spirit? Best to get out now with the bags of money before the citizens become unruly and start looking for tycoons to decorate trees and lampposts, for mansions to burn, for ill-gotten wealth to pillage.
Where does one go to escape from this, exactly?
Maybe the Foundation is vaguely aware that the 20th century zeitgeist is played out, waste-Americana has finally bankrupted itself, that it has run aground on its own insipidity, that it has cannibalized what remains of its capital. Warhol was a primary component of the waste process. Art has been stripped of its artistry … and integrity. What remains is amped-up negritude: graffiti, noise, ugliness, ruin, stupidity … drear and grimness, hatred, anger, psychosis, perp-walk celebrity, pandering, fake-cosmopolitanism, all glorifying/enabling the rich man stealing that last dollar. Maybe instead of selling the Warhols they should be burned instead.
Figure 1 is by an unknown photographer: fashionable German modernist phallus-symbols are driven on a muddy track somewhere in Ukraine in 1943 prior to ‘Unternehmen Zitadelle’. These items were more effective as fetishes than as instruments of policy. As such there was never any return on their creation, they existed entirely for their own sake. What matters is the impression these things make: the process feeds on itself, pointless impressionability becomes an evolutionary consequence.
The Germans never figured out that modernity — despite its glamor and engineered brilliance — sinks to the level of the dirt road rather than the road rising to meet it. The same blindness is shared by today’s modernists. Our culture doesn’t wallow in mud, it has become mud.
This is a brilliant article. You have flashes of great insight and deliver it well.
Art is yet another bubble, and I think you’re correct–the insiders know when to get out of a bubble. And the inflated value along with the vacuousness of contemporary art is a symptom of the disease.
I just wish sometimes you’d be careful about correlating “sex” with the evils of our corrupted society. As we begin to recognize the evils of our financialized lives, a lot of things get tossed into the big mix of badness that aren’t necessarily responsible for the corruption. I’ve seen this line of thinking elsewhere too. Such as in an Elliott Wave newsletter that correlated the permissiveness of “androgyny” with the lack of moral restraint in finance (at least that was the implication). I just think it’s not worth the loss. The battle against androgyny or sex itself has nothing to do with it, just as the battle against women having the vote (arguably another “symptom” correlated with financialization). I know! I’m splitting hairs! So shoot me. Actually, that’s what I’m sort of afraid it will all lead to. People shooting others for having some characteristic associated with the fall of our Romanesque empire. It’s one of the last battles I’m willing to waste my breath on, when the battle to eat and keep warm is obviously most pressing. I guess I want to think we can still think critically about where our ideas take us, as the realm of intellectual masturbation becomes diminished to the point we’re just fighting about a can of Campbell’s soup–and not the Warholian kind either.
Thanks for writing these great articles! I love reading them.
He who seeks to correlate social injustice to women and queers is a coward, a bully and a slanderer and quite frankly, I would gladly spit on his/her face.
Having expressed my well elaborated thought – I think “sexual imagery” is a powerful vehicle both for oppression and liberation.
I could be misunderstood. Those who blame moral and social decay on women and queers are cowards, bullies and slanderers.
The folks in power use sex (among other things) to further their ends. We humans cannot help but respond to sex- and sex surrogates, this is who we are.
The machine culture creates manipulators and gives them power. The machines themselves represent actual force or work-to-be-done, driven by fossil fuels but the force is spent in all directions. The work itself doesn’t matter: culture anthropomorphizes the machines and gives them identities — some of them are sexual. The rest of us respond to these identities. We could choose not to respond but we respond anyway: we can’t help it, we’re programmed by advertising and peer pressure to do so, the machines become our ‘special friends’.
This is ‘glamor’: a symbolic attraction (a derivative of attraction), fetishism coupled to a form of evolution which suggests each new iteration of the symbols improves upon all the previous versions. Since they are symbols, it doesn’t matter if the underlying reality exists, whether there is any attraction or not. The symbols take on ‘lives’ of their own.
What to do with these fetishes after they emerge has never been given much thought. 400 years of killing each other with our friendly robots, 100 years of killing the spaceship we are all riding around on top of … we still don’t understand (refuse to understand) what it is we are doing. We pretend we are helpless, we are ‘mis-educated’ instead.
Steve’s ideas are sophisticated and totally engaging and I can’t help wondering who the hell he is. But my point–which is rarely supported in the degenerate battlefields of blog comments, so thank you Robin!–is that some things that have arisen in this dastardly epoch aren’t all bad. The risk is to throw every baby out with all the bathwater. Indeed, some things arose in the past century which really do deserve to be protected as part of some campaign for a better world. I’m not willing to say that a better humanity isn’t still worth fighting for while the buildings burn and we all get really hungry. I think some of what we won in the past century is part of that. Take the sexual revolution. One can argue that it is a freedom we were given by a status quo that was happy to give up on certain controls that didn’t matter–especially if these freedoms perpetuated our delusions that we were really free and in control of our futures (meanwhile, the status quo was lining up all its ducks). But that doesn’t mean certain freedoms aren’t actually truly laudable. My fear is we end up becoming very brutish and narrow minded in our swing back towards the best values we left behind–such as community, simplicity, personal responsibility–as we look for all the wrong things to blame. I can be very community-minded, live a simple, environmentally low-impact life and demonstrate tremendous personal responsibility…all the while really digging porn. Just saying the most thoughtful of us might have a duty to keep one eye on some of the good we have won (okay, not porn…except, yes porn,insofar as it represents –at least in the viewing of it–a certain libertarian freedom that I value). Steve’s writing and ideas are too damn good. I just see a tiny inkling of normative bias creep in here and there that I don’t think does the rest of his stuff the justice it deserves.
It is useful to keep in mind that the global median income is estimated at $850 USD. Approximately 3 billion people (roughly 43% of global pop.) live on less than $2 USD per day.
On one side of the discourse are the ‘elevated’ abstract concepts of freedom and responsibility. On the other are the bare necessities of food, water, shelter. It is a luxury, we are blessed, to be able to have this conversation with like minds over cyberspace. It is a result of industrialization. The fetishization of ‘the thing’, of the ‘dream machine’ (aka ‘smart phone’), is a natural extension of the aspects of human consciousness that are inherent in the texts of the past 2500 years. It is not ‘modernity’ that is to blame. It is the structure of human consciousness.
As for porn, it’s like sugar or any other drug. While inherently dangerous, it’s good or bad depending on how it’s used. In the grand scheme, it’s rather insignificant, a symptom of the disease much like Warhol’s commoditization of art. Far more germane to the ‘crisis’ are excessive rates of reproduction among the poorest half of humanity which lead to resource depletion. Pop will eat itself. It is a cannibalistic process. There is no need to critique the aesthetic decay of our culture, because the culture will consume itself regardless. Instead of tracing the etiology of ugliness for the 5% ‘free-thinkers’ of the richest 3% of the global population, we would be better served to create lives of the good and beautiful for ourselves. If we are worried about ‘making a difference’ on the shape of the curve, then the focus needs to be on birth control, new energy processes, local energy distribution for the poorest nations, and resource conservation. It’s a tall order.
Wow! Where else can you see Nazi Party Propaganda and Andy Warhol art side by side? Look at figures 2 and 3 together and it makes sense.
I agree with the implied point that the auction is probably a good move for the foundation. It appears now that Warhol’s work and in fact most post-World War II art will be losing monetary value and reputation in the near future.
One big problem is that this stuff is just not as well crafted or as aesthetically appealing as art that has survived from other eras, so intrinsically it won’t age well. But the other problem is that this is art from the late petroleum age, when just about everyone thought the future would look like something out of the Jetsons. That worldview is turning out to be so wrong that its getting hard to look at culture produced by the people who held it. Well right now that is the case just for (us?) doomers, but I’m pretty sure the attitude will catch on. So sell at the top of the market.
I’ve shed the two seater, the house and most of it’s accoutrements, and the art is next. A couple decades ago the art was an inflation hedge holding, but now it’s just friends who came to visit and never left. I’ll hold onto some of the more apocalyptic works, the modernist Piranesi like expressions, our descendents touring amidst the ruins of the 20th century.
And there’s this:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/fravolous/2157523924/in/photostream
The text in the background translates as something like “Adam, do you not see the horizon is burning?”
I’m hoping to buy one or two pieces of art back that I sold 5 years ago. I loved them. But maybe it’s just a vestige of my consumer fetishism. That’s entirely possible. It’s not like I’ve been completely de-programmed yet. Hey, when the time comes and they’ve plummeted in value to the price I’d willingly pay today (5% of what I sold?), I’ll probably still think they’re too expensive. Not when the same money could buy something a person really needs. Time will tell.
So many people crave the collapse with every fiber of their being. They invest their emotional energy into this Apocalyptic hope. Now all we need is the bastard child of Hitler and Warhol to channel the zeitgeist into one more hedonistic mass suicide.
Psyche. Damn nihilist fools. There is no fairytale fast collapse coming to wipe the slate for our redemption; to absolve us of our regrets. In our lives, collapse never ends. We just keep slip sliding into a hell that feels more normal everyday.
Hitler-cum-Warhol-cum-Banksy? or, Obama? Who is the greater show piece of our intellectual bankruptcy? Of a culture that has inverted its core values to feast on it’s own hypocrisy like some land whale at a chili cook off.
A very fine post Steve. Just what we have come to expect from the James Joyce of Economics.
Modernity as a synonym for the here and now is just hubris. Every bunch of Imperial Lizards that has ever lived aspired to be more modern than their vassal provinces and neighboring empires. In every case their culture turned to mud when it could no longer be ignored that modernity costs increase faster than returns. It is one of Mother Nature’s inviolable rules. That’s what we get for biting that apple and learning how to dream of things we’re not supposed to have. We can have some of them for awhile, but we’ll never get to keep them.
A very significant reason why Hitlerism died, by its own hand, in the Chancellery Bunker is that it could not afford anywhere near enough of those phallic Tiger tanks. IIRC from Antony Beevor’s book on WW-II, something less than 300 were built. With say 10 times that many, plus adequate numbers of other modern weapons, Hitler might have died in bed of old age. They couldn’t afford what they needed because they had engaged in a deadly embrace with capitalist ideas about money. Which had been shown to be inadequate to fund WW-I. They tried to overcome the shortfall by looting their newly conquered vassal states, but it wasn’t enough. When an enemy that was more devoted to credit money entered the fray they were doomed. It could easily pay for tens of thousands of the most modern airplanes and enough tanks to tear up every road in Europe many times over.
Now that same credit money imperialism faces its own denouement because, as is the actual golden rule, too much money was loaned unwisely and payback is a bitch. There is still plenty of money floating around and more can be conjured up, but the culture has indeed turned to mud as the people sink into the road.
As for Warhol’s trash, if some yahoos would rather have it than wads of debt-based money, then the old saw about fools and money will be reconfirmed once again. Burning it would be an act of mercy.
What would Sam Green say?
let’s see what the big guns can do to push this crap. my favorite was ‘items,… some of which have not been seen by the public’. oh yeah! for sure warhol was all about having some really good stuff not be fodder for the masses. trust me, whatever hasn’t been seen isn’t worth seeing, much less owning. anyway, they’re probably two years too late to pull it off.
so the once mighty warhol foundation is looking for handouts. they, too, taking carlos castaneda’s advice to beggars: “take the money and spit in their hand”.
most excellent post steve, you delight with this stuff.
Always watch the comedians
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2012-09-13/understanding-the-gfc-with-clarke-and-dawe/4260276
Steve asks: Where does one go to escape from this, exactly?
Peruvian Andes
‘Gathering the Light’
Today the Fed announces basically unlimited base money creation and asset purchases to infinity.
In due time they will be seen as the little man behind the curtain, I think we can all agree on that.
In the money world the only question left is cash or gold.