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| Barry Avrich - Photograph - (Fernando Morales/The Globe and Mail) |
I'm not surprized at all to hear this story today about the so called 'art world' that Canadian multi-talented film maker Barry Avrich calls "Pump and Dump", but this situation always makes me want to scream, giving me a sickening feeling in the pit of my stomach.
A few years back, I'd heard another similar description of the existing corruption, present in the so called art world. I prefer to call it the art market, which the art world has become, because it's all about the money not the art.
Jerry Saltz wrote a great article, and he calls it art flipping, and the biggest art flipper of all he says, is Stefan Simchowitz, who he's deemed the Sith Lord. New York Times writer, Christopher Glazck has called him the patron Satan of the art world, and Sarah Thorton compared Simchowitz by describing him as the Donald Trump of the art world.
All this name calling might sound funny, but the reality is it's all sadly true, and I so wish it weren't. I wish people purchased art, truly for the love of art, not for the edification of money. But as long as we have art capitalists, I'll call them art pimps, who are such good experts at knowing how to inflate the price of art for their own greedy gain, not for the sake and love of art or artist's, but for capital gain alone, it's only going to get worse, before it ever gets better.
2 comments:
Art for money rather than beauty and feeling is a sure way to plant a dagger in its heart. I can see how it got this way, with so much emphasis put on the artist to crank out works and the capitalist society we live in.
A very true statement you make about the dagger in the heart Bev.
Most artists, myself included aren't hell bent on getting rich. We simply want to make a good living at creating art work and doing something we love, because we value greatly the creative life, and believe it's important to this f'd up old world!
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