Art and money. It’s a toxic mix. Money values dominate art values and art has to be submissive to doctrine and ideology. Its called playing the game. Patronage has strings attached so that the art itself is a form of publicity, pubic relations and a fragment of corporate ideology in the service of what really is the entertainment complex. The museum as a high or middle brow Disney in an overall Society of the Spectacle where overall advertising values permeate the all, from the corporate sponsorship to the galas to the auctions: art is big business.
The rub of course, is that patronage, another word for dependence, is a form of domination and it acts accordingly, licking the hand that feeds even if this domination, symbolic though it may appear, is actually based on the notion of misrecognition. In effect a complicity probably tolerated by a mix of pragmatism and sense of lack of viable alternatives. In cinematic arts, entire productions are organized around product placement. Even if fifteen out of twenty pictures are duds, the downside risk is alleviated by publicity. It seems inevitable that art can avoid dancing around kitsch as well.
---Hans Haacke Cowboy with Cigarette 1990 pasted paper, charcoal, ink 37 x 31 x 2 3/8" Read More:http://www.artnet.com/magazine_pre2000/features/kuspit/kuspit4-16-4a.asp
Hans Haacke is a pioneer in anti corporate art. A culture jammer that does invoke the memory of Dada to some degree and John Heartfield with use of disruption and juxtaposition of context. But unlike say, Adbusters, which makes a sophisticated business model out of culture jamming, Haacke is producing art though an argument, plausible, can be asserted that there is too much indebtedness to technology that is at odds with creativity in the traditional sense hence resembles National Lampoon parodies, but the difference is his profound understanding of corporatism and art as a weapon of cultural imperialism catering to the most conservative canons of free-market, neo-liberal ideology.
---Worse, he has failed to point out the original source of Saatchi's wealth: creating advertising campaigns for clients such as Margaret Thatcher, the pro-apartheid South African National Party, the Arts Council of Great Britain, and many other government-owned institutions over which the collector's company, Saatchi & Saatchi, exercised its influence. About their relationship with Britan's conservative Tories, Maurice Saatchi once acknowledged, "We owe them everything ... " The artist who first brought public attention to Saatchi & Saatchi's collaborations with right-wing political groups— and its influence on national funding for the arts— was German artist Hans Haacke. It was his painting "Taking Stock (unfinished)" that so infuriated Charles Saatchi that the collector resigned from the board of London's Whitechapel Gallery and the Patrons of New Art at the Tate, where the work was first exhibited. In this painting, a mock official portrait of Margaret Thatcher, two broken plates, displayed on a bookshelf behind the former Prime Minister, feature the faces and initials of Maurice and Charles Saatchi. Later commenting on the piece, Haacke charged that the Saatchi brothers' innumerable donations of contemporary art to the Tate were no more than a "vehicle for power, prestige and social climbing." --- Read More:http://www.theblowup.com/springsummer2006/PASTPRINT/haacke.html image:http://lib.haifa.ac.il/collections/art/modern_art/artists-h/haacke.html
…Haacke’s 1990 work Cowboy with Cigarette transformed Picasso’s Man with a Hat into a cigarette publicity. The work was a reaction to the Phillip Morris’s sponsorship of a 1990 exhibition about Cubism at the Museum of Modern Art. The idea being that artists are simply puppets, shilling for big money the same way celebrities hawk and pitch cars and computers.
Read More:https://artblart.wordpress.com/category/architecture/
An important theme curdling through Haacke’s work is the link, the almost invisible shaping of public opinion by multinational corporations by their use of patronage of art to construct an image of liberal, progressive cultural values that usually mask questionable political affiliations, political contributions, lobby efforts, monopoly business practices, tax policies and an overiding sense of unethical business practices. In the world of patronage and control of a museum’s exhibits, there is a power to decide what in effect is art, while conversely maintaining “freedom of expression.”
---1978: Known for his deep research into the histories and financial dealings of corporations and government administrations, Hans Haacke incorporates his negative findings in an art that mimics and appropriates the public face of his subjects. Whether it is then presented to the public in the form of simulated advertising or as reports on charitable contributions that his subjects have made to the arts, Haacke's intent is to link the complicity of arts funding with the social abuses and criminal acts of its sponsors. In A Breed Apart, Haacke's simulates magazine ads for Leyland Vehicles, in which he appropriates actual Leyland ad copy and conjoins it with journalistic photographs of white military officers apprehending black South Africans during the South African government's apartheid rule. Read More:http://www.huffingtonpost.com/g-roger-denson/you-say-you-want-a-revolu_4_b_1167215.html
Museums market themselves to the masses as incarnating freedom in the domain of the aesthetic, a bulwark of our cherished values and corporations present an image of benefactors with a genuine interest in community, even though they incarnate the worst excesses of the creative destruction inherent in their ideology, as if its perfectly natural that banks and hedge funds care about John Q. Public. Haacke’s work exposes how museums and corporations harmonize their interdependent relationships in the same way that government cedes functions now to the private sector in these Public/private partnerships which again erodes autonomy. For the arts, it means exchange values and not patronage. As mentioned, Museums then become entertainment centers, tombolas and carnivals able to expand cultural respectability. Circus acts in the P.T. Barnum mold. Bigger shows under the big tent. The blockbuster. The model of capitalist exchange in virtual, or social capital is exchanged instead of industrial goods.
In a system of exchange, art exists merely to be sold and resold. Traded. Even if museums would like to hide this fact, they a
ophisticated Prada and Louis Vuitton based models of consumption occupying the highest perches on the Thorstein Veblen model of the pecking order. There is a clash of interests here, but money has won this battle. Maybe there is truth to what Donald Kuspit claims, in that we are at the “end of art.” and that energy has moved elsewhere.
ADDENDUM:
from an interview with Donald Kuspit in 2010. ( See link at end.):
DK: The money creates the value. I think Hans Haacke got it absolutely right in this piece he did many years ago where he showed a little work by Seurat – a dancer. The artist had given this work to a friend of his who loved his art – a civil servant. When the friend died the family sold it for some nominal sum. All that Haacke did was track it right through to when the price went up in the 1970’s and who owned it now. All this was documented. There was some Swiss consortium that owned it and it was valued at that time for several million dollars. Now I am sure it is even more than that. Seurat has become a “brand” name. That’s the whole thing – you become a “brand” not by selling to the mass market like Coca Cola or Campbell’s Soup. You become a “brand” by selling to certain collectors that will make you – that have a lot of money. They may have the power to create exhibitions and so forth.
DT: That’s a fascinating point because these people are pretty different from the kind of collectors who donated art for Alfred Barr to the Museum of Modern Art in New York when it was just starting up in the 1930’s. There was a lot more intellectual guidance given in terms of the commitment to Modernist ideals which became the basis for the collection.
DK: Capital is always looking for the rare item. The one-of-a-kind thing. It’s willing to pay for that.
DT: Even if it is a total fraud?
DK: Yes, or like it’s a fake one-of –a-kind, like the one-of a kind Hoover vacuum. It’s a mass produced product presented as one-of-a-kind, standing by itself in a pristine room in a glass case with a label. There is a whole strategy to this – the aesthetics of reception. It’s only a small part. We are talking about it so much because it’s so conspicuously in the news. Art is big business, big money.Read More:http://web.me.com/dianethodos/Site/Complete_Kuspit.html
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