WHO NEEDS MASTERPIECES AT THOSE PRICES?

By ROBERT HUGHES

WHO NEEDS MASTERPIECES AT THOSE PRICES

THREE weeks ago, a table was sold at auction in London. It had been made in France somewhere around 1780, probably by a craftsman named Martin Carlin: a spindly, exquisite and useless object, all tulipwood and Sevres porcelain plaques, the very epitome of the court taste of Louis XVI. An Iranian oilman named Henri Sabet paid $415,800 for it and so became the owner of the most expensive piece of furniture in history.

One polite reaction to this news would be to smile at human folly and hope that M. Sabet's Persian cat sharpens its claws on something else. On the other hand, the episode was more redolent of Louis XVI's time than the mere style of the table would suggest. Sabet's excursion into le gout royal cost the equivalent of the collective income of 1,260 of his fellow Iranians, who earn an average $330 or so a year; and with it the creak of imaginary tumbrils with real collectors in them grows a little louder.

The table is not an isolated case. In its upper reaches, the art market has been afflicted with a kind of collective hysteria, a St. Vitus's dance of zeros across the checkbook: $5,544,000 for a Velasquez; a Titian, The Death of Actaeon, sold to Paul Getty for a little over $4,000,000; last week a Renoir, purchased for $16.80 a century ago, fetched $1,159,200 at a London auction. The list could be prolonged almost indefinitely, and will be: before the '70s are out, the first $10 million painting will probably have gone under the hammer. It does not take a very puritanical conscience to deduce that this involves a grotesque inversion of values, a crisis in the function that past art can play in present culture.

The chief perpetrators of the crisis are the museums--which in effect means American museums, since no European ones and only a handful of private collectors have the buying power to compete regularly in this new stratosphere of price. It appears today that if the Met or the Fogg or Washington's National Gallery wants another masterpiece for its collection, it must be prepared to pay in the millions for it, and prices are driven up by museums outbidding one another in an ego race. This ignores a fundamental question: Who, exactly, does need the masterpiece--and why? A few years ago, the late art historian Erwin Panofsky spoke approvingly of "the unselfish rapacity of the museum director." As time passes, and as the use and function of museums come under more rigorous examination, it is arguable that the rapacity that impelled Thomas Hoving to expend more than $5.5 million on the Met's new Velasquez is not, however great the painting may be, unselfish at all.

The American museum still tends to be an institutional parody of the robber baron's castle, staking its prestige more on acquisitions than functions. The Metropolitan speaks with politic sincerity of "bringing art to the people"--though this did not deter it last October from slapping what amounts to a tax on art education by reinstituting an admission fee for the first time in 30 years. But these declarations are apt to be gutted by the display of a now old multimillion-dollar painting. For what will Juan de Pareja on its draped wall in the Metropolitan mean to an intelligent 18-year-old from Spanish Harlem when he sees it and remembers the price? (As well he may, since the Met is not inclined to disguise the market value of its major acquisitions.) His probable reaction will be fury at the wrong priorities that spending $5,000,000 on a painting involves. Who can say that the boy would not be right? In a city that has a Harlem and a Bedford-Stuyvesant, and is already stuffed to superfluity with exceptional works of art, pride in acquiring yet another multimillion-dollar painting is merely an index of fetishism and decayed conscience.

In practice, it would hardly matter if most American museum collections of art by dead masters were frozen tomorrow. We already have too much art to absorb. Our memories are distended with it, like the livers of Strasbourg geese. Probably no civilization in history has had so much art that it did not make and been so forked by the crisis of how to relate to it. In the 18th and 19th centuries, when art transactions were simpler and the founding of massive collections was an undisguised form of plunder, the problem was not consciously manifest. But in America today, nobody needs another Titian--not at these prices. The right to art by force of arms, which produced much of the Louvre's collection, has been superseded by an equally debatable "right" to art by force of buying power. Hence such misfortunes of cultural ecology as the steady leakage of major paintings across the Atlantic, which the British, in particular, wholeheartedly resent.

Art collectors and museum curators like to talk in terms of world culture; but in the auction house they behave like chauvinists. Many critics have noted how the cult of masterpiece value caricatures the historical values of art by creating an unreal scale of "importance." It is equally probable that the cost for acquisitions does violence to geographical as well as historical culture by making it hard for countries to hold the art they have against the battering pressure of foreign capital.

There is, moreover, a lamentable disproportion between the money deployed on buying art and the money available for preserving masterpieces that cannot, by their nature or circumstances, be sold --unmovable art like buildings, frescoes, or even entire cities of cherishable antique beauty. Only a spectacular disaster like the Florence flood of November 1966 will provoke people to expend large sums of money on saving art that they do not own. Because of the publicity campaigns mounted by organizations to save Venice from decaying into an empty, waterlogged Renaissance Disneyland, it may yet stand some chance of at least partial preservation as a city. But the Parthenon, under the influence of time, weather, vibration and industrial fumes, is turning to sand; and all over Italy, Spain and France there is a slow and apparently irreversible destruction of art by pollution, economic progress, neglect and age. This immense but rapidly shrinking deposit of artifacts and images constitutes the ground from which the isolated masterpiece on a museum wall draws its rationale, and hence, in fact, the claim on social fantasy that generates its price. And there is pathetically little money available to conserve it. The common objection is "let the Italians/ French/ Greeks look after their own art." But a wider view must surely argue that our consciousness of art should be seamless, that a picture's or a sculpture's right to survival is not to be determined by some box of frontiers.

Is there any way of retrieving from the hyperactive market some means of preserving what is not for sale? Arguably, there is. Assuming that the appetites of collectors will not diminish in the near future, governments might well impose a conservation tax on every work of art that is sold at auction for more than, say, $100,000. The figure need not be high; 5% would rake off millions of dollars annually into a pool that could be administered by some suitable international body for conservation and restoration needs--in urban space, architecture, sculpture, painting --anywhere in the world.

Such a tax would, by its nature, be an economist's ideal: it would affect only those who can afford it. It might fractionally tone down today's price levels, and no doubt would be strenuously opposed by some art dealers and collectors. It would not solve all conservation problems, but it would contribute a precious measure of alleviation and diminish art's humiliating dependence on erratic charity. Most of all, it could mitigate the crushing sense of waste and meaninglessly flamboyant consumption that anyone who cares about art and its priorities is apt to feel on reading about the cost of next week's Louis XVI table.

. Robert Hughes

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