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From an economic point of view, Vincent Van Gogh is something of a paradox. During his lifetime he was penniless and absolutely dependent on his brother Theo, and he earned virtually nothing from his art. Vincent died young, and when Theo also died shortly thereafter Vincent's oeuvre was essentially worthless, and Theo's investment could only have been regarded as a bad one, motivated by feelings of charity or family solidarity.
Van Gogh painted a number of excellent sunflower pictures
Nowadays single Van Gogh works sell for fifty million dollars or more, and by simple processes of multiplication we can conclude that his entire body of work is worth several billion dollars.Thus, Van Gogh's average annual value-added during his short career must have been several hundred million dollars. So you have to ask yourself -- where was this money during Van Gogh's lifetime? Where did this value come from, since it simply didn't exist in Van Gogh's time, when the paintings were actually being painted? Considering that he and Theo never saw any of it, from an economist's point of view weren't they just a couple of suckers? People still make good livings off Van Gogh, but he couldn't make a living himself. He was a pitiful loser in the struggle for survival, whereas art dealers, as they themselves very well know, are the triumphant victors. (Kenneth Rexroth noted long ago that used-car dealers would go to jail if their business practices were as shady as those of art dealers). Pablo Picasso learned from Van Gogh's example and capitalized himself very well. A great, prolific and extremely versatile artist, he had a fine business sense and was a pioneer both in the way he brand-named himself and in the way he reinvented himself from time to time, thus creating new product which could be sold to people even if they already owned earlier product. With Picasso the living artist hit the big time.
Picasso had many important relationships with women
Picasso made little attempt to flatter the subjects of his portraits Andy Warhol was the third stage of the evolution of the artist. Van Gogh was a talented artist who was, in business terms, a chump. Picasso was a talented artist who had a keen sense of publicity and was alert to business trends. Warhol bypassed the talent part entirely, and while Picasso's self-invention sometimes involved gimmicks or labels, Warhol was all gimmick, all the time. His trademarks were silk screen, clashing colors, and the appropriation of images from popular culture, and he never varied them much. Warhol did not have to rely on actual artistic production; he vitalized his career with a vigorous stancing strategy in the worlds of fashion, high society and the media.
For as-yet-unknown reasons, cows had a special importance for Warhol.
Marilyn Monroe was a
twentieth-century actress who was reputed to have had an affair
By now the commercial formulae of art have been standardized. Every new artist is a rebel rejecting the conventions of society, and it's almost always the same conventions. Ordinary life is decontextualized and disenchanted. Contraries are juxtaposed and the normal is framed to seem strange. In commercial youth culture the sexual coming-of-age, which is exciting and somewhat frightening in every society, becomes the rejection of society rather than just the ritual transition to adulthood via the violation of sexual taboos which in reality apply only to children. Generation after generation, we are continually being liberated over and over again from the same old taboos. To paraphrase Stephen Daedelus, liberation is a nightmare which we are trying to escape. In this process, successful art revolutionaries normally end up counting their investments like Picasso, and their surviving followers, the ones that didn't take the message all that seriously, as a rule slide into forms of normalcy only slightly different those those of their parents. (Van Gogh is not really a tempting model). Commercial youth rebellion, by encouraging young people to reject the values of their parents, actually makes them more malleable and easier to fit into the newer, cheesier world which market forces are creating. As a case in point, the late Frank Zappa was actually a skilled and talented musician, but he talked far too much about the liberating potential of his new, new ideas. No one has ever been able to tell what Zappa's new ideas were, whether on social questions or musically. Socially he seems to have thought that freedom is a good thing and that drugs are a bad thing -- not exactly bold statements. Musically, all the elements of his work -- dada, blues, bebop, neoclassical and occasionally atonal harmonies, electronic music, Bulgarian rhythm, rock and roll, cabaret, etc. -- were well-established by the time Zappa's first record came out (and in most cases, half a century before that time). He was fluent at all of these styles but revolutionized none of them. (And don't say that his genius was in the juxtaposition of these different styles, because pastiche is one of the cliches of dada). We have to give credit to Zappa for providing an escape for people who wanted get away from the vast stupidity of the youth culture of the Sixties without going completely mainstream, but it's hard to say that he changed much of anything. (But new Zappas will continue to be born forever.) Back to the original question. When Van Gogh died a lot of cash was tied up in academic paintings done by people no one has heard of since. Not long after his death, cash started flowing away from these paintings toward Van Gogh's paintings. The academic paintings were stranded as historical curiosities, whereas Van Gogh's paintings can now be used as security to get hefty loans from major banks. So if we ask ourselves "Where was the cash value of Vincent Van Gogh's paintings during his lifetime?", the answer is simple. It was wherever the cash value of Andy Warhol's paintings will have gone a century from now, when people will be able to go to garage sales and spend $5 or so to buy one of the original prints Warhol cranked out. Addendum: Apparently gimmicks are "intellectual property" and can be copyrighted. John Cage's " 4' 33" " consisted of four minutes and 33 seconds of silence. A nice Dada move in a concert where people expect something rather than nothing. But apparently a musician who inserted a minute of silence into a piece, (with explicit reference to Cage), is going to have to pay hefty royalties to Cage's estate. I already knew that the world is ruled by lawyers, financiers, and the media. But I wasn't quite sure whether Dadaists were on the team. They are.
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