Category Archives: Visual Art

General, Vernon Peterson, Visual Art

Thirteen ways of looking at The New Yorker

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“It is never entirely safe to laugh at the metaphysics of the man-in-the-street.”
— J.W. Dunne, An Experiment With Time

I’ve spent three weeks in a state of distraction. Ten minutes here and there, cracks in time, I browsed the summer fiction issue of The New Yorker (June 9 & 16, 2008). I found several scattered signs of our times.

1. Peter Schjeldahl on a Jeff Koons retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago. Koons is a “major artist,” one of those who can “X-ray the cultures that give rise to them,” Schjeldahl begins portentously. But the culture that gives this particular rise is one in which “intelligence is obsolete.” Koons’ iconic “product line” sculptures–the latest of which, a huge steel heart, looks “incredibly costly” and “as sweet as dime-store perfume”–are turned out in a factory employing some 90 assistants. (“Rabbit,” shown here, is a stainless-steel cast of an inflatable bunny.) The steel heart, chirps Schjeldahl, “apostrophizes our present era of plutocratic democracy, sinking scads of money in a gesture of solidarity with lower-class taste.” And that major artist, X-ray vision-ness? “We might wish for a better artist to manifest our time, but that would probably amount to wanting a better time.”

2. Annie Proulx, “Tits-Up in a Ditch.” This is the sloppily-tricked-out, unreinforced Humvee underbelly of the want-of-a-better-time-to-live-through. A story about Dick Cheney’s Wyoming and Dick Cheney’s Iraq War, in which a young woman, Dakotah, begins her “descent into the dark, watery mud” of our time, when she discovers that the only words she has to describe her Iraq experience are the gnawed-end clichés of the grandfather she hates.

3. Ron Chast cartoon book: “How to Live on One Hour of Sleep Per Night.”
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General, Visual Art

Friday Scatter: Back to business

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So, yes, Scatter had a momentary, um, hiatus. Yeah, that’s the ticket. Actually, we were up in Seattle, lots of us, and we took hundreds of slides! There we are with Gramps splashing in the pool. Uh, Gramps? Pull up the trunks. Yeesh!

Anyway, the best thing about traveling, even just up I-5 a ways, is coming back and telling your dear friends all about it. Which would be you. Stop that cringing once and for all! This is going to be quick…

Northwest African American Museum: Part of a reconverted school in Seattle, this museum is small — and almost perfect in its way. Its first show features the art of Jacob Lawrence (who moved to Seattle in 1970) and James W. Washington Jr., a neat pairing, both deeply interested in the African American history and daily life. But for me the real revelation was the permanent exhibit, most of which is a big timeline of African American history in the Northwest. Dense with information and photographs, it does an excellent job of conveying basic knowledge — the faces of early black settlers, the churches they built, what their lives were like. But then it brings us back to the present with video interviews with present African American residents of Seattle, Portland and Yakima, who talk about what it’s like to live here now. It’s great stuff. I would say Portland should have a museum like it, but this one has taken since 1981 to build (it opened in March), so maybe it’s best to concentrate on this excellent beginning.

Wing Luke Asian Museum: The new building of this museum is also excellent — a conversion by architect Rick Sundberg of an old tenement into a light, airy museum that still reminds us of the tenement it used to be. But the Wing Luke could take its cue from the African American museum on coming up with a clear historical timeline of Asian American history in the Northwest, although it should work well as a community meeting place. Another Seattle artist, sculptor George Tsutakawa, is featured here, though perhaps not given enough space. The best idea? Moving the shelves and counters from a Chinese store that opened in 1910, the Yick Fung Company, and re-installing them stocked with goods in the new building.

Olympic Sculpture Park: OK, you already know about this, right? Sculpture by the likes of Louise Bourgeois, Richard Serra, Tony Smith, Louise Nevelson, Mark di Suvero, Anthony Caro, Alexander Caro, etc., in a new park overlooking Puget Sound and staring straight at the Olympic Mountains? Some of the moments are beautiful: In a clearing of white Aspens nests a large black Tony Smith rectangle that creates its own clearing inside the clearing, an arena inside an arena. But maybe it’s best as an “urban renewal” project. The park straddles and spans a major arterial and a railroad track, reframes and reconditions them, and then gives us a great view across the Sound. A bit of urban design genius by Marion Weiss and Michael Manfredi.

Barry Johnson, General, Visual Art

TJ Norris: signs and no-signs

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Let’s say you’ve just gotten back from a weekend in Seattle, taken for the sweetest of reasons (a wedding!), hurried back actually, because you’d waited until the last possible day to see the TJ Norris installation, Infinitus, at the New American Art Union. A long drive, after a couple of long days, which also included a visit to the Olympic Sculpture Park, and that was on your mind as you walked across I-84 from Northeast Portland to the gallery. Because that’s how we often arrive at our art experiences. After long drives. After long days. With other stuff, even other art, on our minds.

You take the Norris video installation lying down, facing upward at two screens suspended from the ceiling, which show different portions of a 71 minute video loop. Actually, those inclined benches are pretty comfortable and they have pillow-like substance at the top where your head goes. You enter the gallery, get your bearings and take a bench. I was alone most of the time on Sunday, the two screens flickering above me. At first they both had automobile imagery going, one of highway traffic shot from above and the other of traffic shot from the side through the diamonds of a chain link fence. So, my pulse still elevated from the walk and the lanes of I-84 on my mind, I immediately began to think of cars, mostly about how boring they were and that this as much as their destructive effects on cities and the environment was good enough reason to seriously limit their use. Seriously. TJ Norris’s installation has nothing to do with that, at least I don’t think so, but “boring” is a good thing to remember, boring as in “mundane.” The installation itself isn’t boring, of course. I found the experience that it offered just the opposite, once my pulse rate slowed and I stopped thinking about cars.

I situated myself on a bench between the two screens, the better to watch both. That was difficult at first, my attention diverted, eyes darting one way then the other. What did I see? I think the most lasting impression is “movement.” Images in motion. Some of them were abstract — tiny lights flickering and fluttering or shapes morphing across the screen. Bubbling emulsions. These passages could last quite a while. The cars, yes, and other “real” objects or places. Long corridors that the camera wanders down. A disco ball. A convex outdoor mirror, the kind they use to help you see around corners sometimes. Shadows of strange objects. Escalator stairs in motion. Buildings and steel “structures.” A close-up of a plant that, as the camera pulls back, is revealed to be behind a barbed wire fence. And speaking of barbed wire, razor wire. Quite a bit of razor wire. This list could go on, but just imagine these things moving along at a good clip though often in long takes, so you can “watch” the motion.

Nothing happens.

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Bob Hicks, Dance, Environment, Film, General, Music, Visual Art

Scatter friends go out on the town

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With the summer solstice having hit town at precisely 4:59 p.m. Friday — was that a sylph we saw cavorting in the woods? — it’s a semi-beautiful weekend here in Portland, Oregon.

All right, clouds are moving in. Yet we are undaunted. Some cool things are happening around and out of town involving Friends of Art Scatter (this is not an official organization, but we like the sound of it, though not as much as we like the sound of “The Loyal Order of Moose”) and we would be remiss not to fill you in on the upcoming action. Some of these are this-weekend-only opportunities, so get on your dancing shoes, and don’t let the door hit you on your way out of the house.

Subversive operatics at Someday Lounge: We like Opera Theater Oregon. How much? Read our report on OTO’s winter production of “Carmen,” sung live to a screening of Cecil B. DeMille‘s 1915 silent-movie version of the Bizet opera. So we are happy to report that this seat-of-the-pants company, which dares to believe that opera ought to be fun (its motto is “Making Opera Safe for America”), is throwing a one-night wingding Saturday at Someday Lounge to show off its new season, raise a little money (there’ll be a silent auction) and generally blow the art form’s reputation for stuffiness all to hell.

“Gypsies, Tramps & Thieves” will preview the three-show season of Gian-Carlo Menotti’s “The Medium” (paired with a 10-minute original called “The Head of Mata Hari”) in October, “Camille Traviata” (music from Verdi’s opera accompanying the 1921 silent-movie “Camille” with Alla Nazimova and Rudolph Valentino) in February ’09, and “Das Rheingold” (a scrunching-together of the Wagnerian wallbanger with an episode of television’s “Baywatch”) in June ’09. All shows at the Someday Lounge, where you can drink to all that.

Bonus attraction Saturday night: OTO performs Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody” with Classical Revolution PDX and Karaoke From Hell. Ouch, we think.

7 p.m. Saturday, Someday Lounge. $25, $40/couple, 10 bucks if you just show up for the after-party from 9 until the cows come home.

Loie Fuller in the Columbia Gorge: Maryhill Museum of Art, our favorite concrete castle on a cliff with a backside view of Mt. Hood within easy driving distance of Portland (see our report on its affiliated Stonehenge replica) was established by visionary engineering entrepeneur Sam Hill as his home and the center of what he hoped would be an agricultural utopia. That failed, but three of his far-flung friends — Queen Marie of Romania, San Francisco dowager Alma de Bretteville Spreckels (wife of the sugar king) and Loie Fuller, the American girl who became an interpretive dance sensation in Paris — turned the place into one of America’s unlikeliest, and quirkiest, art museums.

On Saturday Maryhill is sponsoring a day-long series of events in celebration of Fuller’s life and art, to culminate in an evening performance in the nearby city of The Dalles by the New York company Jody Sperling and Time Lapse Dance, which will perform three dances inspired by Fuller. 7 p.m. Saturday at At the Dalles-Wahtonka High School Auditorium,
220 E. 10th Street, The Dalles; $7-$10.

Looks like a swell day trip, and if you need a break, some good wineries are nearby. The mammoth Maryhill Winery is just down the road from the museum; we’re also partial to the little, high-quality Syncline Cellars in nearby Lyle, Wash. (The poster shown here, part of the museum’s permanent collection, is by Alfred Choubrac, who with his brother Leon was one of Paris’ first poster designers in the 1880s, anticipating Toulouse-Lautrec. She’s probably doing Le Papillon, her butterfly dance.)

Glass at the Portland Japanese Garden: As many of you know, Portland is Glass City, U.S.A. this summer, with a major retrospective of the work of contemporary master Klaus Moje at the Portland Art Museum through Sept. 7, the annual international conference of the Glass Art Society this weekend, and glass work on view at about 40 galleries and other spots around town.

One of those “other” spots is the beautiful and soul-refreshing Portland Japanese Garden, where work by six Japanese or Japanese American glass artists is on view. The work of five (including onetime Moje students Yoko Yagi and Etsuko Nishi) are inside the Pavilion through June 30. But bigger-scale outdoor installations by one of our favorite artists, Jun Kaneko, remain on the grounds through July 31. “This Kaneko piece seems as if it has always been in the Garden,” Diane Durston says of the serene glass bridge in the photo above. We first got to know Durston, the garden’s curator of culture, art and education, when she was the director of education for the Portland Art Museum, and we trust her taste and enthusiasms.

The return of Chamber Music Northwest: One of Portland’s most congenial summer traditions returns Monday night for its 38th season, and we’re not afraid to say we’re looking forward to it. Sure, the crowd’s heads are largely streaked with silver, but these are geezers (and we count ourselves as part of that category) who know a good time when they see one. Great musicians playing great music under very Portland-friendly conditions: no leader onstage, just a small group of talented artists working on something together, and paying attention to the nuances that requires. Scatter pal David Stabler gives details in The Oregonian; we’re looking forward to festival vet Fred Sherry doing a little Wuorinen and Schoenberg’s first 12-tone quartet on July 12.

Through July 27; Reed College and Catlin Gabel School. (The photo is of cellist Sophie Shao and pianist Pei-Yao Wang in last summer’s “Schubertiade.”)

General, Visual Art

Hey, wait a minute Mr. Postman

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Mister postman look and see/You got a letter in your bag for me

Yes, Art Scatter DOES get mail. Most excellent mail, thank you very much. For example, Scott Wayne Indiana sent us a key. Well, not exactly a key (“this is not a key”), but an image of a key. You can see at the left, right? And can you make out what it says? “Do not duplicate.” And what did we do? Just moments ago with a couple of clicks? Mr. Indiana waved the red flag right in front of us, and we couldn’t resist. Anyway, we like Mr. Indiana’s impulses, so we are not obeying the key, and we pass along his invitation to further disobedience. At his website, Mr. Indiana explains how.

We also received a note from Jeff Jahn at Portlandart.net, which he says is now in it’s third year. Art Scatter feels your pain, Mr. Jahn. Three years on the WWW must feel like … well, we could only imagine because we’re only four months in and that feels like… well, we have no idea. Anyway, he directed our attention to two interviews, one with LA art master Ed Ruscha and one with photographer Justine Kurland, and he was absolutely right. It was smart of Arcy Douglass to ask Ruscha about his use of diagonals in his work, and his answer, it has to do with trains (which will be coming up in a relativity post in August — trains, I mean!), was excellent. And Ryan Pierce’s take on Kurland is long and digressive and deep. She’s going to be a great addition to the art world here.

We’ve gotten two recent notes from Alyssa Rosso at the Tacoma Art Museum, which we admit to thinking is a pretty terrific museum, especially in its coddling of Northwest artists. The first is a call for submissions to the museum’s 9th Northwest Biennial. The deadline for you artists out there is July 26, and you have to work through some special entry site. We recommend going to the museum’s website and figuring out things from there. Alison de Lima Greene, cuurator of Contemporary Art and Special Projects at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, will be helping the museum’s Rock Hushka sort through the entries. Good luck! The second email simply lists the museum’s fall shows: recent acquisitions of a surrealist bent (including work by Salvador Dali and such Northwest artists as Morris Graves, Claudia Fitch, Anya Kivarkis, and Karen Willenbrink-Johnson); a Donald Fels collaboration with sign painters in India (which couldn’t sound more interesting); and the responses of Western artists to the Ottoman Empire. Hey, see you in Tacoma!

Finally, Art Scatter has made some very wise purchases at the Studio 333 open house before. Very wise indeed. It’s now called the Boxlift Building, but the artists, and we counted 15, are still conducting the open house. The details: 5 to 10 p.m., Saturday, June 14, 333 NE Hancock St and MLK Blvd. (with a music, wine and hors d’oeuvre reception). And thanks to Boxlift for letting us know about it!

Environment, General, Vernon Peterson, Visual Art

If stones could speak, perhaps I wouldn’t want to read

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I’ve not traveled to Stonehenge, located west of London on the Salisbury Plain. Others have during the past 4,500 years; including, remarkably, the “Amesbury Archer,” a seemingly wealthy metalworker from the Swiss Alps, who made it to Stonehenge and was buried there around 2,400 BC, only to be unearthed in recent excavations, as reported in Caroline Alexander’s fascinating article in the June issue of National Geographic. Parts of the monument itself traveled far. Some 80 stones, the “bluestones,” weighing up to four tons each, were hauled in from Wales, 250 miles away. Larger stones, some weighing up to 50 tons, were hauled 20-30 miles.

How many theories dance on the head of a bluestone? We’ve studied Stonehenge enough to think it was built for a purpose, but what? Alexander summarizes the explanations, so far, of its origin and meaning:

Secure in its wordless prehistory, it can thus absorb a multitude of “meanings”: temple to the sun—or the moon, for that matter; astronomical calendar; city of the ancestral dead; center of healing; stone representation of the gods; symbol of status and power. The heart of its mystique is, surely, that it excites in equal measure both zealous certitude and utter bafflement.

Its very mystery leaves us free to steal some of its power. My favorite mystery-thriller, Joseph McElroy‘s Lookout Cartridge, has a scene set at Stonehenge, a group of late 1960s hippie-pagans exorcizing the evil spirits unleashed by the Vietnam War. East of Portland 100 miles, Sam Hill built a replica Stonehenge as a monument to soldiers killed in World War I. A pacifist, Hill thought Stonehenge a place of ritual sacrifice, and his Stonehenge is cold concrete, a bitter place overlooking the Columbia River.

“Carhenge” near Alliance, Nebraska is chief among the playful henges, to include “Foamhenge” in Virginia and “Fridgehenge” in New Mexico. My own modest proposal is a temporary public sculpture in the Park blocks, made from frozen sides of beef. In the middle of summer, Beefhenge could speak loudly if not necessarily eloquently for veganism, I think, something in the counter-spirit of Hill’s monument. And I wait for the inspired used car lot construction of “SUVhenge” or “PeakOilhenge.”

The current issue of Tin House sports a photograph of “Carhenge” on its cover, an example of “Outsider” art; that is, art created “off the grid” or outside traditional boundaries. Tin House‘s Elissa Schappel explains that Carhenge typifies the “eccentric, amateurish, maybe even laughable” art “created by folks who wouldn’t necessarily even call themselves artists.” The naive, of course, doesn’t exhaust the rather limitless possibilities of “Outsider” art. See, for example, the definitions in “Outsider” art’s institutional publication, Raw Vision. But perhaps it is true that “Outsider” art can be described and defined as such only by . . . “insider” artists and critics? And if you were to build a monument as a symbol of that kind of status and power, what would it look like? Would we recognize it had a purpose, but wonder what?

Barry Johnson, Books, Dance, Visual Art

Monday chatter: Naipaul, Tharp, Moje

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Here is poet Derek Walcott on novelist/essayist V.S. Naipaul, both sons of the Caribbean and Nobel-decorated literary lions:

The plots are forced, the prose
sedate and silly
The anti-hero is a prick named Willie
Who lacks the conflict of a Waugh or Lawrence
And whines with his creator’s
self-abhorrence

Nicely done! According to the Guardian, their antagonism stretches back to the ’70s, and it was mostly fanned by a Naipaul essay that praised Walcott’s early
work. Which must mean he hates the later work, right? Anyway, Walcott goes after Naipaul on the usual grounds — that he embraced the “Raj” of the English literary tradition, became a snobby pedant about it, then roamed the Third World trashing the traditions he found there. But Naipaul’s House for Mr. Biswas was good! (Turn about on the superiority of early work is fair play.)

Scatter loves a good literary scrap, and we doubt that Mr. Walcott will manage to wound Mr. Naipaul. I have followed Naipaul ever since Mr. Biswas — admittedly less in recent decades — and I’ve actually enjoyed his excursions to struggling countries around the world. I’m not sure how he manages those LONG quotes without taking notes or employing a recording device, but I’ve found him an antidote to any tendency I might have to idealize the Third World, and I don’t think he’s as Imperial as Walcott thinks he is, though undoubtedly far pricklier in person than I can imagine.

Quick thoughts on Twyla Tharp. The New York Times today has a story about Tharp’s preparations for a new ballet for American Ballet Theatre, mostly laudatory, though it does mention her recent Broadway fiascos based on the music of Bob Dylan and Billy Joel. Tharp’s high-energy, edge-of-disaster, comic approach to dance is firmly part of our internal choreography now, I think, not to mention a certain amount of slinky slithering and attendant sexual awareness. But I wonder: What does a world look like in which a choreographer with her considerable gifts has the financial security to maintain her own company over her lifetime as a choreographer AND work on various projects in Vegas or Hollywood or Broadway, not to mention other dance companies? What sort of investigations was she unable to pursue?

Finally, a couple of in-town mentions. We at Art Scatter strongly recommend that you take a peek at our Scatter-colleague Bob Hicks’s story about glass artist Karl Moje in The Oregonian this morning. Portland is going to be Glass Central this month! And also take a look at Inara Verzemnieks’s story on Horatio Hung-Yan Law’s Tai Chi project at South Waterfront — and Scatter kudos to Linda K. Johnson for her artist-in-residence projects in the district!

Barry Johnson, Books, Environment, Visual Art

Scatter while you wait

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That clown post we were talking about? It’s going very slowly. To tide you over (and let’s face it, tiding you over is right at the heart of our business!) we have a few quick scatter hits.

1. Penguin reports (via Publishers Weekly) that its eBook sales the first four months of the year already equal its sales all last year. I honestly don’t understand this, primarily because you don’t seem to get a price break from Penguin on eBooks versus paperbacks and the number of available books is pretty small. And I know very few people who have Microsoft readers (or Kindles, for that matter, though I did see a fellow reading his Kindle in the park the other day, and he looked very contented). Shouldn’t the price be MUCH lower?

2. If you haven’t already, please take a look at Randy Gragg’s response to my earlier post on PNCA’s Idea Studio panel led by Metropolis editor-in-chief Susan Szenasy. I was hoping for more commentary about the notions expressed by the panel and to Randy’s rebuke of my contention that neither Tom McCall nor Neil Goldschmidt thought in the same full-throttled way about sustainability issues that our environmentalists do today. I wasn’t even nasty in my response: I am SO restrained. If i had been, the word “deification” might have slipped out. Oops. Anyway, these are important issues, and your thoughts would be appreciated.

3. I have absolutely nothing on my mind concerning the $7,290,000 that a Rufino Tamayo painting, Trovador, fetched at auction yesterday, part of Christie’s Latin American sale. I just liked the painting, above. I know there are worlds of painting about which I know nothing. For example, i have no idea who the best painters in Atlanta have been historically or even now, though a little research might generate some names (though not actual experiences). I know a few names of Latin American artists, the big ones, the Mexican muralists, Frida Kahlo (the Tamayo broke Kahlo’s auction price record), those working within the Western art tradition, at least to some extent, and embraced by the apparatus of that tradition, including its auction houses. Tamayo, for example, was a Zapotecan Indian who studied modern art at Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes in Mexico City, and then created his own style from the collision. But enough, enjoy Trovador.

Barry Johnson, General, Visual Art

American painting: related links

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Today, the New York Times has a short item: Thomas Moran’s landscape “Green River of Wyoming” sold on Wednesday for $17.73 million at a Christie’s sale of American art in New York. This doubled the previous auction record for an American 19th century painting (previously held by John Singer Sargent’s “Robert Louis Stevenson and His Wife,” $8.8 million, Sotheby’s, 2004). This would have been a matter of almost no consequence to me, even though I would have described Moran’s landscapes generally as “yummy” or “pretty cool” or even “sweet” if pressed. I look at some Morans (not this one, exactly) and I’m immediately transported back to the woods of Natty Bumpo and J.F. Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales, which occupied me for a summer when I was a kid. (But that’s another story.)

Back to the auction. As I said, no consequence to me, except that I had just read another, much longer magazine story, by Ann E. Berman in Art+Auction on artinfo.com, about the difficulty collectors and museums were having locating and purchasing paintings by the iconic American painters. What’s the problem? There were few American painters (compared to Europeans), most of the best work was absorbed by museums in the 1990s, and wealthy American collectors are hungry for American art. Berman makes this case pretty convincingly and “predicted” the record-breaking sale of the Moran painting.

I would even have shrugged past this, though, except for one line in Berman’s story from collector James Dicke: “A few decades ago we would have walked right by artists like the Japanese-influenced Arts & Crafts–era painter Arthur Wesley Dow and snowscape specialist Walter Launt Palmer. But now people are taking another look,” Dicke says. “There is also new interest in regional artists.”

Now, we’re getting closer to home. And a series of questions popped up: what regional artists? what region? employing what styles? from what time period? And finally: what about the Northwest? I’ve always thought the Bay Area painters of the 1950s, working out ways to combine figurative and abstract styles, were “undervalued,” not necessarily at auction (though they probably have been), but by the “culture,” as represented by museums and curators and book publishers — David Park, Richard Diebenkorn, Elmer Bischoff, Joan Brown, etc. (There is a good book on this era, Bay Area Figurative Art 1950-1965 by Caroline A. Jones.) And, of course, the Northwest School, which is really the Seattle School — Tobey, Callahan, Graves. A collector could do far worse than turn her attention to these artists. And if she did, that might have larger importance than paintings and cash simply changing hands, namely, scholarship, books, exhibitions, television shows, feature films. Well, maybe not the last two.

Regional artists. The Third Tier. Or is it the Fourth Tier? Ridiculous really, to think in these terms. It’s hard to think of our mythical New York collector making her way to Portland to be shown the work of CS Price, the Runquist brothers, Amanda Snyder. And she’d be hard-pressed to come by a major Price painting, I think (maybe I’m wrong). The Morrises, Russo and Haley, Bunce, Wilson. In the past couple of months there have been shows of older work by Oregon artists at two Portland galleries. There weren’t a lot of red dots. There’s almost no scholarship. Very few exhibitions, let alone publications. And that’s why that line caught my imagination: Because I can imagine a world in which the name Hilda Morris instantly evokes images of her sculpture (and Sumi paintings), poetic descriptions, argument about sources and relative merits — and the need to see them. We need to see them — and dream them, place them, learn from them. We just do.

Bob Hicks, General, Visual Art

The high price of art, the cost of keeping up with it

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Maybe a dozen years ago, when I was filling in for a few months for the art critic at the daily newspaper that was my bread and margarine, I decided it was a good idea to print the prices of the works of art being discussed in reviews of gallery shows. Seemed reasonable at the time. Why shouldn’t the paper give its readers an idea of whether that new painting by Gregory Grenon, say, was going for $1,800 or $18,000? Why not let the working-two-jobs-to-make-ends-meet art fan know that if she really liked that piece by the brand-new art school grad, she could pick it up for $250 instead of assuming it was going to be swooped up by some dot-com turk because it was out of her price range?

The response around me in my corner of the newsroom was unison and aghast. It amounted to this: Art is for art’s sake. Money has nothing to do with intrinsic value (I wasn’t arguing that it did). To discuss price is to taint the critical process (all I wanted to do was list the prices in the information box). Besides, money is, well, you know, tawdry. I quickly scotched the idea, and pretty much forgot about it: No smudge of commerce would taint the culture pages, where truth and beauty are all you need to know.

So why is it so damned fascinating to read about the high-roller art auctions at Christie’s and Sotheby’s? The latest report comes from Carol Vogel in the New York Times, and the frenzied buying seems to indicate that, while working-class saps are getting kicked in the rear by the recession, the big spenders are spending, well, big. Real big. Like there’s no tomorrow big. “The market is defying gravity,” Vogel quotes financier and collector Eli Broad.

Follow the money, everyone says, to which you can add, Follow the art — it’s following the money. To Japan in the 1980s, to Las Vegas and the marketing and advertising whizzes of London in the 1990s, to the culture-cloaking Wal-Mart matrons in the ’00s. And to just about anybody who’s cashed in on the biggest upward transfer of wealth since the days of the 19th century Robber Barons (who actually seem a bit like pikers compared to the new bunch of sudden zillionaires).

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