Seeing Red

Almost nothing that happens at the sort of high-profile art auctions that have been taking place this week has anything whatsoever to do with art. Auctions are not about seeing, feeling, or thinking. Art is stripped bare of meaning and placed naked on the block with only a price to define it. Auctions are rituals in which money performs desire for itself. Art enlarges consciousness, deepens experience, destabilizes certainty. Auctions reduce all that to blood sport for the ultrarich — a streamed séance where capital applauds itself while everyone else pretends they are witnessing culture, entering art history by paying the most money. 

After seven minutes of bidding this week, Christie’s sold a magnificent Jackson Pollock, Number 7A, formerly owned by S.I. Newhouse. The room gasped. Then came the applause: the sound of wealth congratulating itself for existing. A sculpture by Constantin Brancusi, Danaïde — also from the Newhouse collection — climbed past $100 million, while a painting by Mark Rothko, Brown and Blacks in Reds, approached this magic number.

The works were alchemically transformed by this awful ritual into something like casino chips, financial instruments, placeholder trophies large enough to park in a free port beside an untaxed Basquiat and a dinosaur skeleton. Works touted as pure genius are likely to disappear into private hands for many years before they’re ever seen by the public again, probably at an auction. By evening’s end, more than a billion dollars’ worth of art had changed hands in a few hours. I would suggest that rather than truly looking at art, everyone was looking at one another. 

Auction houses pretend this is a “market.” It is not a market. It is a tiny oligarchy: a dozen or so global bidders, a handful of megadealers, several auction houses, and an expanding entourage of advisers, consultants, influencers, and hangers-on feeding off proximity to impossible money. The auctioneer stages this competitive desire in public. Gorgeous X-rays whisper into telephones while invisible billionaires hover somewhere in New York, Dubai, Monaco, Beijing, or upstairs. Everyone else watches as though concentrated wealth itself were proof of cultural importance. 

The entire spectacle feels especially grotesque in the spiritual atmosphere of our current era, where vulgarity has become aspiration and every human endeavor is translated into ratings, clickbait, branding, and leverage. The auction room now resembles a political rally crossed with a luxury skybox at a prizefight. I feel grief at auctions: like something is dying or going away. Or becoming hollowed out, turned into a fridge magnet. 

And then there is the comedy of sentimentality inflated into value. Last night, the 52-year-old British artist Banksy went under the hammer. Beforehand, Loïc Gouzer texted me about the painting, Girl and Balloon on Found Landscape. I assumed it might be valued at $18,000. Hah! He told me it was being auctioned for between $13 and $18 million; in the end, the work was indeed sold for $18 million to an anonymous American on the phone.

Gouzer’s strange virtue is that this one-man, one-work-at-a-time auction house challenges the biggies, and he occasionally exposes the scam from inside the scam. The art world loathes Banksy while obediently worshipping every expensive new permutation of high-design abstraction. Think of Carol Bove’s endless crinkly painted-steel abstract sculptures currently occupying the rotunda of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. By placing this overinflated Banksy beside the blue-chip sanctities of the market, the auction accidentally reveals how topsy-turvy these hierarchies really are: Taste itself begins to look like another speculative asset class — traded socially long before it is experienced aesthetically. 

Gouzer was also a principal architect of the entire fishy Da Vinci Salvator Mundi operation. This Christie’s “rainmaker” conceived the idea of placing the painting into a contemporary evening sale rather than an Old Masters sale. At the time, I joked that this was because it was painted yesterday.

Anyway, the middling Banksy looks less like a multimillion-dollar masterpiece than a saccharine, apocalyptic Hallmark greeting card. It is faux melancholy, prefab-feeling, one symbolic red balloon standing in for human emotion itself. A bad Hudson River School painting filtered through social-media cynicism and Thomas Kinkade mawkishness. Everything is already felt for you in advance. Yet because the market machine blesses it, billionaires line up to perform seriousness around it.

I think of this as the moment when price becomes form. Whatever it is, it’s bad medicine. A Pollock is no longer miraculous; it becomes “the $181 million Pollock.” A Rothko becomes a hedge against inflation. A Banksy becomes a progressive oligarch’s decorative guilt sponge. 

And still — somehow — art survives. Pollock is breathing beneath the hysteria. Rothko opens a void inside you. The Banksy is still shite.