Art and Commerce in The New Yorker

Unfortunately, the New Yorker profile of Tobias Meyer, head of contemporary art and auctioneer at Sotheby's, is not online, so if you want to know more than I'm going to tell you, you'll have to find yourself a hard copy. Might be worth it. It's a good article: readable, a fascinating fly-on-the-wall introduction to the heady world of expensive art, ideologically dubious. Of course you know it's the ideological dubiety (isn't that a great word I just made up?) that's gotten me going.

Meyer sounds like a lovely guy: hardworking, well-clad in colorful bespoke clothing, nicely apartmented and boyfriended, and with an aesthetic eye to die for. Also, apparently, raking in enormous amounts of money for Sotheby's, including selling the most expensive painting ever sold, though his February auction did not make as much as Christie's.* And in the gap between that sentence and the end of the previous sentence lies the ideological confusion.

Now I'm not one to erect barriers between art and commerce. God knows, artists need to live and I'd much rather see artists making loads of money than, say, hedge fund managers. So it's not that Meyer has both a killer eye for art and a killer instinct for making money off of art that I find dubious. It's the structure of the article.

The piece begins with Meyer's own beauty, follows him to the Met where he communes with an Antonello, swoons over his apartment and art collection, then goes biographical, lining up the art-loving mother, the precocious stint at a Christie's training course, the art history degree, and the apprenticeship at a local antique shop (all this in the great cities of Europe, of course). And there we have the ingredients for a portrait of the art-lover as a young...art-lover.

Then, all of a sudden, just after Meyer's successful first auction in 1997, we are in his office on the Upper East Side in December, trying to get a collector to sell a Lichtenstein, and we're off. The rest of the article is buying and selling and, especially, trying to get other people to buy and sell, with the goal, largely it seems, of making more money than Christie's. Now when Meyer sighs over art, it is "to let collectors know that 'desiring an object, desiring to own an object--that it's O.K."

Well, thank you very much, I'm glad it's ok, and I'm glad that it's so easy to segue from "desiring" to "desiring to own," because, you know, we are living in the triumph of capitalism in which to buy is to live and the triumph of the art-lover is the selling of other people's art. I wish I could slide a Ulysses reference in here, but I'm flagging. My point...what is my point? My point is that this article sets us up to buy into its equation of art and commerce, and that we need to recognize that as a rhetorical move, just like Meyer's rhetorical move, not a fact.

As for me, I'll be fine with the inexpensive art on my walls and the fabulous art that the general public gets to see in museums, even if that means I never get the "very primal pleasure," "soul," and "status," that rich people acquire when they acquire art via Tobias Meyer for obscene amounts of money (little of which goes to the artist, lots of which goes to Sotheby's).



*I learned all this from the article--before I read it, I'd never heard of the guy--and I'm just trying to give you a taste, in case you are too lazy to seek out the current New Yorker.