Are You Sick of Art and Money Yet? : The auctioning of two masterpieces that may fetch $100 million is just a sign of the times

“The portrait of Dr. Gachet shows you a face the color of an overheated brick,” wrote Vincent Van Gogh in a letter to his sister, Wil, dated June 4, 1890. So began an enthusiastic description of what would turn out to be among his last paintings, a small but vivid canvas that today is poised in a dead heat to become the next big winner in the Art & Money sweepstakes.

The sale of this textbook masterpiece, which goes on the auction block May 15 after hanging for several years in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, will be matched the next day by the auction of Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s great scene of the newly ascendant urban bourgeoisie, “Le Moulin de la Galette” of 1876. Both are earlier versions of canvases hanging in Paris’s Musee d’Orsay, and both will be closely watched as barometers of art-market health.

Earlier in his enthusiastic letter, Van Gogh had explained his larger interest in painting the face of his friend, a homeopathic physician and amateur painter. “What impassions me most--much, much more than all the rest of my metier--is the portrait, the modern portrait,” he wrote. “I should like to paint portraits which would appear after a century, to the people living then, as apparitions.”

Time’s up. A century will have passed, almost to the day, when the Dutchman’s “apparition” of a brick-faced obstetrician takes its place on the block. Only now, in the volatile new world of the salesroom and gallery, the art market has likewise been transformed into a strange and slippery specter.

How much the Van Gogh and the Renoir will fetch is anybody’s guess, but official estimates currently range between $80 million and $100 million. For two paintings. Two.

Are you sick of Art & Money yet? Tired of all the headlines about who sold what for how much to whom? Fed up with endless tales of how “I coulda bought it when it was dirt-cheap but now I’d hafta sell my house just to pay the sales tax”? Had it with the growing ranks of nouveau boors who are only interested in bagging trophies, but aren’t at all engaged, as you are, with the long, slow, nonetheless wildly amusing deliberations necessary to a true accommodation to the rigors of art? Had it up to here with all that?

Well, don’t look to me for solace. I, for one, am as sick of all the belly-aching over the topic as I am of all the cash-conscious chatter, which is itself usually enough to bore the bark off a redwood. There are two reasons why the whining gets me agitated.

The first is that, more often than not, the activity of complaining tends to signal the utter absence of self-conscious regard necessary to eye-opening creativity--and we sure need some creative responses to the mess that’s been made. Complaining makes you feel like you’re accomplishing something useful when, cowed by an unfathomable and seemingly insurmountable dilemma, you’ve actually thrown up your hands in despair. It’s far too late in the day for that.

The other, no doubt related reason is that the wailing over Art & Money harbors a distinctly idealizing tendency. As money gets cast as a horrific monster, art gets cast as an agent of divinity in a stabilizing effort to maintain equilibrium. Not unlike the present profiles of Manuel Noriega and George Bush, reality lies elsewhere.

For example, among the odder ideas to gain favor over the past many years of galloping Art & Money-mania is the one that moans: Art has become a commodity. The claim is odd because it’s anything but true. If it was true, it would mean there had been a moment in the past when art was not a commodity, a fanciful time of artistic purity and grace that simply never existed. In Western culture, art has been a commodity ever since there have been commodities to be.

Patrons today certainly don’t write contracts in which artists agree to make paintings with specified amounts of gold-dust and pulverized lapis lazuli mixed in the pigment, as they did in the 15th Century to insure the patron got his money’s worth when buying a picture of, say, the Virgin and Child Enthroned. That kind of hard-core assurance of value just doesn’t make sense in the modern world, an epoch in which wallets are filled with decorated pieces of green paper that can be traded for actual home appliances or nights on the town. The nature of the exchange value is different but hardly new.

And who’s to say that anyone who loves art would not, given unlimited resources, want desperately to spring for the drop-dead portrait of basset-eyed Dr. Gachet? (I’ve got a perfect spot for it in my living room.) The idealizing tendency is quietly insidious. One succumbs without a struggle to rose-colored, vaguely sanctimonious nostalgia precisely at the moment when clear-eyed engagement is most crucial to maintain. Art & Money charges the very atmosphere in which thought occurs, resulting in rather peculiar judgments that unwittingly lead down perilous paths.

Take the Museum of Contemporary Art. On March 3, the museum will host its biennial fund-raising auction. As the tally rises, generating much-needed funds to pay for all sorts of programs that are of clear and obvious benefit to you and me, it will be worth pondering a disaster barely avoided: Cash-cravings nearly capsized the thing.

The fourth outing in what has become the largest revenue-producing event regularly sponsored by the museum, the gala evening may well top the nearly $1 million pulled down in 1988. John Marion, the affable auctioneer who wields the gavel at Sotheby’s high-ticket sales in New York, will once again stand behind the podium and do the honors in professional style, taking bids on paintings, sculptures, drawings and prints that have been donated, principally by artists and dealers, to the sale. So what’s the problem?

Artists are forever being hit-up for donations of their supposed non-commodity for charitable auctions of all kinds. At the Museum of Contemporary Art, as elsewhere, common practice now dictates that up to 50% of the sale price of art consigned to the auction be returned to the artist, if he or she chooses, since that would be the minimum split if sold by the artist’s dealer. In this way, buyers exchange dollars for art, the dollars are put to the common good, and the artist is protected from charity-abuse.

This year, however, the museum came up with a new twist. Artists aren’t the only ones with paintings and sculptures to give to charitable auctions. In order to entice private collectors to donate works of art, too, the museum offered them the very same deal they offer to artists: Give us your goods, we’ll give you up to half of what we sell it for.

Sounds equitable--until you realize that a collector might easily receive more than his original outlay in having bought the art he’s now chosen to donate, thus making some cash at a charitable event sponsored by a nonprofit museum. From protecting the artist, who produces the art, MOCA had slipped effortlessly into assisting the collector with financial investments.

Practically speaking, any collector with cash seriously on his mind could sell the art at a commercial auction house, then donate however much he wished to the museum. And that, in fact, is the only way this scheme should happen. Otherwise, the traditional relationship between a museum and a collector, difficult in its own right, has been subtly transformed into an alliance between a commercial agent and an investor.

I know, I know; the museum needs the money to maintain its beneficent programs, and this might fill its coffers. But at what cost? Awakening from its feverish flirtation with disaster, the Museum of Contemporary Art regained its composure at the 11th hour and, after due deliberation of an ethics committee of the board of trustees, rightly withdrew the offer to collectors.

This narrowly avoided twist in the auction plan would have represented a fundamental embrace of conservative economic theory deep into the bosom of the museum. Conservative economic theory--which, in the 1980s, is precisely what fueled the Art & Money fandango that art mavens so eagerly bemoan--assured us that if we all vigorously pursued our own private gain, the magic wand called the marketplace would wondrously reconcile these rival interests to produce a common good. If you believe it will, I direct your attention to a variety of items, ranging from numerous park benches now housing otherwise homeless families to a certain painting by Vincent Van Gogh that isn’t likely to be hanging in a public museum after May 15.

Museums certainly have an economic gun held to their heads these days, but it’s hard to see why they should cheerfully help pull the trigger. Stranger things have happened, of course, including the recent revelation that the Armand Hammer Museum of Art and Cultural Center, blithely under construction in Westwood, has prepared a business plan showing an anticipated profit of more than $1.5 million in its first year of operation, rising to nearly $2 million after five. The outlandish claim that a nonprofit museum would function brilliantly as a sturdy profit-center is the best joke of the art season to date--an assertion positively Dada in the dazzling absurdity of its nihilism. And it could only have been pitched with a straight face at a cultural moment when the words Art & Money have come to be spoken in a single, panting breath.

A while ago, the critic Peter Schjeldahl put his finger on the deep well of light-headed stupefaction that greets such oddly embarrassing events as the 1989 sale of an indifferent Picasso for $47.85 million--an amount that might have cornered the entire modern market not so very long ago. “It’s a moment of indecent exposure of the arbitrariness, the sheer pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey whimsicality, of assigned values,” he observed. “The horror is not that art is overvalued but that, deep down, money is worthless.”

Money is an abstract unit of account in terms of which the value of goods, services and obligations can be measured. In a culture increasingly nervous over the possibility that cash is our only measure of value, the transformation of large quantities of it into art--that pointedly “priceless” spirit-catcher--resembles Oz’s rusting Tin Man desperately yearning for a heart.

Commonly used to treat heart disease, and technically known as Digitalis, two stems of foxglove of somber purple hue occupy a prominent place in the foreground of Vincent Van Gogh’s melancholic portrait of Dr. Gachet. He had painted the emphatically modern portrait “with the heartbroken expression of our time,” he wrote to Paul Gauguin on June 16. If the present climate of Art & Money bespeaks a marked insanity in our culture--well, art has always been a first-rate barometer of the state of things.