The challenge for the art world in these uncertain times is to clarify its relationship with money. It has been done by an exhibition at the Paris Mint, curated by Jean-Michel Bouhours, which has summarized the twenty centuries of tug-of-war on the morality of Christianity regarding money in six rooms.
The first room is dedicated to the distant past, when gold nuggets served as objects in commercial exchanges and later with coins that forged empires and created the dream of gardens with golden apples. The second shows the collision with the evangelical message, when money becomes a totem to face the most commented taboo of Christianity: "can a rich man enter the Kingdom of Heaven?"
For Santo Tomas de Aquino, money requires control and that leads to a debate about poverty and, by extension, the charity promoted by the mendicant orders. Scholasticism conspires with the merchants seduced by the jingle of coins who discover the engine of the economy in paper money, although we must wait for the Lutheran Reformation to see represented the money managers, capital or trade bankers who they sit behind a table with their emblems, gold coins, punches, scales, and ledgers, like Quentin Metsys's bankers.
Money is a singular object in the world of art: an object recreated more in what it achieves than in its essence. From mannerism onwards, the wealth that is achieved with money is seen in the form of a reflection on the memento mori, what good is wealth if you condemn yourself. What is even more singular is that the entire Dutch culture of the Golden Age is based on the shame of riches that the historian Simon Schama spoke of. The use of money is considered perfectly everyday, at least its presence does not cause more discomfort than the inevitable. It is hard to imagine a more artificial posture in an affluent society.
As the spirit of an age, money is analyzed during the industrial revolution, and thus enters the third space, where money converted into surplus value reaches the value of being capital as the engine of society. With Impressionism it has an unconventional beauty. Unlike baroque art and neoclassical art, it achieves a direct expression of money without any kind of artifice; what's more, without the slightest interest in artifice. The concealment of money in wealth is not your goal. Namely, with Monet, Pissarro and Renoir he headed towards the American market and in 1886 an exhibition was organized in New York that certified the importance of this pictorial movement in private collections.
In the fourth room, with Duchamp as a reference, they confront how the object of desire of the avant-gardes is a denunciation of money while their works are priced in style.
Warhol's room is the expression of a rumor that does not stop in the 20th century, money does not bring happiness, but it helps a lot to achieve it. Word games in the face of a certain hypocrisy of those who control money from within a stony system that leaves it rarely, and always for variable interest mortgage loans. Ah, Avida Dollars! It is the motto of André Breton when quoting Dalí who presides over this fifth room here. The typical neoliberal fix. Money is despised, but art has never been closer to it. We have to do something. Warhol's post-pop is the expression of that shame. However, on second thought, we have spent more than half a century devoted to the spectacle as the last stage of a worthless commodity that passes for art. Hans Haacke at the Pompidou Center in 1989 shows art contaminated by money.
We are so used to it that it is no longer too surprising. But who are we supposed to hold accountable when the Mobil oil company itself ranks promoting business-friendly art as one of its goals? The only sure thing is the transfer of the symbolic capital that art obtains from that valuation that silences Baudelaire's old poem about “false currency”.
It is a practical way to get ahead in the face of the current crisis that is proposed in room six under the motto art and money, between flow and information. The public can appreciate the technology of NFTs (Non Fungible Tokens) by reformulating a new artistic reference that opens a space for speculation to digital works, certifying their rarity and, therefore, organizing their monetary value. As the curator of the exhibition himself says. In this new field that is emerging, the notions of work, of artist become more blurred as the market establishes prices and quotes in the manner of a “single machine”. In the end, when the public discovers the framework, it is disappointed in the value of art.
It is a difficult plot point to understand if one is not a Westerner. The buyer pays what is asked of him in exchange for being connected with the current reality. Even if he buys something that does not meet the demands that the artistic object had had for centuries: introducing aesthetic taste into the private sphere. When you become aware of it, no one bothers anymore because the story continues.
money in art Curator: Jean-Michel Bouhours. Monnaie of Paris. www.monnaiedeparis.fr- Until September 24
