State capture is the 21st century equivalent
of 19th century exploitation of natural national resources for
private gain. Art – however – remains the preferred acquisition for money
grubbing moguls, wealth plundering dictators and nation-exploiting oligarchs who’d
like to pretend they have a soul.
Trump is proof that attendance at an Ivy league college
doesn’t make you intelligent. Our own racist foreign secretary Boris Johnson is
proof that being able to speak pop latin doesn’t make you cultured. Equally, it
is true that purchasing the most expensive art on the market will not buy you a
soul.
There's a tired and oft repeated scene in tedious copycat
Hollywood disaster movies. It shows a 'priceless’ piece of art being loaded into a crate or onto a helicopter to be hidden away in a bunker during the plague /alien /
environmental / asteroid / zombie apocalypse. What this is supposed to tell us other than a few people
got their priorities wrong is unclear. Why would cockroaches that give
a damn about The Mona Lisa after we've wiped ourselves out (see last week's happy post).
Many social commentators believe we are entering a new
‘Gilded Age’. This term was coined by Mark Twain in 1873 and described the gap (especially in the US) between obscenely wealthy families and – well –
everyone else - the glimmer of gold on the surface and the corruption and degradation beneath.
Just like the Rokerfellers and Vanderbilts, the new wave of
grabbers of nations’ wealth are outstripping the term itself by quite a distance.
Being a billionaire is no longer a rarity. However, being dirt poor or the
victim of unsanitary conditions, human traffiking or disastrous environmental damage or pollution
is no further from being a thing of the past than it was in the 1800s and early1900s.
Just like then – modern day billionaires love nothing
better than to buy expensive art. Maybe they are trying to purchase the souls
or creativity or humanity they know they lack. Then some build large expensive
private galleries and museums to show the work of artists who probably never made a decent living from their inspiration and creativity while alive.
Many do not do the display thing. They simply buy
and hoard to show that they can. It's not second rate stuff. Private collections contain works by truly great and globally famous artists. Check out The Art Wolf http://www.theartwolf.com/articles/most-valuable-private-art.htm Works of art by
geniuses such as Caravaggio and Holbein the Younger, Titian and even Leonardo
da Vinci – are denigrated to a collector’s hobby – like collecting bottle caps.
Another great trick of faux philanthropy is when those riddled with wealth ‘loan’ their collections to galleries and museums. In case you hadn’t
noticed this is standard euphemism for –
I don’t really want to share my expensive stuff but neither do I want to pay
the insurance.
And all they prove is that you can accrue eye watering
wealth and still lack understanding. You can be so rich you don’t know how rich
you are and yet lack basic humanity and insight. If these (predominantly) men
think they are displaying their excellent good taste or refinement, indulging rarefied
exhibitionism bought with money obtained from murky sources, while children starve and the world goes to hell in a hand cart, they are no better than the blocks of granite and concrete
used to construct their art mausoleums.