In 1950, former US ambassador John Whitney paid $30,000 for Picasso’s Garçon à la Pipe. Allowing for inflation the painting ought to be worth around $250,000 in today’s money but in 2004 Garçon à la Pipe became the most expensive painting ever sold, to an anonymous bidder for $82.5 million. So what is it worth? I mean, really worth.
Putting a value on culture is a perennial problem exacerbated by the fact that the majority of funding for artists and arts institutions (who are in the business of creating culture) is now derived from the public purse. Understandably, governments and the relevant NGOs cannot be seen to be frivolous with taxpayers’ money. Therefore it is imperative that outcomes of public spending can be measured, and to achieve this end the works of art that combine to form culture must be assigned a value.
David Throsby, Professor of Economics at Australia’s Macquarie University, has spent years working out how the ‘two unhappy bedfellows’ of economics and culture can snuggle up most comfortably. He suggests that rather than simply affixing a monetary value to works of art, it would be better to deconstruct the artefact or experience and specify it in terms more suitable to its application.
Throsby’s theory is perhaps necessarily long-winded and obtuse but it does have useful ramifications for policy-makers in the sense that it encourages them to accept and think about the arts in terms of their contribution to citizens’ standards of living, not just fiscal values.
The notion that bureaucrats controlling the purse-strings to arts-related grants are only interested in projects that meet their own aims and objectives is the subject of a best-selling book Capturing Cultural Value by John Holden.
Support for Holden’s thesis has come from surprising quarters, including from the British Secretary of State for Culture, Tessa Jowell, who in the public document Government and the Value of Culture, writes: “Too often politicians have been forced to debate culture in terms only of its instrumental benefits to other agendas – education, the reduction of crime, improvements in wellbeing. In political and public discourse in this country we have avoided the more difficult approach of investigating, questioning and celebrating what culture actually does in and of itself.”
Whilst he accepts these things are not bad per se, Holden points out that what is lacking is the commitment to producing works of aesthetic (and therefore cultural) significance. Which raises the inevitable question: How do you assign aesthetic values when beauty is in the eye of the beholder? And in terms of the public funding of the arts debate, why should public money be used to fund the arts at all, particularly if what ends up being produced are a series of cultural artefacts and experiences that fail to resonate with the public?
During a 1996 debate at the University of North Carolina, Michael Munger, current Chairman of the Department of Political Science at Duke University, argued that public funding of the arts should be withdrawn. He said that artists chasing public money would be extremely unlikely to produce the ‘great’ art that would inspire future generations. “I want to know how many great works of art have been lost because artists have tried to pursue creatively dead, but politically correct, themes in the pursuit of public funding. Public funding, by its very nature, creates new art that is either inert and lifeless, or shocking, but superficial. Unfortunately, neither the market nor the public can ensure ‘great’ art,” he said.
Munger’s debating adversary, Jim Hirschfield, Professor of Art at UNC, conceded that whilst ‘great’ art might transcend cuts to arts funding, the cultural contribution of programs, such as those administered through the NEA, that allowed millions of people to partake in cultural activities were an essential facet of American life. “The question should almost be, ‘can the government afford not to fund the arts?’ This is a ‘question of values,’ what we as a society value,” he said.
Meanwhile the fate of the world’s most expensive painting remains uncertain. It is rumoured to have been deposited in a Swiss bank vault.
Washington Post art critic, Blake Gopnik, laments, “We just have to hope that there will be some chance for art lovers to get a decent look at it. That record-setting van Gogh has been buried in a Japanese vault since it was bought; the Mona Lisa sits safe but remote behind bulletproof glass. Once the market gives a work of art inflated value, its true worth becomes ever harder to make out.”
