It astonishes me how much attention is paid to the art sleaze associated with Jeffrey Epstein. That is in no way meant to diminish the despicability of his sexual predation, but certainly, as regards wealth and sleaze, let’s just say it is to a demonstrable extent how the other half lives.
For my own self and the ambit in which I’ve existed for the past three decades, if I were to say there isn’t a significant sleaze factor in the art world, I’d say stand back, because, in Pinocchio fashion, you’d be impaled by the lance extending that was formerly my nose.
The sleaze factor has always been there. Just now, I am reading Jonathan Richardson’s 1719 advice to Grand Tourists exhorting them to become aware of various pictorial styles, in the certain knowledge that in their drunken debauchery whilst visiting Italy they’d doubtless be sold looks like but surely are not works of art by the most prominent Renaissance masters. The fact is, we are yet today having to sort out what these long dead milordi purchased, gulled into thinking they acquired the real deal when, in fact, they did not.
But art and money are yet a combo that attracts sleaze, as it always has, and the bigger the money, the greater the sleaze, but yet pronounced even at middling levels. With my last blog about the London Art Fair, I was reminded as I visited a couple of weeks ago that, with the painter Keith Vaughan (1912-1977) himself the last couple of years having a significant, albeit posthumous, moment, a fair old number of his pictures seem to have hit the market. And all of them the real deal? Mind, many of them are, but that’s the point, isn’t it? This represents an opportunity for someone to salt the market with pictures by a lesser known but at the moment popular artist. With an oeuvre that runs to a common subject rendered in small scale and with a limited colour palette makes Vaughan an artist whose work is sadly easy to fudge up.
An opportunity, and with no catalogue raisonne, who’s to know? And that much of Vaughan’s work, he being a gay man of the sadly tortured variety, the pictures he’s known for tend to have a homoerotic tinge. But again, here’s a greater chance for sleaze. Where Vaughan’s images were discreet except for those of us within the cognoscenti who had the ability to decode them, now, all of a sudden, the male figures who were formerly sexless in the manner of a Ken doll now sport obvious penises. Anything to make a sale, I guess. Sleazy on a couple of levels, n’est pas?
The fate of the Grand Tourist or modern art buyer sound more like examples of caveat emptor than they do anything approaching the Epstein level, but the fact is, money and sleaze are ineluctably joined. For a number of years, we observed the increasing fortune of one dealer whose financial success exceeded what we could divine of the turnover his own gallery was achieving. Slow in the uptake, it occurred to us that, what was occurring, was the presence of erstwhile partners who, purchasing reasonable quality pieces abroad for cash gained from nefarious activities, and then, sending them duty free to the US for a sale, that, in transit to another national jurisdiction, effectively laundered their dirty money.
Sleazy, absolutely, but accomplished through legal channels as for years, the importation of art and antiques into the US was not dutiable. However, everyone needs a payday, and with the downturn in the retail trade over a decade ago, we expect our unnamed dealer to have an unpleasant visit from his erstwhile partners whose money, still tied up in unsold artwork, remains, shall we say, uncleansed. I will not name anyone’s nationality, fearing being branded an ethnocentrist, but suffice to say, as we imminently expect to find our friend floating in San Francisco Bay, we’ll take a line from popular fiction and say that he will then sleep with the fishes.
This all points to something common to everything dodgy in the trade, a linkage with money, however got, and a pathological fondness for it, whether clean or dirty. And, big surprise, the greater one’s accumulation of money, the fondness for it grows concomitantly. There must be some study somewhere accompanied by graphs that demonstrates this visually. I’d be interested to see it. I doubt however I would be surprised at what it showed. With all of what should be a given, I am therefore further surprised that Epstein’s link with the art world has engendered such outrage. Just a day or so ago, I read in one of the arts commentaries a remark written with magnificent umbrage, suggesting that the Epstein-art world links now emerging ‘…have come to symbolize the endemic depravity of the world’s richest elites.’ Gee, you don’t say, I ask archly. Where have you been for the last 300 years?