Is There Too Much Art Out There?

Recently, a friend sent me a Business Week article, “Boomers are Leaving Behind More Art than Anyone Wants” by Felix Salmon, making me aware of this concern. Who knows if the author or editor picked that title, but my reaction was that there are also too many clothes in some parts of the world, and too much of it is thrown out.

Image generated by A.I.

The author is a British/American financial journalist who writes about culture and money. He uses as an example for his thesis an artist to whom he is related by marriage, by the name of David A. Vaughan. Born in Selma, Alabama (1890-1975 Vaughan studied at Columbia University, the Art Students League of New York City, and in Paris at the Académie Colarossi. Reading his history, he seems an artist of some note but probably won’t make it into the lexicons of the great masters. No matter, there are and will be people who like his work. However, even if his art sells, is exhibited, or is donated to museums (one of his has been accepted into the collection of the LA County Museum but never put on view) or is just passed down through the generations, at some point the interest will slowly peter out. When this happens, his works will be stashed away, discarded, or lost.

One individual responding to the article online suggested giving old canvases away to artists who would be happy to use them. If an art historian resurrects Vaughan’s work, what was left would find the market, be prized, and the cycle would repeat itself. This is the normal cycle of life and art.

Artists need to create art, and many do a few exceptional works, but probably more of what they do you might not want to collect. Even Picasso will someday not be the icon he is today, and the doodle he created on a napkin for a friend or waiter as a tip will not be exhibited by a museum, but it also would not be thrown out. If there is a market, a museum may deaccession it, or a lesser work, and put it at auction in order to collect a work by a different artist.

People will always be inspired to make art, but the product has to be appreciated in order to be preserved, and that is not always the case. Painters, for their part, often discard what they have created or paint over it, which you can’t do with a drawing or a sculpture. The Brooklyn Museum, wishing to do something for the local artists’ community, announced an exhibition of artists currently living in Brooklyn. They received 4,000 submissions for the 200 spaces in the show. I have several friends who I consider good artists, and I appreciate their work, but most have not even been in one museum exhibition, much less in their collections.

There are about 35 paintings firmly identified as by the Dutch Master Johannes Vermeer (1632-1675), with a few more attributed to him. Did he really paint only that number, or were some lost or actually thrown out by him or descendants of his 11 children?

In 2019, in Compiègne, France, an important 13th-century panel of Christ Mocked (c. 1280) by Cimabue was discovered in a kitchen during a house clearance. It had been considered just a nice religious icon until it brought almost 27 million dollars at auction. From this, you can draw various conclusions, but I like the idea that people thought it was worth preserving no matter the monetary value. If, on the other hand, it had been discarded and destroyed, no one would know that it had existed.

Remember, the worth of a painting is in the mind of the beholder. We don’t all like the same works, and taste may skip a generation or two. The work of art doesn’t change, just how we perceive it. In the process, there is always the hope of overlooked work being “rediscovered”.