Yachts don’t have good walls.
These are bespoke. If you want proper walls to hang paintings, you’ll get proper walls to hang paintings.
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They don’t have enough already? They’re entitled to our gratitude as well?
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What is insane wealth without the adulation of the masses?
Think classical demigod; that’s the mindset.
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Classical demigod or modern dictator.
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I have long been fond of that Jebus line concerning camels and eyes of needles (and not just because of how it makes TV bible shitheads tie themselves in knots). Having money is not bad in itself, but it shields you from consequences while amplifying the stakes of every choice you make, so that you’d have to be some kind of mega-saint to keep your moral balance sheet in the black.
TFA mentions that the Bacon on that one yacht had recently been on public display, and that’s not unusual – super-rich art collectors really are committed to art, and more consistently so than most governments. If endowing museums and buying works for public display helps to launder the reputations of the OxyContin-peddling Sacklers, oil-mongering Gettys, arms-dealing Zabludowiczes et al., well, the public gets the better of that deal. We’d have a lot less art without private funding, and new art in particular would be poorer and much more homogenous. And the idea that private collectors are hoarding art in secret is wrong; most publicly-owned art is in storage at any given moment anyway.
But!
This is not saintlike “generosity”, any more than I am a generous patron of the arts if I spend £15 to see a play. It’s great that Mike Bloomberg continually commissions and exhibits art in the offices of his ticker tape company – but at the same time, it’s the least he could do. That’s what I mean by the higher moral stakes for rich people; if you die a billionaire, you are responsible for all the things you didn’t do with it.
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This is a real struggle that you guys should respect. The humid ocean air is hell on paintings. Last year on my yacht we had three Mondrians and a Chagall mildew and we just had to throw them right out.
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Yeah, I hate it when that happens.
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To all superyacht personnel:
In the event of an at-sea emergency, please remember to adhere to the Clement Greenberg Boarding Order when loading the life boats: Picasso, Pollock, Duchamp, then Rauschenberg, de Kooning, and Motherwell. If you have time, put flotation devices on the O’Keefe and the Kahlo, and remind The Wife and Child that the deck chair cushions are fairly buoyant.
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Not really. Their wealth comes directly at the expense of government tax revenues, both from their tax shelters (which the art often is) and from gutting the income of middle class tax payers. Then they spend some of their income supporting fascist media outlets that attack public financing of the arts.
Across the board you’ll see that the arts are far more robust, and a deeper part of people’s lives, in countries with lower income inequality.
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Honestly, I’d much prefer them to be stored in secured, fire-protected, environmentally controlled warehouses. Either way, I’m never going to see the art, but perhaps someday they will make it back to the museum. Boats sink. A lot. And it’s horrible for the paintings. (Both when they sink and not.)
I believe - and I think that a lot of people agree with me - that you don’t own artwork, you are it’s guardian for the time that it is in your possession. Art belongs to humanity, and it needs to be preserved; it’s OK to keep it in a private collection, but you don’t have the right to destroy it; only the artist does.
If I owned a boat and wanted to put art on it that wasn’t my own or that of my friends (who were OK with risking it on the boat), I’d keep the originals safe and put a print on the boat.
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If it’s a vessel the proper term is “bulkheads.” As in “be sure not to leave any marks on the inlaid oak wainscoting when you install the Fabscarte wallpaper on the aft gallery bulkhead.”
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I wasn’t saying that rich art patrons make grotesque inequality worth it; I was saying that art patrons who already are toxicly wealthy often make art accessible to the public without being coerced to do so (though as I say, it’s the least they could do). It is repulsive that the ultra-wealthy have a de facto constitutional role in society, but their management of arts funding is not the problem.
To the extent that I get paid for my work (which is art fabrication), some of it comes from plutocrats and some from government funding; the latter generally involves waiting years to get paid very little, and often a lot of creative interference, because governments are rightly uptight about how public money is spent on art weirdos. There is a lot to be said for having capricious despots in charge of sustaining the arts; without that model you wouldn’t have Richard Serra or Andy Warhol, or the Italian Renaissance, or classical music…
Obviously, I’m talking there about capital-FA Fine Art, which is a bit tautological because that could equally be defined as “art supported by wealthy patrons”. But knitting and indie rock and woodturning and Tuvan throat singing don’t need patronage to happen, so that’s an orthogonal issue. We could do away with the entire concept of “art funding” if we didn’t care whether we had the Sistine Chapel or not.
I get where you’re coming from, but there’s a whole iceberg here. Art doesn’t start out labeled as “downstairs bathroom decor” or “Louvre fuel”; there’s a process involved in that determination (rooted in sale prices, though other systems are possible), and working out what to discard is as important as deciding what to keep. Given that museums are already full, artists themselves are the last people who would wish for all art to be uncritically venerated forever. I know people who dedicate their lives to art and would be happy to tell you which pieces in the Guggenheim they’d burn.
Tl;dr:
Don’t feel sorry for art because it ends up on a yacht, any more than you should feel sorry for it because it started out in an unheated cabin in the woods. It’s not supposed to be limited to a preallocated numbered pedestal, and if its situation is causing arguments, good, it’s working.
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