One of the sorrowful areas is relationships, yet surprisingly few artworks in current circulation focus on this major theme. Imagine a brief given to artist that reads something like this:
Many couples have painful conflicts that break out over dinner. The spark often looks quite small, such as the way someone asked 'How was your day?' with what feels like a sarcastic or sceptical intent. One person says something harsh, the other looks numb with misery; the one who storms out is furious but feels like a monster ("How can this be happening to me?'). There is a spiral of'I hate you' and 'I hate myself and 4 hate you for making me hate myself.' We would like an artwork to carry indications of an underlying but frustrated longing to be happy together. Perhaps the table is beautifully laid. One person is feeling they have done nothing wrong; the other is crying. These are nice people. We are not condemning them. They have to be likeable. They are in the gri p of a genuinely difficult problem. Can their suffering gain in dignity and be less catastrophic and lonely because of a work of art?
The exercise was undertaken for the purposes of this book, and it yielded an image from the American photographer Jessica Todd Harper, which seemed to carry out the brief successfully (45). There could, of course, be a hundred other ways to honour this challenge. There could be galleries full of it, as there are of Agonies in the Garden.
The challenge is to rewrite the agenda for commissioning so that art can start serving our psychological needs as effectively as it served those of theology or state ideologies for centuries. We should dare to conceive of art as more than just the fruits of the irregular imaginations of artists. We should channel and co-opt artworks to the direct task of helping us achieve self-knowledge, remember forgiveness, and love - and to remain sensitive to the pains suffered by our ever-troubled species and its urgently imperilled planet.
Far from humbling art, this is a strategy to give artistic activity the central place it has often claimed, but rarely managed to occupy in practice. It's not that art is not appealing. It's just that we don't actually turn to it with any regularity when we want effective help. Our actions betray the feeling that our lips hesitate to speak. If we want art to be more powerful, and of more consequencc in our individual and collective lives, we should be ready to embrace this unfamiliar strategy.
Our uncertainty about quite what art is for comes to a head around How the vexed question of what it should be worth. As we don't have solid
Should criteria by which to judge the importance of art, the public response to
, the art market is ambivalent. On the one hand, individual works arc seen
Art he*
as repositories of great value and will fetch enormous prices at auction Bought as a result. On the other, these high valuations are deemed a folly by
and Sold? many, and a sign that the world has lost its moral bearing. Beneath the
conflict around price, though, another set of questions is trying to break through. What is the point of ownership? What are we trying to achieve when we purchase works of art? What is a 'collection' of art for?
Three kinds of buyers of art can be identified: institutions, private collectors and the general public. To start with the first of these, consider the acquisitions policy of the Tate Gallery in London, which includes Tate Britain and Tate Modern:
I he Tate Gallery collects British art from 1500 and international modern and contemporary art from 1900 to the present. It seeks to represent significant developments in art in all areas covered by this remit. It seeks to collect works of art that are of outstanding quality as well as works that are of distinctive aesthetic character or importance.
In this respect, the Tate is typical of the world's great public galleries. It aims to present 'the significant developments in art' in both national and international terms and across time. The guiding assumption is that we need to encounter the development of art and that large institutions should set out to buy and display certain works that chart its unfolding story. An acquisition committee might decide, for example, that its host institution already had enough good examples of pre-Raphaelite religious painting, but was weak on the Italian Futurists, and would adjust their purchasing priorities accordingly. This 'representative' strategy is so familiar that it seems strange to ask what it is for and whether it is right. It is entrenched because we have not taken the question of the purpose of art seriously enough. It says: art has changed a lot over time, and we should trace those changes. Imagine reformulating a more purposeful and significant policy for the Tate in line with a therapeutic understanding of art:
The Tate purchases art from any place and any period. It aims always to educate the British soul. It seeks to collect works that meet the psychological needs of the nation.
If this were the mission of the museum, the deliberations of the acquisition committee might sound very different. They might take the view that they were strong on works that addressed loneliness but short on art that helped people form better relationships. The purchasing of new works would be guided by an analysis of the nation's collective psychological frailties. This, of course, would be a controversial matter, but not necessarily more so than an analysis of what was missing in a historical collection. A new qualification for joining an acquisition committee would emerge: accuracy and clarity in diagnosing the state of the national psyche, and in particular its imbalances and biases. The committee would hope that art might amend and compensate for these flaws.
Whatever the possible problems with museums, few people could accuse them of consciously practising deception or fraud. Not so with art dealers, who have been routinely accused of both ills for two centuries or more. But we shouldn't blame the dealers. The problem with the art market must ultimately be located with the buyers: it is because so many don't know what they are looking for that they can let themselves be swindled and led astray.
The task of the private gallery is a serious one: to connect purchasers with the art they need. The chief skill required for running a gallery should therefore be not salesmanship, but the ability to diagnose what is missing from the inner life of the client. The art dealer should strive to identify what kind of art a person needs to rebalance themselves, and then meet that need as efficiently as possible.
The key activity of a dealer would be to conduct consultation sessions that would reveal the state of the client's soul. Before one can know what someone should buy, one has to know who they are, and, more importantly, what areas of their psyches are vulnerable. The role of the dealer would overlap with that of a therapist. The standard layout of a commercial gallery would evolve to include a therapy room, which one might need to pass through before getting to see any works for sale. Thus the dealer would operate as a matchmaker, bringing together an inner need of the client with a work best able to assuage it.
A wise purchase for someone susceptible to hype.
46. Banksy, I Can't Believe You Morons Actually Buy This Shit, 2006
Today, this would look like a very strange process for buying and selling because we have the wrong picture of what art is. At present the task of the gallery dealer is to convince the client that a given work has a special kind of prestige: public but elusive, tangible yet confusing for the uninitiated. Such prestige is essentially dependent on what other people arc thinking. The suggestion is always that if you buy this work, art- world insiders will approve. Hence, galleries seek to create an atmosphere that combines exclusivity and the sense of being at the cutting edge; that is, they build on our anxieties about being an outsider or old- fashioned (46). But galleries could get involved in a more important type of business. They could set out to help clients live better lives by selling them the art they need for the sake of their inner selves.