ἑαυτοῦ ἐπιμελεῖσθαι

Maybe money really is the last obscenity and we’re so used to handling it, it never occurs to us to wash.

William Gaddis letter to Cynthia Buckman, 1978

Business art is the step that comes after Art. I started as a commercial artist, and I want to finish as a business artist. After I did the thing called ‘art’ or whatever it’s called, I went into business art. I wanted to be an Art Business man or a Business Artist. Being good in business is the most fascinating kind of art. During the hippie era, people put down the idea of business – they’d say ‘money is bad’ and ‘working is bad’ but making money is art and working is art and good business is the best art.

Andy Warhol, the Philosophy of Andy Warhol

The horror is not that art is over-valued but that, deep down, money is worthless.

Peter Schjeldahl

Largely hidden from public view, an ecosystem of service providers has blossomed as Wall Street-style investors and other new buyers have entered the market. These service companies, profiting on the heavy volume of deals while helping more deals take place, include not only art handlers and advisers but also tech start-ups like ArtRank. A sort of Jim Cramer for the fine arts, ArtRank uses an algorithm to place emerging artists into buckets including “buy now,” “sell now” and “liquidate.” Carlos Rivera, co-founder and public face of the company, says that the algorithm, which uses online trends as well as an old-fashioned network of about 40 art professionals around the world, was designed by a financial engineer who still works at a hedge fund. The service is limited to 10 clients, each of whom pays $3,500 a quarter for what they hope will be market-beating insights. It’s no surprise that Rivera, 27, who formerly ran a gallery in Los Angeles, is not popular with artists.

William Alden, Art for Money’s Sake, N.Y. Times, Feb. 3, 2015.

FROM Vincent van Gogh to Henri Rousseau, artists have a long and honourable tradition of dying penniless. Their modern counterparts would rather not. This week MutualArt, a New York-based group of academics and museum experts, announced the start of the first-ever pension trust for visual artists. There is a twist: the contributions of those invited to join the scheme will be in the form of paintings and sculptures—20 works over 20 years. Their sale is supposed to provide each artist with three decades of retirement payouts.

Art for Money’s Sake, The Economist, May 27, 2004.

Value (a Profile of J.S.G. Boggs)

J.S.G. Boggs is a young artist who likes to invite you out to dinner at a restaurant, run up a tab of, say, eighty-seven dollars, and then, while sipping coffee, reach into his satchel and pull out a drawing he’s been working on for several days. The drawing, on a small sheet of high-quality paper, might consist, in this instance, of a virtually exact rendition of the ace side of a hundred-dollar bill. He next pulls out from his satchel a couple of precision pens – one green ink, the other black – and proceeds to apply the finishing touches to his drawing. This activity invariably causes a sti. Guests at neighboring tables crane their necks. Passing waiters stop to gawk. The maitre d’ eventually drifts over, stares for awhile, and then remarks on the excellence of the young man’s art. “Thank you,” Boggs says. “I’m glad you like this drawing, because I intend to use it as payment for our meal.”

At that moment, invariably, a chill descends upon the room. The maître d’ blanches. You can just see his mind reeling (“Oh, no, not another nut case”) as he begins to plot strategy: Should he call the police? How is he going to avoid a scene? But Boggs almost immediately reestablishes a measure of equilibrium by reaching into his satchel and pulling out a real hundred-dollar bill – indeed, the very model for the drawing – and saying, “I mean, of course, if you want, you can take this regular hundred-dollar bill here instead.” Color is returning to the maître d’s face. “but, as you can see,” Boggs continues, “I’m an artist, and I drew this. It took me many hours to do it, and it’s certainly worth something. I’m assigning it an arbitrary price, which just happens to coincide with its face value – one hundred dollars. That means that if you do decide to accept it as full payment for our meal, you’re going to have to give me thirteen dollars in change. So you have to make up your mind whether you think this piece of art is worth more or less than this regular one-hundred-dollar bill. It’s entirely up to you.” Boggs smiles, and the maître d’ blanches once again, because he’s into vertigo: the free-fall of worth and value.

[. . . .]

As far as boogs is concerned, the actual drawings should be considered merely as small parts- the catalysts, as it were- of his true art, which consists of the transactions that they provoke. Thus, in each instance the framed drawing of the money itself was surrounded by several other framed objects, including the receipt, the change (each bill signed and dated by Boggs, each coin scratched

with Boggs' initials), and perhaps some other traces of the transaction (for example, evidence of the item purchased-the cardboard carton from a six-pack of beer; the ticket stubs for an air flight; a neatly pressed set of dress shirts- or a photograph of Boggs actually handing an impeccable waiter his drawing and receiving his change: the very change preserved behind glass in an adjoining frame).

Of course, the fact that all these pieces had now been gathered together, some as loans from private collections and others as entities available for purchase, raised some further questions about the transactions. If, for instance, Boggs did in fact manage to purchase a ticket for a flight from Zurich to London on British Airways – a ticket worth two hundred and ninety Swiss francs – with a drawing

of three overlapping Swiss hundred franc notes, it was easy to see how the ten Swiss francs in change and the actual ticket stub had made it into this show. But how had the initial drawing- which Boggs had presumably "spent" to acquire the other items managed to rejoin them, so that the entire transaction could now be offered for sale, for fifteen hundred dollars? Luckily, as often as not last August

Boggs was right there in the gallery [where his work was shown], eager to respond to any such questions. He seemed to feel that the show itself was a continuation of the series of

transactions that had always begun with his taking pen to paper, and that there was still plenty of occasion for perplexity, confoundment, and revelation.

[ . . . .}

[THE RULES]

[Boggs says] "There are a lot of collectors, in Europe but also here, who want to buy my drawings of currency, but I refuse to sell them- that's the first of my rules.”

This is my Rule No. 2- I will only spend them; that is, go out and find people who will accept them at face value, in transactions that must include a receipt and change in real money. My third rule is that for the next twenty-four hours I will not tell anyone where I've spent that drawing: I want the person who got it to be able to have some time, unbothered, to think about what's just happened.

After that, however- and this is my Rule No. 4- if there is a collector who I know has expressed interest in that sort of drawing I will get in touch with him and offer to sell him the receipt and the change, for a given price. It depends, but for the change and the receipt from a hundred-dollar dinner transaction, for example, the collector might have to pay me about five hundred dollars. The receipt should provide

enough clues to enable the collector to track down the owner of the hundred-dollar drawing, but if the collector desires further clues- the name of the waiter, for example, or his telephone number-I'm always prepared to provide those details, for a further fee. After that, the collector is in a position to get in touch with the drawing's owner and try to negotiate some sort of deal on his own to complete the work."

[ . . . .]

[ON THE AESTHETICS OF MONEY]

At a nearby café, where Boggs and I continued our conversation, he said, “I hope you don’t think I’m doing all this as some sort of insult to money-as if I were putting money down, or something. I think money is beautiful stuff."

I laughed.

"I'm serious." He extracted a dollar bill from his wallet. "I mean, look at this thing. No one ever stops to look at the bills in his pocket - stops and admires the detailing, the conception, the technique. My work is intended partly to get people to look at such things once again, or maybe for the first time. Take this one here. This is an absolutely splendid intaglio print. It's actually the result of three separate printing processes-two on the face side, another on the back-all done on excellent paper. Over the years, because of the danger of counterfeiting, these bills have had to be made more and more intricate, in terms of both imagery and technique. But as far as I'm concerned money is more beautiful and highly developed and aesthetically satisfying than the print works of all but a few modern artists. And a dollar bill is a print: it's a unique, numbered edition. And that's just talking about technique. Now look at the content, the iconography, the history.

That crazy rococo profusion of leaves and scrollwork, symbolizing prosperity. The eagle, with his thirteen arrows in one claw, for the first thirteen states, and the olive branch in the other and, on the olive branch, the olives! And then the other half of the Great Seal, with that strange Masonic pyramid - an unfinished pyramid, still in the process of being built. George Washington, on the facing side of the bill, was a Mason. There's so incredibly much American cultural history wrapped up in this little chit of paper. And it's the same with other currencies."

Boggs paused for a moment, continuing to gaze at his dollar. "'In God we trust,' " he said. "Did you knowthat that phrase wasn't always part of our currency? They started putting it on during the nineteen-thirties, as they withdrew the dollar's gold backing. It used to be you could redeem a ten-dollar bill for ten dollars in gold. In fact, originally dollars were coins. Some of the early American bills included engravings on the back depicting the coins for which the bills could at any moment be redeemed. But when they started withdrawing the dollar's metal backing- when you couldn't redeem your dollars for gold, and, in fact, were no longer allowed even to possess gold on your own except as jewelry-that's when they started putting that phrase on the currency. When you could no longer trust in gold, they invited you to trust in God. It was like a Freudian slip."

- Lawrence Weschler