Art Exchange
Modern art's momentum increased dramatically around the turn of the 20th Century. It's impossible to say in which year modernism in art had its turning point. It's a false dilemma. It happened.
It's more useful to refer to 20th Century art as opposed to 19th Century art. In the first years of the 20th Century, the direction of Modern Art was uncertain, while the proto-modern art of the last decade of the 19th Century carried the baggage of the entire century.
I would go so far as to claim the 19th Century produced no modern art. The problem is the term "modernism," and, in particular, the -ism predicate suffix. The problem of Modern Art in general is the explosion of -isms. It is almost the definition of modern art to know one -ism from another.
If art is chronolog-ized by Century, or even better by decade, correspondences with other historical events can help place the work of art in meaningful context. Montmartre, for instance, for about two decades in the 19th Century was the common denominator of both democratic socialism and post-Impressionism.
Individual paintings have distinctive features. List 10 features, and if two paintings have five features in common, they start a set. If a 2% sample is statistically significant, then out of a set of 50 paintings, one painting is representative of a set (an -ism.)
That's art by classification. What classification doesn't do is establish an order of value. What everyone really wants to know is why does a certain painting hang on the wall of the art museum, or why did a private collector pay six figures for another, at auction? Price, one should be quick to add, is not the only factor that establishes value in art.
Art, like investing, has "fundamentals" and "technicals." This is to differentiate between classification and arbitrary value in art. It is a system of weighted averages. A work of art may be weak in fundamentals, and yet cause a public sensation, which leverages its value. A “lost” work of art by an established master will assume immediate value upon discovery, even while lacking history, provenance, and critical evaluation.
Further comparison, by myself, of investing in stocks and bonds and art valuation would be pedantic. I am aware of it. It is relevant. These factors can be assumed. The perception of technicals in art spells the difference between the casual art lover and anyone with direct involvement in the production of art.
Andy Warhol is, of course, the most notorious trader in art technicals of all time. It was his trademark. I never understood the acclaim lavished on Warhol until my own theory of fundamentals and technicals in art. It was then stunning to realize that, as far as fundamentals, Warhol's art hasn't got any.
Warhol was a genius. I'm convinced he hated painting (not because he couldn't), but as a perverse discipline to make art without fundamentals. A lot of people felt the same way because Pop Art was a runaway success. Top collectors got the joke, excuse me, the irony, and the rest played follow the leader.
The sociology of the investment bubble goes back to Veblen's Theory of the Leisure Class, and is of no concern to art. God bless the patrons of art. It is their expertise in technicals that raises art from the provenance of social misfits with dirty hands to a thing of value.
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