Art+$=

This week I as I helped Cora pack up paintings to take back to the apartment with her personal assistant, she motions me over to her bookshelf. “I am getting rid of some books. See which ones you might like, and which others Mary Kate might like.” I grabbed a couple books of poetry, and the book Seven Days in the Art World.” Cora chuckled. “You can take that book, I don’t think that Mary Kate is going to find anything in it she doesn’t know already.”

So far the book has been a excellent anthropological survey of the distinct circles of the auction house, the crit, and the fair, and I am working my way though the authors exploration of the roles of art prizes, the magazine, the studio visit and the biennale. The auction house and the fair I have read about before, and critiques are something I am familiar with from school, but reading this book reminded me of that of the uncomfortable reality of the life a work of art lives as a commodity in these circles, and how the money to be made from art usually only circulate through circles of dealers, collectors, auctioneers, and institutions. I don’t aspire to be an artist in order to profit from my work being courted in this way, artists that do make work for this reason justifiably aren’t the ones whose work is sought after. But I do want to be recognized as an artist, and to be able to pay rent doing so, naturally I’m a bit conflicted when I begin to imagine myself fitting into this amalgamation that called “the art world.” It seems that Cora has navigated it by developing a close relationship with collectors and galleries that she trusts know what’s best for her work. I hope that in the distant future I can at the very least achieve the same.