Well, knock me down with a feather: Where real aesthetic value resides
The discerning eye is alive and well, despite head-spinning prices for "ultra-contemporary" works of dubious merit
Number Go Up is the title of Zeke Faux’s terrific book on the “rise and staggering fall” of cryptocurrencies. The phrase was a mantra issuing from those who pumped the NFT madness which, for a while, and broadly coterminous with the Covid era, seeped into the art world.
In a weird fiscal mirroring of the SARS pandemic, the NFT crypto-disease infected countless thousands of innocent people who ended up kissing farewell to their life savings and hard-earned pension pots while celebrity rug-pullers and Silicon Valley snake-oil salesmen cashed in.
“Number go up technology is a very powerful piece of technology,” said one crypto executive quoted by Zeke Faux. “It’s the price. As the price goes higher, more people become aware of it, and buy it in anticipation of the price continuing to climb.”
That bizarre logic will resonate with anyone familiar with the work of the economist Thorstein Veblen (1857-1929), who observed that demand for certain well-made, high quality goods rises as the price rises. It’s important to note, however, that Veblen, writing during America’s Gilded Age of conspicuous consumption, was referring to a category of goods that functioned as a marker of social status, in stark contrast to objects that lack any kind of utility whatsoever, such as Non-Fungible Tokens.
It’s one thing to be seen posing next to your authentic 1930s Picasso, flashing your Birkin handbag, or driving your Lamborghini, but quite another to boast of having a string of alphanumeric hieroglyphics sitting somewhere in the hard drive of your laptop. Big deal.
I’m sorry if you were among those who were infected by the NFT virus. But I’m not sorry that it seems finally to have been largely eradicated from the art market. By some reckoning, NFTs have lost between 80-90 percent of their value over the past eighteen months.
Meanwhile, back in the real world, we were treated this week to a few examples of true aesthetic value that offered a stark contrast to the digital rubbish that circulated during the NFT pandemic.
One notable instance was the small tempera painting on card of six feathers (shown above) that turned up at Gorringes auction rooms in the county town of Lewes in East Sussex earlier this week (full disclosure: Gorringes was where I started my career).
It was painted by the little-known English still-life artist Eliot Hodgkin (1905-1987) who specialised in painting specimens of nature — flowers, shells, feathers, grasses and so on — with mesmerising acuity. The example that turned up at Gorringes was a fine example of his use of tempera, an egg-based medium that came to prominence among the Italian primitives, which Hodgkin favoured not so much for its historical associations but for allowing him to render his subjects in very fine detail.
Gorringes estimated the work at £2,000-3,000, but so excited were serious Hodgkin specialists that the hammer fell at £60,000, prompting auctioneer Clifford Lansberry to quip, “That’s ten thousand per feather.”
This little gem doesn’t technically qualify as a ‘sleeper’ (an auction category about which I’ve written here) since it was properly catalogued. But it does indicate that the “traditional” art market knows real quality when it sees it and is prepared to dig deep on such occasions.
And so to apples and pears. Contrast that tiny Hodgkin with the unadulterated rubbish that circulated during the digital NFT boom, or indeed with some of the banal output still dominating the upper reaches of today’s art market, and it speaks volumes about the difference between value and price.
I hesitate to compare Hodgkin’s bewitchingly beautiful study of six feathers with the “still life” creations of Swiss painter Nicolas Party (born 1980), but the contrast in aesthetic merit is striking. Party is currently a darling of the high-ticket speculators driving the market’s so-called “ultra-contemporary” sector. The paint is barely dry. Tacky, you might even say.
I mean, take a look at Party’s Still Life of 2015 (above) — a picture of stupefying vapidity that somehow juiced US$4.4 million from a myopic bidder at Christie’s in New York in November 2023.
Eliot Hodgkin was no featherweight, of course, and does come with a refined artistic pedigree. His family are related to the noted English painter and critic Roger Fry (1866-1934) and Hodgkin himself was a cousin of the celebrated abstract artist Howard Hodgkin (1932-2017). That hinterland counts for a lot.
I was tickled to bits by those lovingly observed little feathers. They are for me emblematic of an enduring aspect of the traditional art world — the importance of the connoisseurial eye — which continues to inspire and that offers a reassuring antidote to the flotsam washing around the upper reaches of the contemporary art market.
I guess I’m just not a Party animal.
Tom I would pay you with my undying respect and continue to share your witticisms with my colleagues who cite your scholarship and wit in their dissertations. Several already have at the University of Texas at Dallas.
Otherwise I'm sending my retirement resources to attorneys I hired to sue the FAKE designer and contractors. June 4 is the trial date so hopefully this four year saga will not be totally in vain.
Are you positive we couldn't interest you in a stack of trump NFTs?