Have you read me?
Art today is in a precarious position. In order to survive artists must participate in an elaborate system that is increasingly becoming a point at which Wall Street, Madison Avenue and government converge. The embarrassment and the corrosive effects of such a system may well prove to be dangerous to creative life in our culture.
…
Evidence of the interlocking elements that make up the art world today is obvious in reports of increased corporate investment in painting and sculpture as a hedge against inflation, and a new interest on the part of individual buyers in the business value of art. For a long time there have been wry comment in the artists’ milieu about a kind of elegant decorative painting that can be called art-for-banks. Now those banks are advising individual clients to follow their example.
Those are a couple of the opening paragraphs of “The Selling of American Art,” an unsigned, undated, unmarked, 9-page essay I came across the other day in a miscellaneous clippings section of Dore Ashton’s collection at the Archives of American Art. I can find absolutely no mention or reference to it online, and I don’t just mean Google.
Obviously, it sounds like it could have been written yesterday, but the paper’s references to Harold Rosenberg’s last published interview [In Portfolio, vol. 1, 1979] and the December 1980 edition of Artworkers News [!] probably hint at its actual date.
It’s a pretty incisive and prescient indictment of the emerging art system, right up until the somewhat incongruous suggestion that then-underappreciated [or under-collected?] painters like Richard Diebenkorn and “the late Philip Guston” represented an alternative path out of the corporate art trap.
Ashton was a rare critical defender of Guston throughout the artist’s lifetime, and his inclusion makes me think she is also the author of “The Selling of American Art.” I really should have asked her about it when I had her on the phone.