Art Is Hard to See Through the Clutter of Dollar Signs

2013 Estate of Francis Bacon/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/DACS, London

Francis Bacon’s “Three Studies of Lucian Freud” sold for $142 million.

By ROBERTA SMITH

Published: November 13, 2013

• Facebook
• Twitter
• Google+
• Save
• E-mail
• Share
• Print
• Reprints
• 

As our troubled age becomes ever more gilded, art auction prices soar with bone-numbing regularity. A new high-water mark was reached on Tuesday, when a 1969 triptych by the British painter Francis Bacon sold for $142 million while the Christie’s auction in which it was featured took in $692 million. Both figures exceeded recent highs: One arrived in spring 2012, when Edvard Munch’s “The Scream” sold for $119 million at Sotheby’s; the other came last spring, when a Christie’s auction total reached $492 million. It seems that people really, really like art these days.

Connect With Us on Twitter

Follow @nytimesarts for arts and entertainment news.

Arts Twitter List: Critics, Reporters and Editors

A sortable calendar of noteworthy cultural events in the New York region, selected by Times critics.

• Go to Event Listings »

Auctions have become the leading indicator of ultra-conspicuous consumption, pieces of public, male-dominated theater in which collectors, art dealers and auction houses flex their monetary clout, mostly for one another. The spectacle of watching these privileged few (mostly hedge fund managers and investment-hungry consortiums, it seems) tossing around huge amounts of money has become a rarefied spectator sport. These events are painful to watch yet impossible to ignore and deeply alienating if you actually love art for its own sake.

More than ever, the glittery auction-house/blue-chip gallery sphere is spinning out of control far above the regular workaday sphere where artists, dealers and everyone else struggle to get by. It is a kind of fiction that has almost nothing to do with anything real — not new art, museums or historical importance. It is becoming almost as irrelevant as the work, reputation and market of the kitsch painter Thomas Kinkade.  

Some have tried to put things into perspective, lamenting that the Bacon price almost equaled the $154 million that President Obama requested for the National Endowment for the Arts for fiscal year 2013 — and more than the $138 million that the endowment actually received, with cuts.

Others have pointed out that the price would have paid, twice, for the renovated Queens Museum, which cost a modest $69 million. It has been noted once more that such figures make it impossible to see the art for the money, that works costing this much are, at least temporarily, damaged goods.

 But here’s another perspective. Prices for postwar art began to rise in 1977, when the Whitney Museum of American Art paid $1 million for Jasper Johns’s “Three Flags.” The art world was shocked. Even adjusted for inflation, the $1 million Johns painting would cost roughly $3.85 million in today’s dollars. Now, this would seem a drop in the bucket.

And the system seems greased to go even higher. In a postsale news conference on Wednesday, Brett Gorvy, worldwide head of postwar and contemporary art at Christie’s, seemed to be in gung-ho mode. “This isn’t a bubble,” he said. “It’s the beginning of something new.”

Yet it seems obvious that the Bacon — three portraits of the artist’s friend, the British painter Lucian Freud — is a special case and a guaranteed money magnet. It is a portrait of one of Britain’s two most famous modern artists painted by the other one, both of whom led flamboyant and well-documented lives. More skeptically, the triptych, “Three Studies of Lucian Freud,” might also be termed a portrait of a middlebrow artist by another middlebrow artist.  Yes, the work is beautifully painted with a fetching yellow background, yet if its subject were someone else, or if it simply had an unfamiliar name in its title, it probably would have gone for quite a bit less.

In the meantime, it helps to remember that today most people look at Mr. Johns’s “Three Flags” at the Whitney without seeing a million dollar signs. It may be hard to look at this Bacon without thinking of its extraordinary price. But since the buyer is currently a mystery, it’s anyone’s guess whether we will see it again anytime soon.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: November 14, 2013
An earlier version of this article misidentified the auction house where “The Scream” by Edvard Munch sold for $119 million in the spring of 2012. It is Sotheby’s, not Christie’s.