In the early 70s musicians Georgie Fame and Alan Price came together to produce an album entitled the Price of Fame. For five minutes they were well known, failed to destroy any hotel rooms and made the papers for all the right reasons. The music was less than memorable but the title still has agency. One definition of fame talks about
‘widespread reputation, especially of a favourable character, renown and public eminence’ while another mentions a firework display. Whichever way you go, fame is shortlived and there is a distinct feeling that something is lost in the process – if you survive. The price of fame may not be worth the adventure.
Interestingly, the famous of the art world in the 20th century had moments when ‘fireworks’ was probably true as their work ‘exploded’ onto the market. Often though fame/infamy came from sources other than the work produced. Picasso was a womaniser, Pollock and de Kooning were alcoholics, Dali walked a gold lobster down the street and any number died as renown swept around the corner overwhelming their sanity. One example is the documentary film made about Pollock as he danced above a canvas which did more to upset his fragile equilibrium that his alternate life at the Cedar bar. Suddenly everyone knew who he was and he shortly joined a procession of car accident victims from James Dean to Princess Diana who’s lives came to an end at the pinnacle of world-wide acclaim. There was nothing of life like their leaving it.
The poor old post impressionists might have enjoyed something other than public ridicule in their lifetimes although whether they ever conceived fame as a possibility is anyone’s guess. Like the American painters on the 50s who openly admitted that abstraction was never going to make them either rich or famous, their lives were often lived on the edge of both poverty and society. Franz Kline described the lofts of New York as places where animals went to die – or artists. The myth of the impoverished and misunderstood artist in the garret continued for some time until noted gallery owners got in on the act and then it became a selling point. And they did sell once they stopped being branded as communists. Interestingly, the preferred social realism of conservative groups and politicians was actually the art of choice for communist countries who saw abstraction as a threat to society. For both the post Impressionists and the abstract crew in New York, their fame came late in life or death, as we all know. Monet and Renoir however, lived long enough to be acclaimed as masters in a century foreign to them but got to hide away in the countryside without the benefit of continual press scrutiny and social media. De Kooning and Bacon in particular avoided openings but could not avoid the notoriety. Picasso though, revelled in the limelight signing tablecloths and working his way through a number of wives. No doubt Time Magazine had a whole department devoted to his activities with a stream of paparazzi doing quite well. Today he would have had an Instagram account and a billion followers to match the uptake of Justin Beiber – not that the noted pop star will be remembered for much more than just being famous alongside the Kardashians.
It’s also not difficult to find examples of artists who were household names in their day and are now discarded by history or the opposite, never recorded by history. It took for instance 400 years for Pierro Della Francesca to assume his rightful placed in the pantheon and Bach JS was forgotten for two centuries. A variety of women artists from Caterina van Hemessen to Fede Galizia to Clara Peeters and Hilma af Klint never made the limelight, to say nothing of women mistaken for men and women who took men’s names. You have to wonder how any of them might have handled 20th century fame or the advent of social media allied to a Google search engine.
The question in my mind, however, comes down to who would want to be famous as an artist in the first place? Fame, as opposed to respect and recognition, is short lived, superficial and fickle, unless of course you are Jeff Koons who is his own publicity agent.
In the 70s that whole movement that produced unsaleable art of either on a huge scale or located in desert locations where it was all but inaccessible, strikes a chord. If it’s that big and inaccessible, such as the Smithson Spiral Jetty, let history rather than the art market deal with it. As it is, I can’t seem to avoid the current sale price statistics from Sotheby’s popping up every day as indicators of the viability of being part of a system dominated only months ago by a ludicrous price for an NFT, a banana, and a self-shredding Banksy. Robert Smithson is remembered for all the right reasons both before and after his early death in a plane crash [at least it wasn’t a sports car]. Making the art annals in perpetuity without having to resort to reality TV or social media is quite an achievement.
Reading about the wholesale destruction of the work of Agnes Martin, Ad Reinhardt and many others while in the care of galleries purporting to further artists’ careers through exhibitions or retrospectives, leaves little doubt that art and artists are a commodity and a disposable one at that. That anything survives the carelessness of others, the thefts and the deliberate destruction, seems a matter of pure chance. Rothko’s work, or at least some of it, ended up in offshore vaults wherein investors could buy into its worth and expect a dividend. I doubt that thought even occurred to Rothko in his lifetime. He was depressed enough as it was. He imagined that people would want to enjoy his work for what it was, not for what it was worth.
I’d be the first to admit to my ambivalence about both fame and the art market. Rothko was vehement in his hatred of the whole system and I’m not naïve enough to believe that I, in fact, have any control over how, where, when or to whom my work might be sold and its potential fate let alone how I might be portrayed or remembered. As much as I might like someone to notice what I’m doing, the thought of the social media circus, the packing and transport of works anywhere, and even the reality of openings and galleries, all leave me cold. I’m sure there are many artists who would welcome the attention. I’m not one of them. That probably condemns me to an artistic life in the backwaters.