My family recently moved. A change of address means a lot of paperwork, one of which was calculating the value of the art collection my husband and I have amassed. I seem to have been trying to displace some emotion—moving from our home of 14 years was not easy—but the exercise got me philosophical. I could list the prices I have paid for various works; I could extrapolate about the current art market by looking at recent auction results. But what does that tell me? The insurance company wanted to know the dollar amounts, but I was stuck on the thornier question of value.
Seven years ago, I saw a retrospective of the artist Agnès Martin at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. I knew Martin’s minimalist paintings, which I admired, and I didn’t expect to be surprised by the exhibition, much less deeply moved. I like the experience of communion with films, books, and paintings on the wall, but I’m rarely overwhelmed by them, and I certainly didn’t expect to cry over an artist known for her cold geometries. But there we were, my partner and I, contemplating Martin’s last completed painting with tears in our eyes.
I tried to make sense of my state that day. I was hungry, or tired, or thirsty, or some combination of all three: that’s how I found myself facing my children’s emotional outbursts. Maybe the Frank Lloyd Wright building had something to do with it, the slope of the ground made me feel unsteady, the open rotunda made me dizzy. Or maybe my reaction was purely emotional: I’d have to be made of stone not to feel anything after hearing the sobering facts of Martin’s life. Maybe all of that is true, or at least a factor, in my tears.
It is also possible that I experienced something all too rare in my secular life in our secular culture: the sacred. It is already a cliché to say that museums are modern cathedrals, built to eclipse the body and amaze the senses. It is worth noting that the silent contemplation of everything that is not my iPhone is profound and that the progression I made on the ramp of the Guggenheim was rather like the observation of the Stations of the Cross by a devout Catholic.
I think that art is for me, and perhaps for most of us, one of the last territories of the sacred. The price of a work of art tells us nothing about it, and there is no point in talking about art in terms of dollars, euros or yen, but perhaps there is no other unit of measurement available to us.
The most expensive thing The only thing I have ever bought is a painting. It is a small work, a minor effort by one of the most famous artists in the world. I bought it at auction, spending far more than I had planned, swept up in the fervor of competition, my desire for it somehow independent of the price I would pay for it, by the magical thinking that governs most of my purchases. The way my insurance company judges the value of this untitled painting is by reference to the statement of what I spent to acquire it. That is the market in a nutshell: things are worth what someone is willing to pay for them.
When I look at this painting, I don’t think about that number. I think about what a genius can do with paint, and I think about the ability of that particular genius to create images that are both horrible and beautiful, and I think about the hands of that particular genius touching this artifact that I now own. But I’m not a subscriber.
This is the most expensive painting in our collection, but I don’t know if that means it’s also the most valuable. I have a framed watercolor that my oldest son painted when he was three—bless the Montessori teachers who wrote the date on it. It’s a splash of light blue, and according to the artist, it’s a whale. Children’s artwork rarely looks like what it’s supposed to depict, but in this case, the object, perhaps by accident, really does look like a whale jumping. Obviously, there’s no way to convert sentimental value into real currency.
It is a great privilege for me to be able to spend money on art, even though I have more feelings than financial means. It is still possible to buy works by artists at the beginning of their careers, or editions of more famous names in small auction houses, or even minor works by true masters.
I think about money, because I work within the constraints of a budget, but only when I am in the middle of a transaction. Then I forget about it completely. I cannot, like George Lucas, spend $15 million on a Robert Colescott painting. I could, however, spend about a month’s rent on a small old work by the same artist. Living with that work gives me a pleasure that I cannot put a price on, even though my insurance company has asked me to.
Sometimes a work of art is described as invaluable. In my imagination, this implies more zeros than can be counted, but it is more accurate to say that in art, numbers are not salient. We should call a masterpiece invaluable instead.
Yet money is such an essential factor in contemporary existence that we cannot help but integrate it. Money borders—even if it should not enter—some of the most important areas of life. Family life, religious faith, and romantic love are perhaps the only ones left that escape the logic of buying and selling.
The art market is one thing, but even the urge to photograph or otherwise document a museum visit, which is very common these days, is, I think, an economic activity. We grab our phones out of a vapid desire to participate in a culture too in tune with pointless connectivity, yes. But posting a Pollock or a Van Gogh on Instagram turns that moment of pleasure into work. We think it’s ennobling; it’s sadly degrading.
I don’t know whether it’s right to regard faith as a domain completely uncorrupted by money – it’s certainly possible to list the assets of, say, the Catholic Church (some of which are what we would call invaluable). Nevertheless, art can offer an encounter with the mysterious, a territory that borders on the mystical. Perhaps that is why I so often find it a balm.
Just a few months ago, on a day that I found personally difficult, I took refuge at the Museum of Modern Art, seeking distraction or solace. There I saw an exhibition by the video and performance artist Joan Jonas. I spent a surprisingly long time looking at black-and-white footage of a performance she had staged decades earlier, in the wasteland of Lower Manhattan. For those minutes, I completely forgot the worries that had driven me to the museum in the first place.
Last summer I pulled some strings and I was invited backstage at Christie’s Rockefeller Center branch. I was writing a book in which a character, a billionaire, buys a painting by Helen Frankenthaler. (The choice of this artist has no meaning other than personal, since she is one of my favorite Abstract Expressionists.) I wanted to see the rooms where serious collectors are sometimes invited to test the tires of the masterpieces they might buy.
A Christie’s employee led me down a long corridor, opened huge doors onto intimate, silent rooms, simply but brightly lit, containing nothing at all. I thought they looked like chapels. I loved imagining the Warhols and Picassos that had once been there, ready to be inspected.
My guide seemed surprised to discover that the last room we entered was not empty at all. In my memory, it was also bright and silent, but there, on the wall, was a painting. It looks like a novel, but it is true: it was by Frankenthaler. There are many words that apply to this word: chance, coincidence, luck, destiny.
I find that when I’m immersed in writing a novel, there are strange resonances in my real life. I’m served a meal like the one I’ve imagined, or I meet someone with the same name as a character I’ve invented. There’s no deeper meaning to it, just a funny event that’s happened to me often enough that I understand it as part of the process of writing a novel. Maybe it’s also part of the experience of seeing a work of art. There’s a thrill that can’t be expressed in words, a feeling of recognition or kinship.
I don’t know what happened to the Frankenthaler I saw that day. (Christie’s sold a Frankenthaler this spring for more than $4 million, but that’s a detail that I think is of most interest to insurance companies.) I like to imagine the person who bought it: that she walked into the same room as me, that she smiled with an intimate pleasure at the thought of being alone with the painting. I like to imagine that she knew and cared about Frankenthaler, that she was tempted to touch the painting, that she wondered about its provenance, that she got close enough to the canvas to smell the paint itself.
I like to imagine that this moment brought them joy, a joy they feel every time they see the painting, wherever they choose to hang it. I can’t bear to think that it was stored away or hung in a spare bedroom in a rarely visited vacation home. I prefer to imagine it was with someone who would agree with me that the value of art is incalculable, even if it’s someone with enough money to say something like that and be taken seriously. I’d like to tell the owner of this painting how I stole two minutes alone with his painting, and I like to imagine that he knows that it’s worth everything.
Rumaan Alam’s new novel, ‘Entitlement’, is published by Bloomsbury
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