Perspective.....

It's been said here many times that cars will never touch the art market. Unless BMW starts selling some of their Art Cars... Specifically Warhol's M1.

Still, I thought the Newman painting was gorgeous. I hope it ends up at a museum so it can be seen, instead of at someone's living room.

 

Collectible markets tend to move in lockstep. Booms and busts. Look out for the coming bust.

Dave

 

To me, the worst thing that has happened is this idea that "cars are art". It's completely RUINED the hobby of owning and enjoying older cars.

The people who would love to own the car to own it can't afford it because the people who see it only as a money maker keep it under lock and key for a few years and put it up to willing auction houses who thrive on pushing metal out the door as long as they get their commission.

The true value of the car is distorted because the reason for buying it is not because it's a car - it's a commodity that rises in value. It's become no different than buying pork bellies or Apple Stock.

When I had my Dino, it was worth about 20-25 grand. New 308's were about 35 grand so I thought it was about the right price. I drove it as my daily driver for 18 months. I parked it anywhere. I drove it up to Monterey from LA. I waxed it once and a while and kept it parked in my carport under a car cover. I enjoyed it. It was -- a really nice and fun car to drive.

And, I was lucky enough to afford it with some sacrifices at the time that I was willing to make.

Today, that's impossible. Same car --- different attitude and reason for owning it.

It's no longer fun. It's a business.

So, who to blame? Well, I blame the rapid growth of Auction houses who bring in rich clients and speculators to buy not for the love of the car but for what the car will bring in 2 or 3 years time.

Ok... a really special car that is really unusual or important in history-- I get it. Auction it because you really can't tell what it's true value is.

But, a car that you can buy any day of the year by just opening up your newspaper or looking at Auto trader? That's not special.

That's just a car.

 

I don't get “Onement VI”...it looks like one half of a ping pong table. Shouldn't be too difficult if you wanted to recreate it for your own place.

I'm not sure how much the Art Cars would go for...a very interesting topic. I'd guess the Warhol would fetch the most like you stated.

 

Disclaimer: I've found it's very hard to talk about art - contemporary art in particular - and not sound like a snob. I don't mean to accuse or offend you or anyone else with what I'm about to say. As someone who's been working in the contemporary art market for a few years, and also someone who's very passionate not only about contemporary art, but about art (and culture in general) education, my main goal is to inform, not to judge. Also, please excuse the huge post.

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This particular painting is one of Newman's masterpieces, and a truly wonderful painting. The problem with great sums of money attached to things - especially art - is that they make most people very antsy. Abstract expressionist art in particular generates a LOT of skepticism, due to its abstract nature, and due to the high values the paintings command.

I would say that it is important not to underestimate the first, visceral impression any work of art elicits. In the end it can boil down simply to looking bad or good for you - ignoring all the rest, like $$ etc. However, the truth is, like a lot of things, to really appreciate art in general, it is important to know and study what you're looking at.

Onement VI is one of a series of paintings that defined Newman's "style" so to speak, and the white line - which ended up being called the "zip" - is an integral part of that style. Along with other abstract expressionist painters like Rothko, Kline, Pollock, Krasner, DeKooning, Gottlieb etc, Newman was rejecting the sense of objectivity that had dominated art in the past. In a nutshell, the invention of the photograph basically made detail heavy, objective painting obsolete. This allowed for the impressionists, then the cubists, to re-interpret subject-based painting into a more introspective practice, rather than a narrative one. Yet despite all of that, they continued to paint based on real life - and even though the cubists (Picasso in particular) attempted to represent multiple visual planes on a two-dimensional surface, many artists by the late 1920's and early 1930's began to question why painting should continue to be a representation of real life. From there came the surrealist (representational, but "surreal" points of view) movement, as well as the De Stijl (mainly abstract points of view focused on basic harmonic relationships between form and color) movements. The second world war shifted the world's art capital from Paris to New York, where a group of American painters had been accompanying these movements with some skepticism. Their cultural reality in a country that had never really dictated any cultural movement, but that was prosperous and eager to do so, meant that they were free to deny the "rules" imposed by their european predecessors and break with the tradition of painting using "outside" inspiration. Abstraction was the obvious answer, and the different personalities meant different techniques of laying paint on canvas. The main goal was to elicit a visceral reaction from the viewer, though not one that was "biased" by giving them the answer in the form of a pictorial representation of something they had already seen, such as a nude woman, or a guitar, or apples... Eventually, this form of painting came to be called "Abstract Expressionism".

Newman, Rothko and Pollock were especially concerned with creating a transcendental experience between painting and viewer. There is a famous story that when one of Newman's one man shows was first hung at the Betty Parsons gallery, he had a sign hung up that said "These pictures are meant to be viewed from up close". If you are lucky enough to have the opportunity to visit a museum with a good AbEx collection - particularly one with Rothko paintings - I would say go and look at the paintings in person. But stand in front of them, from up close, let the canvas take over your peripheral vision, and just pause for a minute. Soon you'll forget you're in a city, you'll forget about your problems. It can really be a mind blowing experience, but you have to be open to it beforehand. It doesn't work if you allow your pre-conceptions about what the paintings are worth, or of the "my kid could do that" type to "infect" your viewing of this piece of art. Remember, the fact they are in museums, the fact they are in important collections, the fact they are in textbooks - all of this proves their validity and importance as far as Art's place in history is concerned.

There is much to explain and learn about this, and if you really want I can give you a few book suggestions. However my main point is the following: each of us can choose what we care about and enjoy in this world, and how we use our time enjoying these things. Art is important, and that is undisputed fact, but it is also important to understand that it takes great skill to paint a picture such as "Onement VI". Not the same sort of skill that it took to paint those huge renaissance paintings that are hung in the Louvre, but skill nonetheless. There's no point getting riled up about Contemporary Art values if you've not put the time into understanding the importance of these artists and paintings to the world you live in, and what their lasting influence has been. Initial reactions - or uninformed ones, if you want to be mean - are important because like I said, you have a finite amount of time to do things you enjoy, and if you think it's to much work to understand why a painting that looks like a ping pong table is worth 43 Million, then that's obviously OK. But the other side of that coin is that waving hands up in the air with uninformed opinion will only put you in the group of people who get riled up by the sale of anything for extreme sums of money.

Personally, I don't believe in the statement that many times shows up in these discussions that "Art (or even good art) is what you want it to be". I think that's BS.

There are a number of objective factors that prove what really is fine art, what is influential art, what is important art, what is good art and what isn't. I do, however, believe that everyone is entitled to their opinion on what looks good and what doesn't. If you want to spend 2 seconds in front of a painting at a museum (or a rich friend's house), or 2 hours, that's entirely up to you. In fact I can tell you that on average people spend 8x longer reading museum labels describing the works of art than they do looking at the works of art (4 vs around 30s - so not much in any case). I just wish more people would approach artworks with more respect than they do, but that IMO is a complicated issue to fix in this day and age, due to a very fragmented art market, and an educational system that is happy telling people that it's the same thing to experience a Rothko painting in a google image search as experiencing one at the Rothko Chapel, in Houston.

 

Interesting timing:

Up Close With Andy Warhol's BMW M1 Art Car - Autoweek

 

Thanks for the response. I did read it in its entirety and would have even if you decided to write more. I love art...in all mediums and painting movements. The price is not something I have an issue with. It's not my money and I couldn't care less how much they spent on it just like that Indian businessman that spent $1 billion on a house or $43mm in this case.

The hard part for me is trying to put myself in the buyer's shoes (and competitive bidders) to see why it was so popular and your explanation helped in that regard. Having been to the major museums in Paris and the US, I've seen a lot from the various movements and abstract was one I have had the most difficulty with.

Your point about skill in renaissance vs. abstract is valid and I don't think it's fair to compare the two based on that area alone. Impressionism is my personal favorite, but I can appreciate the time and skill it takes for the renaissance works even though I don't go out of my way to view them. However, for some (not all) abstract works, I can't help but think at least a little more skill needs to be evident so that and others could appreciate it more as you do even if they do interpret the meaning correctly. That may sound a little selfish, but with some of these on public display, I feel the criticism isn't completely unwarranted.

I wouldn't go as far and say "my kid can paint that," but I have to draw the line somewhere for my view on what I find impressive art...and painting a canvas essentially one color happens to be where I draw my line. It's still art, don't get me wrong, but just not what impresses me and it takes me longer to figure out why others regard it so highly.

I'll have to give the peripheral vision viewing method a try next time. I try not to get too close to paintings and have only been able to do that viewing technique with the wall-sized Warhol Mao paintings (the one at the Met).

 

Nice write-up. I think I accidentally learned something

 

I completely understand what you are saying, and perhaps I should also say that I am a very big fan of the Abstract Expressionist movement, so I'm inclined to enjoy the paintings even more. Having said that, I think Newman was more important as a member of the AbEx school as a man than as a painter. I enjoy the "Onement" series a lot, but I am a bigger fan of other painters, mainly Mark Rothko, Franz Kline, Jackson Pollock, Lee Krasner, Joan Mitchell, and Clyfford Still. Newman was an important personality in the history of the development of American painting, though, and I encourage anyone who is interested in it to watch Emile de Antonio's movie "Painters Painting". He made it in the 1970's while a few of the AbEx painters were still alive, and it is a good basic way to understand the development of American painting before what some call the post-historical period which came with the fragmentation of the art world after pop art. Newman is interviewed at length, and he was a very very interesting guy.

https://itunes.apple.com/us/movie/painters-painting/id312435677
Amazon.com: Painters Painting: Andy Warhol, Leo Castelli, Helen Frankenthaler, Henry Geldzahler: Amazon Instant Video

Here's a clip of him talking about Onement I, from the movie:

[ame]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N6sU6ft9Xjg[/ame]

 

Well said.

 

But the older cars thata re too expensive these days are just ones that are now NAMES, there are plenty of equivalent undiscovered automotive works to enjoy. its just that most people only find them covetable when the prices rise enough to make them a NAME.

For instance, maserati 3500 are equivalent to period astons and feraris or arguably better, but awhole lot less still. same with a GHIbli which is very affordable.

You can buy a superformance GT40, same as real thing or a Kirkham cobra same as real thing but better built. Now you willa rgue against these, but its not in the way they drive, its because they dont have provenance and therefore growing value. But as motive art they are the same as period builds. You can also get a proteus Ctype.

Less to spend and a etype out of reach. Try a TR6, or a new lotus elise. In fact is an elise not where Dinos used to be when theyw ere 20K cars.

NSX's are not too expenmsive 308's are still great value. All thes ecars will one day be wortha lot and then people will lament that they are not driven and are now collectables. The only era that has not produced a lot of classicaly great cars is themid 70's to mid 80's.
Otherwise there are so many equaly valid subtitute choices for the cars that have shot up in value.

how about alotus Esprit instead of aDino.