What is Art? Who decides?

Years ago, during her lunch hour, a young woman named “Sara” used to walk through the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. “I was 22, and a critical thinker, albeit still fairly naïve about the world,” Sara says. “I wanted to learn more about art.” In her days at the National Gallery, Sara fell in love with her first painting – Matisse’s La Coiffure. For the first time she also found herself questioning art. “One day I saw an exhibit showing the lithograph ‘Lots Wife’ by artist by Helen Frankenthaler,” Sara said. “I really didn’t understand why this would be art. As I recall it looked like a long squiggly line down a page. “
What is art? Moreover, who decides which art is “important” art, worthy of museum? And how do they set prices reflecting this purported intrinsic worth? It’s a question that anyone who likes “art” considers at some point.
In a strictly democratic sense, art is anything made by anyone who calls herself or himself, an artist. From an economic, or pecuniary standpoint, it’s much more complicated, according to retired art dealer Donald McKinney. During his long career, McKinney represented and helped elevate many now-legendary artists including Jackson Pollack, Mark Rothko and Richard Diebenkorn.
“The dollar has a very strong influence, I’m afraid,” McKinney says, “to convince people of the value of a work of art.” And price starts with the influential art dealers. In the ‘60s and ‘70s, McKinney ran the New York location of the Marlborough Gallery, then the most famous art gallery in the world. Until 1993, he co-owned Hirchl and Adler, still one of the most prominent New York galleries. According to McKinney, there exists, in fact, a system to elevating an artist.
First a dealer gets excited about an artist’s work. Normally it takes many years of collaboration to make the work known to the public. “It also means associating and selling the work to people to who generally have great collections,” McKinney reveals. “These people also can have some influence with the museums – either they give their paintings to museums or they are a benefactor to the museums in one way or another.” McKinney sold most major Rothkos and Deibenkorns to the Mellons, and now many of those paintings hang in major museums including the National Gallery.
“It’s a slow structure to develop their work, but also their price structure is developed that way. It doesn’t just happen,” McKinney says. “You cannot say arbitrarily, ‘I’m going to ask 20,000 dollars for this artist’s work.’ You may have to start with 1,200. So you see? It takes the right kind of sales to get to the next step.”
McKinney represented the work of Bill Traylor, a former slave who drew scenes of Alabama life on cardboard using crayon and tempera. “At the time when I took them on, they were selling between $600 and $800, generally $1,200. And during the time I handled the work, they went up to $25,000. I sold one to the Metropolitan at that point.” McKinney also sold some to Steven Spielberg after he’d completed The Color Purple. “Now,” McKinney reveals, “some … many are over $100,000. And remember, most of those are on cardboard.”
McKinney agrees that it’s sad to see that the price tag has such influence, on the artist, the people who buy the work, and even the museums. “When a work of art is right, it’s right. And I mean by right, it’s emotional, intellectual, and it reaches out … it has to reach out to you.”
Naturally people will always gravitate to art that touches them in a personal way. This often means that the artist and the art collector may share some pieces of life, or points of view on life, in common. As a young woman, Sara identified with the Matisse painting because it reminded her of herself. Hence, if at its core, art is an artist’s point of view on life, and his or her experiences, then essentially art is in the eye of the beholder. “And often a dealer concentrates only on the area that he strongly believes in,” McKinney says. “If that dealer believes in his artists, he does what he can.”