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William Boyd Thinks Art Dealing Is Corrupt

January 25, 2017 by Marion Maneker

Philip Hook
Philip Hook

The novelist William Boyd uses the occasion of Philip Hook’s Rogue’s Gallery being published to launch a screed against the art market in which he says he has witnessed no less than three outright fraudlent practices ‘worthy of prosecution:’

What makes the plastic arts – painting, sculpture and their contemporary conceptual and multi-media spin-offs – different from the other six arts is that they require no popular acclaim at all, however modest, no market-driven consensus, to succeed (I pointedly don’t say to be “good”). But a novelist who sells no books, a film-maker whose films are never made, a composer whose scores are never performed – and so on – cannot survive, let alone thrive. This is not the case in the art world. The late, great art critic Robert Hughes put it this way: “The art market can be set pitching and rolling by a single act, which is why it is so notoriously vulnerable to manipulation.” […]

In my novel Any Human Heart, as a kind of joking thought-experiment, I created a scam whereby a low-value indifferent Picasso could be transformed into a high-value first-rate Picasso. “How did you know?” a dealer asked me, quietly, as if I was some kind of initiate. Yet, as Hook’s book expertly demonstrates it has, in a way, been forever thus, for centuries.

To quote Robert Hughes again: “No work of art has an intrinsic value, as does a brick or a car … The price of a work of art is an index of pure, irrational desire, and nothing is more manipulable than desire.”

Rogues’ Gallery by Philip Hook review – the gullible rich and the art market (The Guardian)

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Filed Under: Dealers, General

About Marion Maneker

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