Date: Thu, 31 Aug 1995 07:50:26 -0400
Subject: Art and Money 


   The New York Times, August 31, 1995, p. C16.


   The Marriage of Art and Money. Is art money or is money
   art? Or is neither idea realistic?

      Art and Money
      By Marc Shell
      Illustrated. 213 pages.
      University of Chicago Press. $35.

   By Charles Hagen [Mr. Hagen is an art critic for The NYT.]


   Despite its sweeping title, "Art and Money," Marc Shell's
   quirky and fascinating new book, has little to say about
   the workings of the art market, public and private
   financing for the arts and many other questions related to
   this prickly topic. Instead, Mr. Shell, a professor of
   comparative literature and the director of the Center for
   the Study of Money and Culture at Harvard, is concerned
   with explicating what he sees as "this vexed relation
   between visual art and money," specifically, "how money
   becomes (or is) artwork and how artwork comes to assume
   some of the characteristics of money." Just what that
   typically dense phrase might mean becomes only partly clear
   over the course of this frequently brilliant but elliptical
   book.

   The key to the relation between esthetic and monetary
   realms, in Mr. Shell's view, is that both are symbols of
   something else. In both, he writes, the physical substance
   of a thing is separate from its intellectual or spiritual
   meaning. Thus he cites with approval an argument by Clemens
   August Andreae, a contemporary art theorist, that the first
   work of Conceptual art was a coin engraved with the numeral
   2: in other words, where the nominal value of the coin was
   greater than the actual value of the precious metal that
   made it up.

   The relationship between art and money has been especially
   complex in the Christian West, Mr. Shell suggests. Biblical
   stories of Jesus' actions in driving the money changers
   from the temple and his instructions to "render unto Caesar
   that which is Caesar's" exemplify the Christian belief that
   matters of money and the spirit should be separate. But
   Jesus is regarded by believers as both a universal God and
   an incarnate God, divine and human; in a parallel way, Mr.
   Shell argues, money is both a symbol and a physical entity,
   ideal and real. "This makes money disturbingly close to
   Christ as a competing architectonic principle," he writes;
   as a result, Christians have felt uncomfortable with money.
   This unease has manifested itself in many ways, including
   medieval laws against simony and the demonizing of Jews as
   money-grubbers.

   In the first part of the book, Mr. Shell looks at several
   examples of Christianity's mixed attitudes toward money and
   the manifestation of those attitudes -- taken from history,
   dogma and myth -- in art. He starts with eighth- and
   ninth-century Byzantium, when debates about biblical
   strictures against graven images led to a wholesale
   destruction of figurative artworks. In arguments on both
   sides of the issue, church fathers used coins as metaphors,
   because as physical objects on which images are stamped
   they combine the physical and the intellectual; much as
   Jesus combined the physical and the spiritual. At the same
   time, Byzantine icons of the period frequently looked like
   coins, with Jesus' head appearing on round backgrounds.

   The Christian confusion of the physical and the spiritual
   can also be seen in the Eucharist wafer, which for
   believers becomes the body of Jesus during communion. Mr.
   Shell points out that it, too, is shaped like a coin, as
   were the golden halos traditionally used in European
   painting to surround the heads of angels, saints and other
   holy figures. He also provides provocative if compressed
   discussions of other instances in Christian myth and art in
   which matter and spirit have been mingled, including the
   Holy Grail, the Annunciation and the medieval trade in holy
   relics.

   In the second half of his book, Mr. Shell turns his
   attention to the relationship between art and money in the
   United States in the late 19th century. There, he notes,
   the introduction of paper money to replace gold and silver
   coins brought fierce debates about the relationship of
   currency to value that in some ways paralleled earlier
   arguments about Christian dogma.

   Political cartoonists had a heyday with the topic, which
   seemed so common-sensical and also offered a host of visual
   metaphors to work with. In an 1878 cartoon by Thomas Nast,
   entitled "Milk-Tickets for Babies, in Place of Milk," a
   doll is offered a ticket labeled "This Is Milk, by Act of
   Con," suggesting either Congress or a confidence game.
   Behind the doll is a drawing of a cow on which is written,
   "This Is a Cow by the Act of the Artist."

   The confusion about the relationship between image and
   reality created by the introduction of paper currency was
   matched by a heightened illusionism in certain forms of
   art. This was especially true of the trompe l'oeil
   renditions of paper money produced by such artists as
   William Harnett, John Haberle and Victor Dubreuil. Some of
   these deceptive renderings of bills were so convincing that
   they were investigated by the Secret Service, and
   Government officials impounded hundreds of trompe l'oeil
   artworks; Haberle himself was suspected of being the famous
   counterfeiter called Jim the Penman.

   Mr. Shell also offers a sketchy outline of more recent
   attempts by artists to play on the separation of
   representation from reality in questions of money. In 1919,
   for example, Marcel Duchamp paid his dentist with a
   hand-drawn check from "The Teeth's Trust Company." Since
   the rise of Conceptual art in the 1960's, other artists
   have produced a flood of similar art jests based on the
   insubstantiality of both esthetic and monetary value. But
   as Mr. Shell observes, the results have been "often more
   cute than acute."

   Mr. Shell closes his book by reiterating his belief that
   questions about the relationship between art and money are,
   as he puts it, "no small affair," exemplifying as they do
   larger confusions in Western culture between mind and
   matter, representation and exchange. Since Byzantine times,
   he argues, debates that have pitted the religious world
   against the secular world, God against mammon, have had
   "extravagant political significance."

   In this slim, heavily illustrated volume, Mr. Shell
   performs a valuable service in focusing attention on a
   subtle and difficult subject. But he has an unfortunate
   tendency to make broad generalizations that are not
   sufficiently supported by the evidence he provides.
   "Artistic production generally is essentially always a form
   of commercial, even monetary, allegory," he declares, but
   most of the artists and artworks he cites to back up his
   ideas are oddballs, outside the mainstream of art history.

   At the same time, he provides many suggestive instances, in
   the history of art and money, of the shared ideas that
   inform them both. In the end, his book is itself somewhat
   of an oddball: by turns provocative and opaque, repetitive
   and profound.

   [End]










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