Art as Posession: From the Hearst Castle to Cleansed Bills

Hearst Castle

“The prime aim of these wild Xanadus (as of every Xanadu) is not so much to live there, but to make posterity think how exceptional the people who did live there must have been.” (Eco, p. 27).

Umberto Eco, in Travels in Hypperreality, asserts that America’s wax museums/Hearst Castle/Marilyn Motel etc. arise out of a “horror vacui” since we exist outside of a European, historical past and therefore we need to take fake possession of the real. This is similar to previous function of oil paintings in society. Berger in Ways of Seeing (see previous post) asserts that oil painting was a way of owning property in lieu of the real thing or as a demonstration of what one owned for society and posterity. Basically, its all about possession and value. How capitalist.

So I guess we Americans are left with a simulacrum of the real as a roads to possession. Eco continues that people seem to think if its a good enough simulacrum, such as the Hearst Castle, its almost better than the ‘real’ thing.

“Cleansed” bill in Draw your Money project.

Roland Farkas, a Slovakian artist in Hungary, gets at this notion with his 2011 project, Draw your Money, where he takes something literally capitalist, a banknote, and turns it into art. Draw Your Money involves cleansing banknotes of the ink markings that give them value. The artist removes the ink from paper money to create blank slates for drawings: “In this way the ink and paper of bills are recycled as materials for an original artwork, the value of which is greater than that of the denominated note from which it was created.”

Via Rising Tensions

In trying to thing of something intelligent to say, I poked around the internet and found this. Which kind of sums it all up if you were to throw in some dollar bills.

Oil Painting and Art as Commodity

Art Collection of Archduke Leopold Wilhelm, Teniers, 1651

A long, forgive me, but interesting quote from John Berger‘s Ways of Seeing, which I just read for the first time.

Oil painting did to appearances what capital did to social relations. It turned everything into an object. Everything became exchangeable because everything became a commodity. The soul, thanks to the Cartesian system, was saved in a category apart. A painting could speak to the soul –by way of what it referred to, but never by the way it envisaged. Oil painting conveyed a vision of total exteriority. 


Pictures immediately spring to mind to contradict this assertion. Works by Rembrandt, El Greco, Giorgione, Vermeer, Turner, etc. Yet if one studies these works in relation to the tradition as a whole, one discovers that they were exceptions of a very special kind. The tradition consisted of many hundreds of thousands of canvases and easel pictures distributed throughout Europe. A great number have not survived. Of those which have survived only a small fraction are seriously as works of fine art, and of this fraction another small fraction comprises the actual pictures repeatedly reproduced and presented as the works of ‘the masters’. 


Visitors to art museums are often overwhelmed by the number of works on display, and by what they take to be their own culpable inability to concentrate on more than a few of these works. In fact such a reaction is altogether reasonable. Art history has totally failed to come to terms with the problem of the relationship between the outstanding work and the average work of the European tradition. The notion of Genius is not in itself an adequate answer. Consequently the confusion remains on the wall of the galleries. Third-rate works surround an outstanding work without recognition –let alone explanation– of what fundamentally differentiates them. 


The art of any culture will show a wide differential of talent. But in no other culture is the difference between ‘masterpiece’ and average work so large as in the tradition of the oil painting. In this tradition the difference is not just a question of skill or imagination, but also of morale. The average work –an increasingly after the seventeenth century– was a work produced more or less cynically: that is to say the values it was nominally expressing were less meaningful to the painter than the finishing of the commission or the selling of his product. Hack work is not the result of either clumsiness or provincialism; it is the result of the market making more insistent demands than the art. The period of the oil painting corresponds with the rise of the open art market. And it is in this contradiction between art and market that the explanations must be sought for what amounts to the contrast, the antagonism existing between the exceptional work and the average.

– John Berger, Ways of Seeing, pp.87-88. 

Think of all those still lifes. The value of the object being protrayed helped determine the value of the painting itself. It was an argument for the patron’s wealth or beauty or other impressive quality. Today, with an open art market in full swing, such forms of representation  are just  as present, albeit in a questioning manner. The photographic “portraits” of Cindy Sherman and certainly the oil paintings of Julie Heffernan come to mind.