What’s It Got to Do with Art?

Kooks, politicians, and museum bigwigs all have a bad case of climate delirium; a Microsoft billionaire’s art sets an auction record.

H appy Thanksgiving weekend from rural Vermont. We’ve had a gloriously warm and sunny fall. If that’s climate change, I’m for it. I’ve written about the climate kooks in Europe and the U.K. smearing heavy-hitter paintings in museums with tomato soup, mashed potatoes, and cake frosting and then gluing their hands to the frames. It’s vandalism and horrifying, to say the least. Mona Lisa got a cream pie, but she’s behind glass. Paintings by Monet, Botticelli, Turner, Constable, and Van Gogh got smeared, too.

Two loonies from an Italian group called Last Generation glued their hands to the base of the Laocoön at the Vatican. Protesters target museums, they say, because they’re icons of a ruling class enriched by oil. Oil consumption, they believe, causes our little planet to overheat. In the Iliad, Laocoon and his sons warned the Trojan brass not to let that big wooden horse into the city.

There’s no hard science, or even facts, behind climate hysteria and hypnosis. They’re driven by computer models and rigged weather statistics as well as academic greed. The Earth is 4 billion years old. Our climate isn’t well understood, and it’s always changing. A few thousand years ago, a drop in the chronological bucket, Vermont, where I live, was covered with ice. It melted with nary a diesel truck in sight. Global warming’s a corporate boondoggle, too. Lots of sly people are making a ton of money.

I live among the hot spots of climate delirium. Having vanquished plastic bags, our masters are targeting bovine flatulence. They’re functional but crazy. People living at the intersection of ignorance, hubris, naïveté, and deceit power what’s got to be called an economic stab at suicide. Vermont’s a poor state. Only the rich can afford the useless changes forced on us.

Quack science aside, one of these days these vandalizing dopes are going to ruin something precious. These protests are all happening in Europe and in the U.K., where global warming is a religion, fake as it is. Why aren’t they happening in the U.S.? Is the protester class at a transgender-whale conference?

I read all the stories about art vandalism. Directors and curators outside America condemn the tactics, not the philosophy, and even the tactics get a wrist slap, as long as they involve tomato soup rather than something more toxic. Americans probably have more common sense. Vermont aside, and we’re eccentric thinkers, Texas looms larger in forming the civic mentality. It’s worth noting, too, that our museums have better security. Guards are better trained to be observant and proactive. Big-ticket art’s often alarmed.

In 2003, thieves stole Benvenuto Cellini’s Saliera, a majestic gold salt cellar, from the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. Made in 1543, it’s an epic work of hand-hammered sculpture. The thieves broke into the city’s equivalent of the Met at night, swiped the thing, and left. They triggered an alarm, but a guard, dozing a few galleries away, awoke, turned it off, and went back to sleep. The thing’s insured for $60 million. The museum recovered it three years later. Extreme negligence, I know, but American museum people know European security standards are pretty low.

In the Soup

Even most museum directors and curators in America know little about the International Council of Museums, or ICOM. It’s the world professional association for museums, so it’s the Association of Art Museum Directors and the American Alliance of Museums combined. American museum professionals tend to know it only through a basic ICOM membership, which gives them — and the random art critic and independent scholar like me — free admission to museums.

ICOM’s been on the barricades in promoting climate hysteria, as long as the barricades are at a swanky resort in Sharm el-Sheik on the Red Sea, and the crowd includes billionaires and movie stars. Sharm el-Sheik was the site of COP27, the latest international conference of climate full-mooners. Why don’t these people ever meet in Akron? And why not meet for a weekend, not two weeks?

Sure, ICOM deplores flingers of tomato soup at a Warhol soup-can picture, though that’s the only sign of logical, linear thinking to be found in climate action. “We wish for museums to be seen as allies in facing the common threat of climate change,” ICOM said, between margaritas by the beach. “ICOM wishes to acknowledge and share both the concerns expressed by museums regarding the safety of collections and the concerns of climate activists as we face an environmental catastrophe threatening life on Earth.” And pass the sun-tan oil . . . oops, “oil” is a dirty word.

It seems like ICOM’s giving weather wackos an invitation to fire up the glue factory, wind power only, please, and peel more potatoes for mashed mêlées. ICOM’s developing an exhibition called “Reimaging Museums for Climate Action.” It’s itching to propel museums through the looking glass, into climate wars in which museums have no stake and no expertise. I’ll write more about ICOM’s political adventures in the new year. ICOM does good work, but if its leaders are bored by art and thrilled by climate politics, they should look for new jobs.

Cool Billions

I didn’t write about the two sales of Paul Allen’s collection at Christie’s immediately after they happened. With a haul of over $1.6 billion, with only 155 works on the block, it’s the most lucrative sale in auction history. The first auction, on November 9, made a bit over $1.5 billion in selling Allen’s big-enchilada art by Picasso, Monet, Manet, Hockney, Jasper Johns, and others. The next night, sculpture, paintings, and works on paper made $115 million.

I didn’t write about it in part because the national press covered the basics. I wanted to highlight stories about exhibitions in New York that had just opened. And, while Allen’s art is top notch and the money involved impressive, my take is along the lines of “funny what you can buy if you’re worth $20 bil.”

The sale is Christmas-comes-early for Christie’s. It guaranteed Allen’s estate a set amount and then gathered a set of bidders with binding pledges so it knew what its exposure was. These big, blue-chip sales are choreographed. I saw the preview. The art is of the highest quality, but nothing is beyond the scope of human imagination. Maternité II by Gauguin, painted in 1899, went for over $105.7 million. All prices include the buyer’s premium, usually 20 percent, but everything was negotiated. It’s an iconic Gauguin, but there are dozens like it. The Morozov show I reviewed earlier this year in Paris had half a dozen. Allen bought it in 2004 for what was then a record-breaking price for a Gauguin.

Paul Allen and Bill Gates were the pioneer developers, and a team, in the field of personal computers, co-founding Microsoft. Gates is the more famous. He was the public face of Microsoft and is sometimes in the news for his health-care philanthropy. Allen was more quixotic in his interests, owning sports teams, investing in Seattle real estate, funding brain science, and developing spaceships. He led a rock band called Paul Allen and the Underthinkers, funded a pop-culture museum in Seattle, and collected yachts — one with two helicopters, a submarine, and a basketball court. Allen had no children and never married. He died at 65 in 2018, a polymath of astral proportions.

And he collected art, not for a long time or in great depth. Allen had endless dough to spend. He bought over a period of 15 years or so. Christie’s produced an elegant, 283-page catalogue. It’s sumptuously illustrated and aimed at an evolved art appreciator who enjoys offbeat angles.

There’s a chapter on John Quinn (1870–1924), the New York lawyer, avant-garde art collector, and bane of censorious prudes. Quinn owned the small version of Georges Seurat’s Les Poseuses, which Allen bought in 1999 and went for over $149 million, including the buyer’s premium. It’s only 15 inches by 20 inches, and the big version is at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Quinn was an eccentric and savant, and I think Allen saw lots of Quinn in himself, though Quinn was a collector who bought deeply and with focus.

Allen bought some of his art as mementos. A Manet view of the Grand Canal in Venice sold for nearly $52 million. Allen loved visiting Venice. Shelburne Museum in Vermont has a Manet Venice scene. At the hands of Manet, these Venice pictures are lovely, but lovely on the border of schlock. Allen liked Georgia O’Keeffe. Andrew Wyeth’s Day Dream, a nude who’s crossed the border into the land of schlock, sold for over $23 million, eight times the high estimate. Brice Marden, Turner, Thiebaud, Francis Bacon, Canaletto, and Botticelli were in the mix, too.

Everything sold, but I doubt it’s because of Allen’s cachet. He wasn’t flamboyant as a personality, and he wasn’t a Rockefeller or a Rothschild. What he assembled isn’t a distinguished collection, other than its distinctive price on its dispersal. Allen bought what he liked, and knew quality, but I’m drawn to collecting that wanders the map with less abandon and has a consistency born from strong personal taste. I looked at the provenance for the high-end paintings. I couldn’t find much fresh meat, which means art that’s been tucked away in a private collection for hundreds of years. Almost all of it has been on the market, and often.

My impression is that, for Allen, collecting art was a very expensive pastime, not even a hobby. His band, yachts, spaceships, and brain-science giving meant more. The money’s going to Allen’s philanthropic foundation. The estate’s not selling his science-fiction art collection. That might go to a museum.

We’re at the end of what dealers tell me has been a boom two or three years. They tell me the supply of high-quality objects is low since so much came on the market. Billionaires are still worth billions, and those with a yen for big names and quality have slimmer pickings. The Christie’s sale, executed with its usual high standards, and with a great catalogue, might be a high note before a bit of a market dive.