Understanding the Tension Between the Living and the Departed
Your latest dispatch, “Beyond the Embalmed,” arrives with the same unflinching clarity that has become your signature. One cannot help but admire the precision with which you expose the market’s peculiar necromancy, the elevation of estates, the retrofitted narratives, the sudden alchemical transmutation of overlooked oeuvres into blue-chip gold once the artist is safely silent. The indictment is, as ever, difficult to refute in its broader strokes.
A Moral Imperative for Evolution
You argue that collectors must shift allegiance to the living pulse, measured not by posthumous myth but by what you term Artist Direct Earnings, the unmediated revenues of a breathing practice. There is a bracing moral force to this proposition. It demands accountability, evolution, risk. It insists that value accrue while the hand is still warm, the mind still restless. I concede, without reservation, that too many resources are lavished on the safely departed, too many reputations engineered from archival dust.
The Perils of Immediate Visibility
Yet permit me, once again, to offer a quiet demurral, not in defense of the excesses you rightly decry, but in defense of a certain temporal patience that has, historically, served painting well. The living artist is indeed vulnerable to the market’s immediate gaze, yet that same gaze can be cruelly capricious. Direct earnings, while a useful signal of resonance, are not always a perfect measure of enduring contribution. Some of the most vital voices of any era toil in relative obscurity during their lifetimes, sustained, often, by the very discretion of private patronage or institutional shelter that you critique. The danger of an exclusive focus on the living is that we risk mistaking visibility for significance, urgency for permanence.
The Value of Temporal Patience
I have, in my own quiet way, acquired works from living hands for nearly two decades, often before public notice, sometimes at prices that reflect conviction rather than consensus. Several of the trajectories you have illuminated in these pages already grace collections I advise. But I acquire with an eye toward stewardship across generations, not merely the heat of the present moment. The best collectors, I venture, wager on both: the pulse today and the echo tomorrow.
Stewardship vs. Spectacle
As a collector deeply invested in contemporary art, I have navigated the realms of both living talents and historical figures, seeking to build collections that are not merely reflective of transient trends but resonate through time. The true art of collecting lies in balancing the immediacy of creative output with the enduring nature of legacy.
Room for Both Realms
Your call for a paradigm where the artist is judged on skill and direct engagement while alive is noble. Yet I wonder if we might allow room for both, the immediacy you champion and the longer horizon that has, in the past, rescued genius from premature oblivion. History remains the final, impartial patron. It has embalmed some and revived others. Perhaps our task is not to choose exclusively between the living and the departed, but to cultivate discernment in both realms.
Conclusion: A Call for Discernment
With continued respect, and a growing sense that your arguments, though provocative, are not easily dismissed.