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The Rightful Ownership of Art
Nike of Samothrace
This topic leads to another question: what does it mean when significant works of art are purchased for private collections (these days at fantastic prices)? Is it right for them to reside for the foreseeable future far from public view? Or do masterworks of art belong to the world at large, properly housed in public spaces where they can be freely visited?
Little did I realize, enjoying our class discussion, that the next week would put me into a situation where this issue is not theoretical. While beginning a tour for which I’m lecturing in Germany, the organization kicked off our packed schedule with a lovely, surprise reception in a private home in Cologne. Built in Bauhaus style, this home stretches far back from its humble façade. It is open and airy, with a grand, windowed corridor flanked by quadrants of gardens. For the party, a pavilion was erected in the back garden. Tables filled the home and yard, and, mercifully, the threatening rain held off for the duration of the evening.
The hosts of this party are charming, highly educated, deeply respected members of Cologne’s business and artistic community. They regularly open their home for such events, in part because their house is filled with significant art. Large contemporary canvases, small sculptures from various eras, pieces of decorative art, and select paintings from the 19th, 18th, even 17th centuries define each room. And everything is displayed to seem organic to that room.
The deep obligation these owners feel to preserve art and make it available was tangible at every turn. The next day, I overheard bits of a conversation about upcoming events the family would be hosting. Let’s just say that opening their home is a regular part of weekly life, and it cannot be easy. But they have this mission deep in their bones, so to speak.
Most of us live in a world where art is rarely discussed, much less owned. Most of us do not carry the weight that comes with purchasing and preserving art. But the obligation to preserve and present our artistic heritage is present in each of our lives today. How to do this is easier to see in places like Cologne and Dresden, Paris and Prague where heritage cannot be ignored. In Cologne, modern buildings are set consciously upon the foundations of Roman walls. Families digging deep in their gardens really do unearth Roman treasures. Every inch of real estate is developed with an eye to its cultural significance and historical past. Art is part of everyday life, rather than a subject to be ticked off in a curriculum requirement.
Here in America, we have had (in the past) a good sense of preserving our artistic heritage, especially in our East Coast cities. Our most esteemed cultural institutions were built by families who devoted enormous private resources to do this, establishing galleries and museums, orchestras and theaters. These institutions, alas, tend to be taken for granted today. Fundraising for them gets ever harder. There is diminishing appreciation for the fact that individuals brought them into being. We had no kings, emperors, or archbishops to do the job.
Christopher Columbus. Photo by Tony Webster (CC BY-SA 2.0)
Yet, here we are, whipped up by academics and ideologically inflamed citizens into a frenzy of stripping our cities, our campuses, and our public institutions of their past. There are individual situations, I acknowledge, where specific names and images need to be reconsidered, reconfigured, or possibly even removed. But those circumstances are rare.
Instead, total swaths of our historical culture are being ripped away in a manner so thoughtless as to have been inconceivable just years ago. With every monument toppled or name stripped, a chunk of our history disappears. Time is supposed to be the arbiter of how history is written, not a ravenous committee of professors and politically driven activists.
Of course, individual works of art are vulnerable too. In fact, one argument (historically) for having masterworks in private hands relates to the probability that they will be better protected from ideological wrath. It pains me to see awkwardly worded placards slapped up next to the identity tags on paintings and sculptures in today’s museums (in Europe as well as America). These placards, in essence, preach sermons reinterpreting items created three, four, even five centuries ago. They apply language and ideas that no artist of the time would recognize or understand. I most recently saw this phenomenon among Renaissance treasures at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. If it were not so damaging, it would be laughable.
Still the passage of time has a way of winning the argument. Vividly I remember being in Moscow a couple of years after the so-called Fall of Communism. Churches were reopening lickety-split. Books long purged could be found in the shops. The old names of streets and institutions were being restored. Monuments toppled by the Bolsheviks were being recast.
I knew this all to be true, of course, from reading about it. Still, encountering it in person was something else. I’ll never forget the physical shock of bumping into the pedestal of a newly cast bronze of a Romanov tsar while backing up to photograph a favorite view. “Where did he come from?” I uttered in surprise. “He didn’t use to be here!”
Actually, he did use to be there—right there, until his statue was melted down after 1917. When the Bolsheviks forced their violent ideology onto the citizenry, everything was done to quash nine-hundred years of tsarist heritage (not to mention more than nine-hundred years of Christian history). With a new light illuminating the Russian world, the past was being rebirthed. It had won its battle through patience.
We don’t know when the current fever for destroying our culture heritage will abate. Some of us may not live to see sanity restored. But for those laboring quietly, diligently for the renewal of education and the preservation of cultural history, do not waver. Take ownership of our cultural and artistic treasures. Whether we preserve them in the corners of our homes or are called to set them out for all to see, we cannot lose confidence in their strength, value, or efficacy.
Published in Culture
I am with you!
It is hard, though, as even people on the right are willing to concede to the removal of art that offends.
Absolutely.
Preserving art is going to be low on the Maslov Hierarchy of Needs. It takes a prosperous culture to preserve art. I remember visiting the Plains of Issus in Turkey. There was a long and impressive Roman aqueduct which was being dismantled by the local farmers for building materials.
Well, of course. Is it so hard to imagine the public display of a sculpture of homosexual pornography? If some radicals put up such an obscenity in the town square, can we not vote them out of office, and have it removed?
If we’re talking about the display of government-owned art, it’s up to the government. If it’s private art, it’s generally up to the owner, though perhaps with limitations (such as display of pornography in public).
I do think that this is a pretty easy question to answer. I don’t think that it works well to say that something “belong[s] to the world at large”? What does that even mean?
I don’t think that it would be wise to depart from the general rules of public property in this area.
It might make sense for a government to own art, and make it accessible to the public, or not. It would be up to the government. If art is privately owned, it’s up to the owner.
I do think that it would be a legitimate exercise of government power to seize a piece of art for public display, as a taking of private property for public use, subject to the 5th Amendment requirement that the owner is compensated. I don’t think that this would generally be a wise policy.
No, we are talking about art that was fine for 150 years and now it removed for political reasons.
I find this to almost be a form of vandalism. It is certainly proof that the wokeism is a strain of marxism.
Here is a 6 min video of Mark Steyn interviewing David Starkey.
Starkey makes the interesting, and politically incorrect, case that western culture invented history. Western collectors gathered artifacts from other cultures who did not have an appreciation of history, and were not interested in preserving their own heritage. He gives specific examples.
Depends on how you define homosexual pornography. Artless depictions of sex acts, that’s an easy call, or even your Maplethorpe with the whip-up-the-patootie, however carefully lit and composed it may be. But a not-insignificant quantity of your Renaissance and Baroque art is purrretttty gay.
What if it was considered shocking and indecent at the time, but now rests comfortably in the galleries because the artist was regarded as important, and the work has aesthetic and historical importance?
Yes, usually because it abrades moral or religious sentiments. Although the cases are scant – Serrano, Ofili. The Left removes art for political reasons – they are intent on reformulating the past as a toxic landscape no one can travel with any safety, so all the signposts that might lead one to that hellscape have to be removed. Eventually it is enough for the people to know that this empty plinth once contained an enemy of the future, until the empty space itself is a testament to the industry of those who are making a new world.
But painting and sculpture are small potatoes. The most public of arts is architecture. The break with traditional forms, the replacement of visual historical continuity with new strange forms unmoored from our common aesthetic definitions – well, that’s where the action’s at.
I so agree there! I want to live amid beautiful buildings.
Jordan Peterson made the comment once that beauty is under valued in our society. I agree. We need it. it is important.
Behind the elevation of ugly art are ugly motives. Evil, even, despite the high self regard of those who do this.
I have been thinking about this somewhat. I think it is tied to the overall move toward relativism. Since there is no absolute truth there can be no objective standard of beauty, so the believers in relativism go out of their way to devalue beauty in order to devalue truth.
But you state a principle that would be applied to the example that I mentioned. Now you seem willing to agree to removal of art that offends, if it’s offensive to you (and to me). My view is that the idea that we cannot remove art that offends is a bad idea.
So I don’t think that the current problem is the tactics of the people who want to remove art that reflects Christian or conservative ideas. I think that the problem is their ideology is evil.
If you donate something to a museum–a Renoir sketch, a Hokusai print–it may never (or rarely) be seen by the public: It will go into the vaults where it can be studied by scholars and students, but will never go on display unless it is of particular interest.
Few people know that anything in particular needs to be done to protect and preserve art, much less how to do it. For instance:
Did you write intros for Rod Serling in “The Twilight Zone?” LOL
If I’ve got this right, the average art museum has about 90% of its works locked away in storage and 10% on display.
I’m not too concerned about the art purchased at exorbitant prices being taken away from public view because the vast majority of those are junk. The super rich play games with who can own the latest outrageous piece of crap on the market. The really good stuff sells in the upper middle-ranges.
A point of interest – William Bouguereau was the most successful and popular artist (and probably the most financially successful) in France during the 19th Century, and today most people never heard of him. In the 1950’s and 60’s, so I hear, his paintings could be bought for a couple thousand dollars. Nowadays his prices are back up to where they should be, the highest being sold for a little over $3.5 Million. Here’s one you might recognize: