When a local artist intentionally shattered a vase, last week, at the Pérez Art Museum Miami’s ongoing Ai Weiwei retrospective, most journalists predictably focussed on the price of the destroyed work, which was said to be a million dollars. CNN’s headline was typical of the coverage: “MIAMI ARTIST DESTROYS $1 MILLION AI WEIWEI VASE IN PROTEST.” Variations of this appeared in the _ Guardian_, the Associated Press, and on Gawker, as well as in magazines and local newspapers.
Ai had painted the Han Dynasty-era vase to resemble a cheap modern-day container, an example of his long-standing interest in notions of cultural heritage, authenticity, and—appropriately enough—the value of art. It’s not surprising that media coverage led with the price, rather than by focussing on these more rarefied qualities. What is surprising, however, is that the much repeated price was almost certainly wrong. There is scant evidence that the vase, which was on loan from the artist and had never been auctioned or sold, would sell for anything close to a million dollars. An official appraisal by the museum’s insurers is still in progress, but, according to Leann Standish, a deputy director at the museum, they will most likely determine that the vase is worth much less. How the million-dollar figure came to be, and how it subsequently spread online and in print, says a great deal about the contemporary art market, and about the ephemeral relationship between a work of art and its dollar value.
Last Sunday, Maximo Caminero, a fifty-one-year-old artist, walked into “According to What?,” the Ai Weiwei retrospective, picked up one of the sixteen “Colored Vases” on display, and—ignoring the protests of a museum guard—dropped it. Video footage of the event shows a large triptych of photographs on the wall behind the vases, which depict Ai dropping an urn from chest height, in the same manner as Caminero. After smashing the vase, Caminero waited calmly for police to arrive, at which point he told them that he had spontaneously decided to protest the new museum on behalf of local artists, and that Ai’s triptych “Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn” had inspired him. “I did it for all the local artists in Miami that have never been shown in museums here,” he told the Miami New Times. “They have spent so many millions now on international artists.”
Standish said that the police needed to assign the vase a dollar value in order to arrest Caminero, since that figure would determine the charges against him. But such figures are not easy to derive without sale or insurance records. A travelling exhibition like “According to What?” is typically insured as a whole, not piece by piece, Standish said, and the cost of insurance is divided among all the museums that the show visits. To give the police a sense of the vase’s worth, museum security workers mentioned Ai’s 2007 series of nine Neolithic vases, “Group of Nine Colored Vases,” which sold at Sotheby’s, in 2012, for a little more than a hundred and fifty thousand dollars. The museum employees speculated that the potential auction price of Ai’s sixteen “Colored Vases” might be as high as five hundred thousand dollars, which the police tentatively raised to a million dollars, with the understanding that the number was a placeholder that would be modified by an appraiser before the trial. (The police never spoke to the museum’s curatorial staff.) By the time museum officials realized this number was being reported as the definitive price of the single broken vase, rather than as a back-of-the-envelope estimate of the entire series, the story had already taken shape.
The press surrounding the Pérez Art Museum Miami, which opened in December, has not been entirely negative, Standish told me. “It has allowed for a dialogue to get started about what makes art valuable, and that is a good thing.” Still, she has since declined to give reporters a more accurate estimate of the vase’s value. “I’ve seen what can happen to a number,” she said. Ai, who disagreed with the reasoning behind Caminero’s homage, told the Associated Press he thought the reported price was “a very ridiculous number.”
This sort of reporting error results from the speed of journalism in the Internet era, and from the increasingly widespread belief that an art work’s monetary value is its most newsworthy feature. Because art can be difficult for journalists to write about, much less evaluate, price often takes on exaggerated relevance in stories like this one. But journalists need not avoid the subject of money altogether. Much of Ai’s work, including “Colored Vases” and “Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn,” confronts the way that art and other cultural objects (like ancient Chinese urns) have become attractive high-end investments for collectors, who may be unlikely to consider the aesthetic object behind the price. And Caminero’s protest against the millions spent on international artists at Pérez, however ill conceived, raises real questions about celebrity artists, like Ai, and about the best use of a museum’s budget.
Such questions are hardly novel for museums, nor is Ai the only modern-day artist determined to complicate the relationship between a work of art and its purported value. Damien Hirst has built his career on exploring (some would say exploiting) the intersection of art, value, and spectacle; “For the Love of God,” his diamond-and-platinum cast of a human skull, was one of the most infamous art-market pieces of recent years, mainly because of the furor surrounding its original asking price: a hundred million dollars. The preposterous price was exactly the point—it critiqued art-world avarice and the spectacle of consumption even as it participated in the fray. But, of all the intriguing convergences of art and money suggested by the destruction of Ai Weiwei’s vase, by far the least interesting is the object’s monetary value.
The art-world spectacle and the huge sums of money that accompany it, as well as its coverage in the media, though commonplace today, are relatively recent developments. When the “International Exhibition of Modern Art” made its début in New York, in 1913, showcasing thirteen hundred recent works of European and American art, the response among critics was as schismatic as it was sensational—not because of record sales but because of the art itself. Professional art critics wrote ecstatic raves and head-shaking pans of the new styles and schools on display. In a 2009 piece in Art & Education, Kristen M. Osborne noted some of the headlines of newspaper stories: “AMERICAN EXHIBITION IN NEW YORK TEEMS WITH THE BIZARRE … ALL SCHOOLS WELCOME … QUEER CONCEPTIONS OF ‘INSURGENTS’ VIE WITH CONSERVATIVE’S WORKS” (the Chicago Tribune), “A REMARKABLE AFFAIR DESPITE SOME FREAKISH ABSURDITIES” (the New York Tribune), FLYING WEDGE OF FUTURISTS ARMED WITH PAINT AND BRUSH BATTERS LINE OF REGULARS IN TERRIFIC ART WAR.” (the New York Herald).
The Armory Show, as it is known today, was America’s uneasy introduction to European modernism. It featured work by many artists who are now household names: Renoir, Munch, van Gogh, Monet, Manet, Rodin, Seurat, Cézanne, Courbet, Picasso, Matisse, and Duchamp, for starters. According to Osborne, Duchamp’s “Nude Descending a Staircase” inspired particular vitriol among critics, who delighted in describing its resemblance to, variously, “an explosion in a shingle mill,” “a dynamited suit of Japanese armor,” “an artichoke,” and “an orderly heap of broken violins.” To a contemporary reader, though, the most striking part of the Armory Show commotion isn’t the reactionary outrage or the amusing parodies of slack-jawed visitors but, rather, the near-complete absence of any talk about money.
A century later, contemporary art still makes headlines, most often following a record-breaking auction at Sotheby’s or Christie’s. (A tryptich by Francis Bacon recently sold for $142.4 million. Nick Paumgarten wrote about the sale, and about the current art market, in the magazine.) In these articles, it is the phenomenon of art as investment that seems to interest readers. In his reflection on the Bacon sale, Peter Schjeldahl discussed “the spooky assumption that art is worth anything.” When the media picks up on a story outside the auction house, it tends to be an occasion to unmask pretention or hypocrisy among the art-world cognoscenti. Even then, money is always invoked. Stories of gallery custodians accidentally throwing out an expensive piece of installation art (a strangely common occurrence) reinforce prejudices against contemporary art; if even gallery employees cannot distinguish between art and garbage, it would seem to many observers that the emperor has no clothes. Stories of vandalism, destruction, forgery, and theft fascinate us because they are such tidy allegories of our relationship to art, a relationship that, at least since the time of the Armory Show, has consisted of a bizarre admixture of suspicion, discomfort, and occult reverence. Today, these attitudes are neatly characterized by the large fortunes that art sometimes commands. Passed from headline to headline, the prices reinforce public skepticism even when the numbers themselves are uncertain or, as in the case of the “million-dollar” vase, flat wrong.
Still, I am not sure we should pine for the days of the original Armory Show coverage. Even though money was not at the center of that media circus, as it has been at recent art fairs in New York, contentious headlines about art have always spoken louder than art itself. When the dealer Frederic C. Torrey bought Duchamp’s “Nude Descending a Staircase,” from the 1913 Armory Show, for three hundred and twenty-four dollars, he wired the money from his home in San Francisco. He hadn’t even seen the painting, but he had read all about it in the papers.
Photograph: Joe Raedle/Getty
