Wanna see Morley Safer‘s latest “60 Minutes” screed, where he once again suggests that the contemporary artworld (this time seen at Art Basel Miami) may be “the biggest scam since Hans Christian Andersen trotted out the emperor’s new clothes”?
Then again, are you sure you want to waste your time with this?
Okay, art-lings, if you really want to (perhaps in the April Fools spirit of Beethoven’s Tenth), now you can!
If you’d like to get through this tiresome twaddle faster, you can quickly read the segment’s transcript, here. But then you’d miss seeing some familiar faces among Safer’s Enablers for this dubious enterprise—Larry Gagosian (“For me, it’s a place to sell art, to make money.”); Jeffrey Deitch (talking more like a dealer than the museum director he now is); Tim Blum of Blum & Poe (“This is all theater….It’s the Wild West.”); collector Dennis Scholl (a sympathetic character whose day job, unmentioned, is vice president of the Knight Foundation, in charge of its philanthropic Arts Program); and let us not forget the ubiquitous mega-collector Eli Broad (whom Safer treated with deference in a previous “60 Minutes” segment, here).
If there’s a dealer in that crowd who actually cares about art and artists for some of the right reasons, you’d never know it from Safer, who wraps up his report with some serious but unsubstantiated charges:
This is where the art trade’s carefully constructed mask of Olympian
high culture begins to crack, and the underside of a booming, cutthroat
commodities market is revealed, one without regulation or oversight, in
which price fixing and control of supply, to maintain demand, is both
legal and commonplace [emphasis added].
Last time I looked, art dealers were subject to the same types of laws, regulations and oversight that govern other merchants. The next time Safer makes a cameo appearance on the contemporary art scene, perhaps he should support his inflammatory opinions with some journalistic investigation.
Until then, it would appear that the “emperor’s new clothes” fit the reporter.