Why Is Pollock Art Famous Why Is Pollock Art Considered Good

In Pollock We Trust: Digital collage by Photofunia.com

On November twelfth of last yr, Jackson Pollock's Number xvi sold for $32,645,000.00 at Christie's, New York. The thirty¾ by 22¼ inch painting has a expanse of 684.1875 square inches, which means that it sold for $47,713.52 per foursquare inch. To put this in context, the Median U.S. Household Income for 2012 was $51,017.00.

Just how did this Pollock painting -- a rectangle of paper covered with skeins of enamel paint -- come to be worth such a heed-extraordinary sum? It is a fantastic and vexing question isn't it?

I call back there is a short answer and a long reply.

The brusk answer is that the figure of Jackson Pollock sits at the apex of a vast cultural structure: the currently accepted history of American art and culture. To explain how he got in that location, and how his work became a grade of currency, requires a long answer.

Jackson Pollock (1912-1956), Number 16, 1949
Oil and enamel on paper mounted on masonite, 30¾ x 22¼ in.
© 2001 Pollock-Krasner Foundation / Artists Rights Club (ARS), New York

Jackson Pollock, who was born in 1912, perfectly embodies a cultural myth that has fascinated and obsessed Americans -- and those who have admired and/or envied American culture -- since World State of war 2: the myth of the heroic individual creator. Over time, Pollock'south legendary status has been woven very completely into the fabric of a media society that has built art and culture into a very lucrative business organisation.

Pollock is an artist who is seen as the prime mover and innovator behind a new American style of art (Abstract Expressionism) that blossomed in this canton in the backwash of our nation'due south defeat of the Centrality powers. America's triumph in the war, infinitely aided past our having adult nuclear weapons beginning, validated our obsession with progress and paved the way for an era of American cultural hegemony that has lingered strikingly. Interestingly, if the rise of Fascism hadn't driven a generation of intellectuals to immigrate to the U.Southward. the nuclear bomb and Abstract Expressionism would accept likely both been invented in Europe.

If the idea that Europeans would accept invented Abstract Expressionism seems improbable to yous, accept a look at Joan Miro's 1925 painting "The Nascence of the World," which features a background of flung and poured paint that the creative person himself characterized as "gratis and unconscious." This work was painted eleven years before the American critic Harold Rosenberg published an commodity in the New Yorker describing the emergence of what he called "Activity Painting."

Jackson Pollock led the American avant-garde -- originally a military term -- in its defeat and supersession of European culture. As we now know, Abstract Expressionism even had some CIA assist in terms of becoming the representative style of American individualism and in turn confirming American exceptionalism. A new generation of critics, particularly Harold Rosenberg and Cloudless Greenberg, made striking arguments for Pollock that helped him earn a lofty position in postwar America'due south chop-chop evolving cultural Pantheon.

Before the war America'due south cultural superstructure already had been developing rapidly. The Museum of Modern Art was founded in 1929: the same yr that seventeen year old Jackson Pollock moved to New York to report art. The growth of Pollock's career and the growth of the market for his work has coincided with the ascent of New York's status equally America's -- and arguably the world'south -- uppercase city of art and culture.

According to this informative chart -- A History of New York's Gallery Districts -- in that location were 140 art galleries in New York when Pollock arrived. There are now about 1500. New York'south art museums welcomed some 16 million visitors in 2012. Arts in the broader sense -- Visual Fine art, Theater, Trip the light fantastic, etc -- are a huge economic force: a New York land survey of 2010 identified 53,085 arts-related businesses employing 335,683 people.

Getting back to Pollock, a striking aspect of his work is that it is abstruse. To put it another mode, it requires anyone who accepts and or "likes" it as art to accept what was once a radical premise: that ideas are more valuable than skill. In the American model, progress starts with ideas and if you take a great one yous are going to own a factory (or today an internet startup) not work in one.

The Philistine modern art haters of the fifties who would look at a Pollock in a magazine and say "My child could do that" missed the betoken that Pollock was a "genius" who had changed how things were washed considering he had a new idea of how to do things: he replaced the brushstroke with the drip. Ideas begin in the mind as abstractions, and if you don't "get" a Pollock there remains a possible taint: if you need or like images or realism mayhap you have an excessively literal mind.

Pollock's career unfolded in an era when the evolution of mass media accelerated and multiplied the broadcasting of new ideas and images in art. Pollock'due south career was certainly aided past the rise of mass media: a tremendous impact was made by the spread Life Magazine did on him in 1949, which posed the question: "Is he the greatest living painter in the United states of america?

In other words, he got in early a tendency that was only emerging. If you are a visual artist living and working at present you can't help only be enlightened of the fact that if you lot come upward with a great idea in the class of an paradigm information technology volition be infinitely multiplied by a seismic sea wave of jpegs that will spread your fame and increase your reputation across the world. Try googling "Jackson Pollock" and you will get over 18 one thousand thousand search results. Jackson Pollock, who has been the subject of a feature motion-motion picture, a Pulitzer Prize winning biography and innumerable magazine articles and museum exhibitions has had his myth multiplied by a media society, and it didn't hurt that he died immature in a spectacular car crash.

Pollock's secure place as an apotheosis of Americanism -- and every bit an internationally famous creative person ---has translated into extraordinary cash values for his art. The toll record is reportedly held by his No. 5 of 1948 which is believed to have sold for $140 1000000 in 2006. Disputes over the authenticity of several purported Pollock works take made for some very entertaining news stories in the past decade. Recently, the authenticity of what some believe is Pollock's final painting has come to hinge on forensic assay of a polar acquit hair found embedded in the paint.

Information technology is an accepted fact at present that works of art tin can serve as financial instruments just like stocks, bonds or precious metals. If yous want to check the value of Jackson Pollock equally a "stock" yous tin can use the Mei Moses® Fine Art Index to go an objective handle on the market. Fine art databases including those at Artnet.com and AskArt.com have fabricated access to data nearly the prices of fine art at auction instantly available to anyone interested in investing works of art. Past the way, we still refer to people that buy multi-million dollar works of art as "collectors" only is there anyone with that kind of coin who shouldn't exist called an investor?

One way to look at the prices for Pollock's work is to call information technology a great American success story. Can't we merely sit back and beam with pride over the story of a troubled beau whose artistic legacy is valued by museums, sale houses and banking institutions? Another way to await at the situation would exist to speculate that Pollock's prices are the result of a cultural asset chimera. What would happen, for example, if fine art historians came to a new conclusion and decided that Pollock was actually a rather pocket-size artist after all? Books would need to be re-written, curricula redesigned, and museums might put his works into storage.

Pollock'southward Number 16 is an abstraction backed past an brainchild: the construct of America's cultural and artistic history. Like a one hundred dollar bill it is ultimately just a slice of paper that we take learned to trust as valuable. It is worth many millions of dollars simply because an entire cultural system has been congenital on the assumption of its value. It seems like an unintended effect, merely the generations of predominantly left-leaning critics, curators, and academics who advisedly constructed the story of American modernism ultimately built up a new asset course for super-wealthy investors.

It strikes me as ironic that an artist we value for his rebelliousness and innovation has now get a figure that is somehow across question. Could yous get a job every bit a Museum Director in the United States if you told those interviewing you that you didn't care for Pollock? I uncertainty it. The process of turning Pollock into an icon and a commodity has gone so far that it is virtually impossible to plough back. Perhaps for that very reason, Pollock paintings continue to look good to investors. After all: Pollock is besides big to fail.

Note: for some other very illuminating take on some of the forces at piece of work in the Art Market place, take a wait at the video below, created past Tymek Borowski and Pawet Sysiak.

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Source: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/jackson-pollock_b_4709529