How much is this art work really worth? Why are there differing prices between two similar works in the art auction? As everyone knows, besides its own aesthetic value, art work has a lot of additional value, however, how to add the additional value to the art work? What story is behind the work of an exorbitant price?

The Story behind the Soap Pads Box

On November 13, 2012, Andy Warhol’s “Brillo Soap Pads Box” appeared in a Sotheby’s auction of contemporary art. It is nothing but a plywood box, on which the name was printed in red and blue by silk screen. However, this seemingly ordinary wooden box was valued at $700000 - $900000, attracted 9 bidders, eventually sold for $722500 when the world economy was in a trough. It is because the work was created by Andy Warhol, the representative of the Pop Art movement. It is the story behind it.

For the story behind such a work in an art auction, some basic information is obviously important: authenticity of the work, the relationship with the artist, which gallery had run it, etc., however, Sothebys deliberately ignored a part of information of the story behind the work: As the industrial product, the Brillo Soap Pads Box wasn’t originally designed by Andy Warhol, instead by abstract expressionist artist James Harvey, who served as a commercial designer to make money. He designed the soap pads box for the Brillo Company in 1961. If Harvey produced it once again, it would still be worthless. Because Harvey sold it as an industrial product design, which had a one odd payment from the Brillo Company, while Andy sold it as an art work, which was on show at a gallery. Thus, did Andy succeed because of the proper operation of the gallery, who made up a good story for this work?

Leo Castelli, one of the most successful operators of modern galleries in New York, thought himself a storyteller. When it was the prime time for galleries in 1966, he once said that: “My responsibility is to create myths, and the job of the art dealers is to imaginatively create myths.” He did have a special keen insight, successfully operating Andy Warhol, and other important pop artists, minimalists, conceptual artists, but he overestimated the role he and business operation played, the myth of Andy Warhol was not only produced by himself. Andy’s work was more valuable than Harvey’s one, because Andy’s concept gave a new meaning to the work, but not just because it was recommended by Castelli Gallery.

There is a more important content of the story behind the work. In addition to the information of the catalog, it also published an article to introduce the significance of “Brillo Soap Pads Box” into the history of art: It is one of the representatives of the Pop Art movement in the first half of 1960s, a relic left by an art revolution. The revolution deeply affected the general concept of the art, the right of the art creator, the authenticity of artwork, etc.

“Brillo Soap Pads Box” is a typical case that Warhol misappropriated goods and advertising design. As early as when he went to New York in the 1950s, Warhol succeeded in illustration, graphic design, and window decoration. It made him incompatible with the Greenberg’s modernism system that strictly separated elite art and popular culture. At the end of the 1950s, Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns the two gay artists developed another road, and got rid of the control of the New York school, walking on a separate path with Abstract Expressionism which became too persistent, masculine, self-centered, widely accepting the popular American cultural resources, such as: the national flag, the target, numbers, images of newspapers which inspired the new generation of artists, from then on the commercial cultural images were a part of the main creative resources. Andy Warhol moved to 231 East 47th Street, New York, establishing the famous visual art “Factory”, and hired assistants, to create the works adapting to business marketing, until the end of 1968, when an artist with a mental health problem attempted to murder Warhol, he then announced the end of the processing plant period of the destruction of elite art. It is the most creative period of Warhol’s art career. “Brillo Soap Pads Box” appeared here.

Whether Andy Warhol admitted it or not, he consciously destroyed the boundaries of high culture and commercial art in the early 1960s, using common things in the supermarket to tease Elite Art that thought highly of itself, represented by Abstract Expressionism, by the way, it also mocked the seemingly pure galleries and art museums. Later, many artists were inspired by the work, followed by minimalist artists who took industrial products and its sequence as the themes. So that Andy Warhol was regarded as the Pope in the Pop Art, and “Brillo Soap Pads Box” was considered as an important chapter of Pop Art.

In the 1960s, contemporary art more and more emphasized the social critical, social experiences of the artists became the focus of the recommendation by the auction house. Christie’s introduced Haiti African-American black artist Jean-Michel Basquiat: He really painfully realized that, in the Western upper-class art world dominated by white people, he became a correct political decoration which created insecurity for him, and he was suddenly accepted and mistrusted the art world which caused his heart to panic, which was an important reason why he later depended on drugs. Whether the graffiti in his early years or in the later paintings, they are full of angry passion. It is obvious that the success of Basquiat is associated with an American cultural reflection on racial problems in the 1970s and the 1980s. Although Basquiat used graffiti and folk culture of Black people to fight against the art market and collections of art museums, the story behind the work is dotted with some key words “White People, fear, fresh energy, angry” ensures that the price of Basquiat’s work always soars.

Art history has always been linked to history and social politics. When Sothebys introduced French artist Yves KLEIN’s Reliefs Eponges – RE 9-1 in the video in 2012, it specially mentioned the year 1961. The 35th President of the United States John F. Kennedy was in office, the Berlin Wall was built, the Nazi official Adolf Eichmann was sent for trial in Jerusalem, the Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Alekseyevich Gagarin was the first person who went into space. Yves KLEIN invented the patent blue paint - “International Kline Blue”, and called it the purest color between the sky and the sea. He painted naked bodies of female models in this blue color and made them roll in the paper. It is said that some of the cotton balls were once used to daub the bodies of the female models. The glorious history of the 1960s and the imagination about the nude bodies of female models perfectly made a good story behind it so that several humble cotton balls soaked in blue pigment were sold for $3.8 million at auction.

Damien Hirst’s Spot Paintings and Dead Shark

Even if one artwork looks like another one, the different stories behind them would also produce different prices. In 2008, one of artist Rachel Howard’s spot paintings was sold for $90000 at auction in New York. A few months later, another similar spot painting created by her was sold for $2.25 million. Although the two paintings were painted by Rachel Howard, the difference is that the work signed by Damien Hirst was sold at a higher price than another one. It is entitled “Amphotericin B”. It is a spot paintings named after a drug that was common in 1993. Howard once worked as the technician for Hirst, and she began to independently create in 2007. She was one of the most able of hundreds of technicians guided by Damien Hirst. As for the same painting, Hirst’s spot painting was painted by Rachel Howard 25 times compared to Howard’s own spot painting. What law is hidden behind such an appreciation? Whether the creator of the concept is more important than the creatpr of art?

The Spot painting series is one of the most famous works by Hirst. There are varied sized spot paintings with multi-coloured spots arranged on a grid, which just seem to be simple geometric abstract paintings. In art history, geometric abstract art is one of the highest achievements of modernist art in the 20th century, but by the end of the 20th century, geometric abstract painting had spread unchecked in hotels, shopping malls, offices and middle-class family’s dinner tables. Thus it has descended to trite decoration and was derided by postmodernists. Hirst used the geometric abstraction once again, and manually copying of symbolic images of commercial society like Warhol, any physical traces by people were thoroughly erased, as Hirst said “Diligently painting like a machine”.

There are many reasons why Hirst’s spot paintings are popular, but one of the most important reasons is its significance in contemporary visual culture. It belongs to the original works of Hirst, and has nothing to do with his assistant. No matter how well Hirst’s assistants paint, their paintings are short of support from the story behind it, so they lack additional value. Starting from Warhol’s soap pads box, original thinking was more important than the original production, in the era of Hirst, even the physical property of the original itself was not important any more, such as his well-known dead shark. Hirst was known for his installation “The Physical Impossibility of Death in The Mind of Someone Living” in 1991. Steven Cohen, the manager of the hedge fund that bought the dead shark at a high price in January 2005, though it began decaying. The shark began to fall off, and its body discolored and collapsed. Hirst bought another fierce great white shark of the same size to replace the original one, and poured liquid formaldehyde with a concentration of 10 times the original in the glass box. The work featured at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York is the new shark donated by the hedge fund. Generally speaking, such a bait-and-switch behavior is called a fraud. But, if the artist did it himself, and the story behind the work didn’t change, the work was considered as the original one and accepted by one of the biggest museums in the world.

For Andy Warhol, Basquiat, Kline or Hirst, the story behind made their work greatly increases the value, becoming the myth of the history of art. However, it is obvious that success stories neither can be simply fabricated by a gallery owner, nor is an auction house able to create it alone, the corn of the story is not a commercial fraud, but the interpretation of an artwork, which weaves together the artists’ originality and aesthetic appearance, society, history, culture, and economy, to constitute the contemporary visual culture or the generating of ideas.

When the price of the art market is more and more grandiose, and the significance of contemporary art is more and more fuzzy, there are too many stories behind it as if many events happened in this era, which makes people loose direction and miss the essence, perhaps we can hardly believe in any kind of interpretation, but we still need art, want to understand art, which isn’t because it is an expensive investment, a social and political illustration, a commercial myth in the high-tech era, but because it is our spiritual comfort, spiritual luxury, it solves many problems in our survival, such as: love, loneliness and death, these problems are not brought by a network, technology or globalized economy, they never disappeared, perhaps it will never be healed.

Notes:

1. About Clement Greenberg’s Elite Art, see Clement Greenberg, “Avant - Garde and Kitsch”, in John O 'Brien, ed., Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism, vol. 1, Chicago, 1986, 5-22. Originally published in The Partisan Review, Fall 1939.

2. Damien Hirst, cited in Damien Hirst and Gordon Burn, ‘On the Way to Work’, Faber and Faber, 2001, 220.

3. ibid, 90.

4. Andrew Johnson, “A Damien Hirst original...” Independent, Sunday, September 14, 2008.

5. About Damien Hirst and avant-garde art in the UK, see Shao Yiyang, “Beautiful and Terror: yba and After Avant-Garde”, “Art Study”, vol.1, 2005, 28-41. It was issued in Shao Yiyang’s “After Postmodern”, published in Shanghai Fine Arts Publishing House in 2008, the first edition, published in Beijing University Press in 2012, the 2nd version.

Courtesy of Shao Yiyang, translated by Chen Peihua and edited by Sue/CAFA ART INFO.