A recent episode of the television show Mad Men – a brilliant series about Madison Avenue advertising executives in the early 1960s – featured a work of contemporary art as its surprising symbolic centrepiece. In this episode, the boss of the ad agency, the eccentric Mr. Cooper (who always makes employees remove their shoes before entering his office) is rumoured to be calling his executives to his office, one-by-one, for a personal meeting. His workers are convinced that the meetings are a cover-up – that they’re actually being tested on their reactions to Mr. Cooper’s new acquisition, a painting that cost him 10,000 dollars. The executives decide to break into his office after hours, to get a head start on formulating their opinions about the new ‘picture’. Upon opening up the door, they find a red and orange Mark Rothko hanging on the wall. ‘Hmph. Smudgy squares’, declares the secretary. One of the executives, the head of the television department, who is first-up for his personal meeting with Mr. Cooper, decides there are two possibilities: ‘Either Cooper loves it, so you have to love it, like in an emperor’s new clothes situation, or he thinks it’s a joke and you’ll look like a fool if you pretend to dig it.’ None of them, not even the ‘creatives’ or the art department, can come up with a meaningful interpretation of such a modern work of art. When the head of TV is finally called in to see Mr. Cooper, he admits, ‘Sir, I know nothing about art.’ To which Mr. Cooper divulges his secret: ‘People buy things to realize their aspirations – it’s the foundation of our business.’ And then, before dismissing the topic, he adds with a grin, ‘But between you and me and the lamppost, that thing should double in value by next Christmas.’
Either nothing has much has changed about American’s perceptions toward art since 1961, or the episode is a reflection of how we in the US view contemporary art today, seen through the lens of our past. Namely, we understand art primarily for its financial value. A recent cover story in Time (the first time, probably since Andy Warhol, that the magazine featured a contemporary artist on its cover) pictured Damien Hirst beside the headline ‘Bad Boy Makes Good’. Underneath it, the subtitle gushed, ‘Thanks to an unprecedented auction, the merrily morbid British artist Damien Hirst is about to land the biggest payday in the history of art.’ So ‘making good’, in this case, doesn’t mean making good art, it means earning lots of money. The article, which focuses mainly on Hirst’s prices and his impoverished background (calling him a ‘cash cow’), is illustrated with several images of Hirst’s work: their titles are printed in black, while their ‘Estimated Prices’ are printed even larger, in siren red. The article presents his artwork in the only terms it assumes its readers will understand: what makes him worthy of inclusion in this magazine is not the quality of his artworks, but the prices they can fetch.
