Making Art While Wealthy
Artists who come from wealth can easily make their work visible to the world. But can they see themselves?
Dorothy Comingore playing the role of Susan Alexander Kane in Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane (1941)
When we think of wealthy artists, we normally think about those who eventually encountered critical and commercial success after a life of scarcity. We think less often of those who start their career from a place of wealth.
The peculiarities of this type of artistic identity can be partially exemplified by the fictional character of Susan Alexander, the untalented mistress and second wife of the main character in “Citizen Kane”. Kane pushes Alexander to become a singer, investing enormous amounts of money to fund her productions and using the full strength of his newspapers to produce rave reviews of her performances. When the audience’s and the independent (i.e. not controlled by Kane) critics’ responses are clearly negative, Alexander refuses to go on, yet Kane forces her to continue.
Over the years I have encountered various examples of artists whose life and profile are somewhat similar to the one of this film character— albeit, unlike Alexander, often without the full awareness of the extent to which their wealth attempts to validate their self-financed careers. The questions that interest me is precisely the kind of self-awareness that artists in this situation often have.
Years ago, I attended a social event in New York —an elegant sit-down dinner at a spacious and modern artist’s studio. His rather monumental works, made in all earnestness, reminded me to art one would see in a Pink Panther cartoon. I vaguely remember a giant, transparent acrylic nose coming out of a chair on top of a tall pedestal.
As I learned later, the artist was the heir to a family fortune. Independently of that detail, the work would be perfectly forgettable to anyone who encounters it. But the mechanisms or promotion and support that he could rely on seemed endless. Within the odd category of artists who start their careers from a position of wealth this—the access to nearly unlimited production and promotional support— is the one common denominator.
Here it is important to clarify —and set aside for the moment— certain basic things about the relationship between art making and wealth, many of which should perhaps go without saying: wealth, and the privilege that it comes with, when combined with genuine talent, often result in significant and notable careers. Helen Frankenthaler was the daughter of a New York Supreme Court judge and studied under artists like Rufino Tamayo at the Dalton School; Robert Motherwell, who became her partner, also came from a wealthy family. There are several examples of other successful and prominent artists and thinkers who were wealthy, and not only in the visual arts. Charles Ives, one of the first major modern American composers, came from a wealthy family, And Ludwig Wittgenstein came from one of the wealthiest families in the Austro-Hungarian empire. Also I want to emphasize, as I have mentioned in a prior column, there are plenty of examples of generous wealthy artists, who have generously supported those in need, artists and not.
But turning back to artists coming from wealth, we also know that the unique access and privilege afforded by a wealthy background does not necessarily a great artist make. We can find examples of this in 19th century France: probably the wealthiest artist of the 19th century was the classicist artist Ernest Meissonier—someone born into wealth and augmenting his wealth afterward with his own work. While widely recognized celebrated during his lifetime, Meissonier is all but a footnote in art history books, and nowhere nearly as significant as several of the Impressionists and post-Impressionists. History is a cruel judge of an artist’s legacy. Once that entire generation is gone, the promotion, the political and financial influence and the psychological reasons that would have compelled some to admire an artist all vanish, and all that is left is the work for the unbiased, objective eye.
When studying the history of this topic, one can conclude that the greatest challenge faced by artists who start their careers in a position of wealth is having a critical view of themselves and of themselves in relation to the world. I have corroborated this many times.
Once I knew an artist — I will call him M— who was extremely wealthy. For various reasons we were in touch over several years. I don’t know if I can even say we had a friendship (nor could I ever imagine someone of that financial stature would think of someone like me as a friend), but we had a good rapport and we occasionally had honest conversations.
M’s work was unremarkable. What was remarkable were the resources at his disposal to make the slightest doodle into a gargantuan, high-end production. He could enlist teams of architects, designers, studio assistants, welders, IT technicians, conservators, scientists and more to make practically anything that came through his mind. This was supported as well by a sophisticated promotional machine that would land him, like Susan Alexander, on top of major art publications and media (mostly purchased). M was a philanthropist and collector, which gave him unique access and leverage to practically anyone in the arts. His prominent status would also allow him to exhibit in prime spaces— most of which, I assume, would agree to exhibit his work because of the opportunity it would give them to attract other high-end collectors who would attend M’s openings.
I sometimes observed him in art events, surrounded by other wealthy people, who always acted in deference to him, since he was richer than everyone else. He would pull out his iPhone to show top curators the latest thing he was working on and everyone would need to gather around to look at and admire the work.
He did not seem to realize how these dynamics were conditioned by his elite social status, and one day I had the guts— and I don’t know how I did this— to tell him so, on one day that we were happening to be talking about artists’ careers. I mentioned that given his unique place as a wealthy funder, he would seldom get sincere responses about his work by those who he typically supports as a donor.
He appeared to not care, nor even understand at all, what I had said. He replied that I was wrong and advised me, taking now the tone of a mentor, to promote myself more within the museum where I then worked.
That moment I realized how truly invisible I was to M— and to everyone like him. Any of my words to him also would land on deaf ears. It was not precisely a revelation, but more of a reminder of the vastly different worlds we inhabited, even while we interacted in a common territory known as the art world. But a more disquieting fact was how M. could really not see how he came off as entitled and self-centered, let alone having any critical sense of his own work.
The paradoxes of making art from a place of extreme privilege is that the process of art making demands the ability to look critically at the world, including the things that are closest to us, and including ourselves. And we know that the lens of privilege, if anything, distorts what we see and how we see it.
Daniela Rossell, Untitled, from the series Ricas y Famosas, 1999
Turning to the Mexican context, I think of two photographers who have reflected on aspects around self-image and wealth. In the late 90s Daniela Rossell, an artist from my generation in Mexico City, famously convinced several of her wealthy friends to stage and art-direct self-photo portraits with Rossell taking the shots. The kitschy, nouveau-riche gilded backgrounds, the over-the-top self-regard and pretentiousness of the sitters/art directors flaunting their wealth and privilege —sometimes lying on couches as if they were princesses, and sometimes even with their (indigenous) maids to their side— was scandalous when the photos were first exhibited. The series, Ricas y Famosas, became an embarrassment to the subjects themselves, who saw themselves ridiculed (and this was, thankfully for them, before the era of social media). The power of that series lies precisely in what I am trying to point at in my previous references: the enormous gap between the real world and the aristocrat, and moreover, the inability of a wealthy individual for self-examination.
Yvonne Venegas, photograph from her book San Pedro Garza García (2013-2017)
A more recent photographic take on the wealthy in Mexico that I find particularly compelling is the project by artist Yvonne Venegas who over the course of several years (2013-2017) documented the lives of the extremely wealthy Mexican families in the north of Mexico, in the town of Garza García, Nuevo León (part of the metropolitan area of the city of Monterrey). Venegas’ photographs give us unusual access to a reclusive community who live in big mansions, own huge ranches, and celebrate lavish weddings and other social events, albeit in a heavily fortified environment surrounded by armed bodyguards. Aware of their privilege in a country of deep inequities and the ever-present danger of kidnappings and violence, they live inside a golden cage of their own making. For all their ostentation and wealth, for all their incredible privilege and financial resources, Venegas’s photographs reveal to us a community that nonetheless and ironically look powerless, isolated, submerged in a melancholy prison of delusion, living within it their own version of freedom and happiness.
Of course, these families are not artists. But to the extent that the presentation of the self is a creative act, one can see parallels in the process of introspection (or lack thereof) that occur when one is enveloped in a life of privilege where practically everything is given to you — and yet where there are some things about yourself that you will never be able to see, and where there are certain things that you will never be able to purchase.
Like, for instance, your place in art history books.
This makes me think a lot about entitlement - the confidence one gets from an assured and stable future. I heard about a survey that documented lower/middle-class kids and upper-class kids interactions with doctors. The report found that the upper-class kids tended to request doctors to clarify their terms or asked them questions. They basically assumed that the doctors worked for them and their authority was no threat. On the other hand, the lower/middle class kids would take the doctors comments as a final judgement. There were no questions, not even an inkling a question could be asked. I imagine it is the same with artists - one has to believe so much in ones work that an inner-entitlement is found, despite how one is raised, how ones economic status has formed their identity, or the security that one feels within the trappings of circle of people able to collect artwork. I'm sure there are some amazing, talented people in the world who never been given the opportunity to recognize their talent, albeit even participate in the art world.
Thanks for this piece, Pablo.
I wonder, is art-making only for people with means? One reason I stopped making art in the 90's was to become a teacher in order to earn a living. After 20+ years creating a stable financial life, I resumed my art practice, albeit in an altered form. I've been thinking about how stability, not angst or the stress of being unable to afford materials, allowed me to find my artistic way.
How would income redistribution, or simply just tax laws for the wealthy, impact creativity? I imagine millions of beautiful minds focusing on big questions instead of on how to pay rent or secure food.