Timeless Pop

The Wall Street Journal has an article about the faltering art market. Of course, they're talking about the ultra-high end -- "sales of $10 million-plus paintings" -- which is completely irrelevant to the art I'm interested in. I caught myself trying to caveat that with some logic like "except that it nudges higher-end collectors downward to the sorts of pieces I could afford, pushing their prices up," but the truth is even that's delusional. There are many, many levels between me and the sort of collector who might even consider an $80 million sculpture.

But there was one line in the article that interested me:

Art is vulnerable to shifts in taste. Baby boomers who favor abstract expressionists and pop art may find it hard to offload their collections to younger buyers. Millennial and Gen Z collectors aren’t showing interest in the same artists. Cultural signals have moved on: Warhol’s screen prints of Jacqueline Kennedy or Marilyn Monroe may not carry the same potency for coming buyers.

I like pop art, and I'd certainly be delighted if the heavies came down. Of course, the last art auction I followed saw a Lichtenstein ("Blonde", from the surrealist series) go for double the pre-auction estimate, so, you know, maybe not quite falling to pieces yet (to be clear: "Blonde" is a print, and so it's worth nowhere near the mega-millions paintings talked about in the WSJ article).

But this passage did make me think that we're probably at a pivot point for 20th century art, including pop. Specifically, I think we're approaching the point of post-speculation. It's less and less of a question "who are the (very few) figures who are genuinely going to stand the test of time as THE artists of their generation?" The pecking order might shuffle a little bit, but not by all that much. And so there's less bubble pressure buying someone in the hopes that they'll be "the next big thing". Yes, there's always revisitations and attempts to pull up someone unappreciated in their time, but odds are if someone hasn't broken through by now, they're probably not going to.

For pop, if you ask me who the consensus "THE artists" are, I'd say the convergence is on Lichtenstein and Warhol. And from that vantage point, the above quoted passage suggests a potential vulnerability in the latter compared to the former. Warhol's cachet is tied to cultural icons whose potency, I suspect, is rapidly fading. This is the risk of pop -- its whole point is to comment on the ephemeral nature of popular culture, and little of popular culture, even that which seems immortal, is truly timeless (see also: Elvis).

Lichtenstein, by contrast, I think is much better positioned simply because he isn't as tied to such period-specific figures. His cachet is tied to comics, a medium rather than an icon, and that gives him more staying power, I think. The short version of this is that in 2065, I think society is much more likely to still be interested in comics than it is to be interested in Marilyn Monroe.