 |
| John and Irina Mappin with Ted Stourton (right) |
by John Mappin
The phenomenon of controversy certainly warrants understanding by a collector of fine art, or an art investor, or an art investment fund manager.
This is particularly true in the contemporary art markets, not least as according to leading art investors today, an understanding of controversy’s role in the market place can enhance the potential and likelihood of making a correctly timed investment in art or in an artist’s work. Being able to analyze controversy can help to choose the exact correct moment to invest and becomes a vital tool for evaluating an artist’s potential.
The manifestation of controversy during the career of an artist may indeed hold the key to timing in such investments.
Picasso, Dali, Hurst, Hockney, Paul Cezanne Van Gogh, Monet, Da Vinci, Andy Warhol, Ted Stourton, Jackson Pollack, great artists all, but read their histories and there is one common denominator: controversy.
Fact: There has not been a successful artist, icon or leader, or a person of even minor note, for the last 10,000 years that has not experienced some measure of controversy in their life.
It has long been suspected or known by those who follow the fortunes of any great artist, and indeed by those who invest in art, that there is some sort of intimate relationship between the controversy surrounding a subject and success.
But what is that relationship exactly? What is its use? And how can an artist or an art investor put this knowledge to work?
In an Internet, Reality TV and Celebrity age, where controversy is both cultivated and indeed often confused with other phenomena, controversy’s role in art and in life is well worth considering and well worth gaining a greater understanding of.
The Dictionary defines controversy as:
“Dispute, argument, or debate, especially one concerning a matter about which there is strong disagreement and especially one carried on in public or the press.”
It is derived from the Latin word Controversus, turned in an opposite direction, from contra = from and vertere = to turn.
Controversy is simply the end result of two or more opposing or differing views on a subject.
That controversy exists MAY mean that the product, subject, art form or person about whom there is controversy is extraordinarily brilliant or it may mean the opposite or, of course, all the possible shades in-between brilliant and bad.
Controversy is, for want of a better word, “NOISE” in a market place.
It certainly attracts attention and creates awareness, expansion and far more interest in the market place that, but for the controversy, would not be present.
This is sometimes true even when the controversy contains criticism that is quite valid.
Controversy as it relates to an art form is a barometer of open interest or past interest and can be viewed as an indicator of future interest and value.
The tired, but not quite true, old adage of “there is no such thing as bad publicity” and Oscar Wilde’s immortalized statement “There is one thing that is worse than being talked about... and that is not being talked about,” while in fact somewhat false, can even appear to be true at times.
But what are the laws of controversy as they relate to art and how does controversy effectively relate to art investment and potential long term returns when investing in art.
Is there a paradigm relating to controversy that holds true in art?
There is, but to understand it well you need to observe, realize and understand the following:
“Artists, art and beauty, that validate and cause additional Freedom, are and always have been a THREAT to the Status Quo.”
When an artist is postulating, imagining, dreaming up and creating new ideal scenes and new levels and concepts of beauty for mankind, the existing scene of man and his environment changes.
Those who seek to maintain the existing order and existing scene are by their nature mission bound to fight any and all attempts of an artist to change life in the direction of an improved ideal scene.
The artist is working in the vanguard of society in that respect.
And, sometimes he will experience quite vicious and insidious attacks from those elements.
If he is wise, he will do well to gain an exact understanding of the deep well of personal inadequacy from which such negative criticism is sourced.
For hell hath no fury as the brutal and intellectually coarse gate keepers of a middle class mentality. A mentality, which today has the viral capacity to pervade all income brackets.
The “middle class mentality” is a state of mind, not a measure of privilege, or a measure of education, or even an indicator of IQ.
Its purpose is “to Trap”.
Where true eternal beauty is used by artists to postulate and create ideal scenes that free the mind and society, one can expect the greatest incidence of vicious controversy.
In such cases, controversy is often nothing more than a sign of success and a sign of potential future success and it also contributes to the almost assured immortality for the artist’s art forms and ideas.
For beauty that enhances freedom, either in physical form or in concept form is the arch enemy of the materialist and is the actual nemesis of the enslavers of man. In the creation of art and of beauty that glorifies freedom, the enslaver views, as in a mirror, his own imperfections and flaws. His very being is weighed in the balance by his own observation of himself in relation to true beauty and in relation to fine art forms that serve to illuminate the potential of freedom.
The blunt realizations that result, concerning his own nature, cause and trigger an attempt to bring down, suppress, make less of or negate that beauty and to destroy it.
Beauty and fine art of that quality, do actually threaten his reality of himself.
The irony is that the unchanging mentality of those who seek to trap can’t reach the wavelength of such fine art, for true beauty and fine art exist at wavelengths that such people can never, while at that unchanging mentality, assimilate.
Beauty does indeed lie in the eye of the beholder, not least as “the eye” is a metaphor for the human spirit. Beauty is a product of the spirit and is its potential enhancer, where it forwards freedom, it is an echelon of life that is almost totally out of reach for those who rail against it.... and so controversy continues to be part of the life of any great artist.
And thus the ranters an ravers continue to rant and rave against the very beings that are in truth their only valid salvation. They continue to degrade themselves and become even more mentally solid, crippling their minds and becoming personally stifled by agreeing with the noise and disagreement that they have now contributed to and become.
And the world’s great artists continue to create and become freer as spirits to the degree that they create beauty and contribute to the manifestation of ideal scenes that assist freedom.
By all means, as you observe such games at play, express shock at some new controversy generated by a nearly unconscious and demagoging media, but understand it as a phenomenon and, most importantly, that at the root of destructive criticism of fine art lies a deep well of desperation, jealousy, envy, and failed purposes, that in truth, were they fathomed and inspected, would make the devil’s own hair curl.
A Fine Artist or an Icon of the Future and indeed any Collector of Fine Art as a true collector of beauty that forwards freedom, is entering into an intimate symbiosis with beauty, and needs to fully understand controversy and what its exact relationship to beauty and creativity and truth is.
For these reasons, and a few others, many professional art investors and art collectors consider that controversy has a vital role and relationship to an artist’s ultimate rise in the art market place and can dramatically affect the value and popularity of an artist’s work.
Perhaps, the value of analyzing controversy when it appears, has been grossly underestimated as an investment research and analysis tool.
Try this:
Look for new emerging beauty in concept or in form being created in art or life.
Decide if that beauty is serving freedom or if it is a trap.
Look for early signs of controversy manifesting around an artist and research the time line of the controversy.
Know that one is observing a higher mathematics and algorithm at play and that there is a pattern and a code that can be understood.
Never be afraid of controversy or shy away from it, understand it, evaluate it correctly, and act accordingly.
Understand this and you can own the whole four dimensional chessboard of life.
It is a road to freedom.
