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Originally Posted by atari 2600
Van Gogh, as we know, is the A-number one king daddy in today's art market. His works fetch the highest prices. He's widely recognized as a visionary genius. And he is.
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What's more interesting about the rise in stature within today's art market of someone like Van Gogh is the way in which he symbolises a fetish for some romantic kind of artist-as-visionary figure.
Van Gogh satisfies our apparant need to see the artist as some kind of an outsider. We like to think of him as being somehow 'different' from us. Van Gogh's mental illness thus places him alongside Beethoven's deafness, Monet's partial blindness, etc, etc. It's sad that art is valued primarily for its 'outsiderness' (something I know Atari (at least) is aware of, having mentioned Colin Wilson's book,
The Outsider, on another thread).
This isn't to say that I think Van Gogh is a bad atrist, so much as that I believe the elevation of his stature in recent years is a direct result of some underlying popular discontent with a kind of postmodern consensus regarding the death of the artist.
I'm far more optimistic about the fact that the most collectable living artist at the moment is Gerhard Richter (known on here mostly for the candle painting on Daydream Nation). Here is an artist who embraces appropriation but who still manages to maintain a level of individuality in his work that neither undermines its sense of borrowing from others without calling into jeopady the 'intregrity' of the artist. Furthermore, to my knowledge, Gerhard Richter is neither deaf, blind nor depressed!