Hanging right there ...

NEW YORK, APRIL 28

UPCOMING art auctions at Sotheby's and Christie's are hugely noticed in the New York Times. Two Picassos are especially prominent. The first is labeled Dora Maar with Cat, and it is expected to fetch $50 million. The second, called Repose, is even uglier, and is expected to go for about $20 million.

The display raises several questions, the first of them being, Why would anyone wish to own these Picassos? There is only a single answer to that, which is, "Because they are so valuable." Imagine a situation in which you woke to find in the mail a package containing Dora Maar. It is yours, with a single condition attached: You are not permitted to sell it.

What would you do?

Call your friends and say, "Come on over to my house and I will show you a painting by Picasso which auctioned for $50 million."

The unhappy part of the deal is that in order to show it to your friends you would have to hang it. To do that would ruin any composure that room ever generated for you. The only solution would be to devise a curtain to shield it from sight except when you pull down the cord, exposing the hideous agglomeration of eyes, mouths, fingers, and--yes, a black cat.

On the matter of the value of such as Dora Maar, one recalls the wry economist who wrote of the phenomenon. A man arrives at U.S. Customs with an oil painting. It's only worth a couple of hundred bucks, he says. But the customs officer shakes his head: "I know a Picasso when I see one!" He wants a couple of million in import duties. The traveler appeals and the canvas is shown to five art experts. Three of them say that it is genuine, two that it is fake. It is therefore worth ten million, by a majority of one. The viewer, who is inexpert, sees the same picture. The reason the genuine article brings crowds in from the streets to admire it isn't that it is manifestly unique. It is that it's worth $10 million. The economist permitted himself to wonder whether as many people might not be induced into that room in the museum if, exhibited in the same space, were $10 million in hundred-dollar bills.

Art critic Robert Hughes spoke at the Royal Academy of Arts two years ago about the sale of Picasso's Garcon a la pipe. It went for $104 million. Hughes said simply that the sale was "a cultural obscenity." He went on, "Such gestures do no honor to art. They debase it by making the desire for it pathological." Some collectors, Hughes commented, "use museums as megaphones for their own sometimes debatable taste." He expressed concern about the effects of speculation in art: "After 30 years in New York, I have seen a lot of the damage it can do--the sudden puffing of reputations, the throwing of eggs in the air to admire their short grace of flight, the tyranny of fashion."

With advances in the technology of reproduction, there is no excuse for high art prices at this level. You can get an extremely good reproduction for a hundred dollars. If what you want is the beauty or the originality or the whatever--you can have it.

The great revolution in music came with the phonograph record. You did not have to get in line beginning at five in the morning to get a ticket to hear Caruso. You paid five bucks and turned on the switch. There is no reason whatever to deprive the citizen of the finest music. Yes, it enhances the experience to be present physically when Caruso sings, but that is lily-gilding.

I visited from time to time the home of a publisher who had over his mantelpiece an oil by Renoir which I admired. The last time I was there and paused over it he told me that I was now looking at a reproduction. He had sold the original to a museum, settling for this splendid copy. "It's a half inch shorter than the original," he said. "That way, it cannot pose as the original." Otherwise, you couldn't tell.