486. “The Art Market Is in Massive Disruption.”

486.“艺术市场正处于大规模混乱之中。”

Freakonomics Radio

社会与文化

2021-12-16

42 分钟
PDF

单集简介 ...

Is art really meant to be an “asset class”? Will the digital revolution finally democratize a market that just keeps getting more elitist? And what will happen to the last painting Alice Neel ever made? (Part 3 of “The Hidden Side of the Art Market.”)

单集文稿 ...

  • I'm Doctor James Deneen, and I'm a primary care internist at the Mass General Hospital in Boston, where I practiced for 45 years and retired from patient care in 2008.

  • James Deneen is looking through some photographs from a long time ago.

  • This is my city in Alice Neal's backyard.

  • This is Alice beginning the portrait.

  • Alice Neil was a painter born in 1900.

  • Her specialty was painting people, what you and I might call portraits.

  • But she didn't care for that word.

  • Neil was resistant to the genre of portraiture, which she associated with status and wealth.

  • And that's Kelly Baum.

  • She's a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

  • Stuffy, stiff, uninspired, overly romanticized, without a critical or radical.

  • Neil preferred to call her paintings pictures of people that are also history.

  • Neil's pictures are always more than just the person they represent.

  • Baum recently co curated a massive Alice Neill retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum.

  • It was called people come first.

  • The vast majority of the people Neil painted were not well known.

  • Doctor James Deneen fits that description.

  • Well, one day in the office, she said, I'd like to paint you.

  • So this is in early 1984, and my son and I drove down to Spring Lake, New Jersey, and she painted me in her backyard.

  • How did Alice Neal happen to meet James Deneen, and why did she decide to paint him?