Money and art: Nothing new. Get over it.

I briefly mentioned Holland Cotter's NYT museums section essay in this morning's first post. (Aside: Why didn't Cotter just pick up a phone and call Chris Gilbert fer chrissakes? I don't know Gilbert either, but I'm pretty sure that within three phone calls I could track him down.) Cotter makes many good points I'm leaving alone because I want to tackle the money issue with which everyone in the art media seems unduly fascinated.

Art-and-money is the new art writer's crutch: The art world is newly awash in money! Everyone's making money, spending money, buying art! We must talk about the money!

But the real story is that there's nothing new here. Art-making has been driven by money before there was money. Institutions, be they Renaissance guilds, the Catholic Church, or European governments have used money to buy and present art. Individuals, be they kings, earls, dukes, Habsburgs, industrialists, software engineers, or merchants painted by Hals have done the same thing. There is nothing new about money in art. What's new is that art writers and critics can't stop writing about it. And they can't stop writing about it in a way that seems to ignore history.

I don't mean to pick on Cotter, but here's a line from his essay: "Money is like white noise, so there that you forget it's there...Every American city, to be a proper city, now needs to have its own jewel-box art museum." Great, if by "now" Cotter means the last hundred years. If you geographically chart the history of art museums in America, you will also be charting the history of regional wealth in America. It's no coincidence that the St. Louis Art Museum, for example, came into being when St. Louis was a new economic power that wanted to remind the East that it was an important, wealthy city. Decades later, it's no coincidence that the Aspen Art Museum came into being when wealthy people started moving to Aspen.

There is good art writing on money out there: Look at much of the coverage of the Albright-Knox deaccessioning issue. But to merely point at the existence of money in the art world, and to keep pointing again and again, is lazy -- and an old story to boot.