The Culture That Never Happened
It’s inarguable that art has both represented— and simultaneously shaped— culture for all of history. Consider Hugo Ball’s Zurich-nestled “Cabaret Voltaire” which was a direct response to the raging global effects of World War I. It gave birth to the elusively-defined Dada art movement, which rippled over into the anti-art movement, which would bubble up in full force roughly a century later. It showed the explosive power of small, artist-built micro-communities. Later on, The Post War Period (1945-1970) gave birth to a new gritty, political wave of art that directly inspired abstract art movements for years to come.
Yet the art world doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It serves as a crucial building block to the formation of culture. It’s a bridge for cross-cultural communication, the exchange of ideas, and a catalyst for social change. But our culture has been heavy-handedly curated by those who’ve been in control of art— a tight-knit group of institutions and the top one percent. The fabric of art discussed in the public forum is radically different due to these two forces.
Forbes recently reported that a Picasso— unseen for the past 40 years— surfaced after its extensive time out of the public eye and was auctioned in early 2021 for $15,000,000. The painting (shown in the image above) was of Picasso’s lover, Marie-Thérèse Walter. Before it went into the archives in 1984, the painting— believed to be painted in 1937— spent over 40 years floating around. Couldn’t it be argued that this painting had enough time to influence culture? Most likely not.
Before the information age (which began in the late 1970s) the activation energy for viewing art was exponentially higher than today. The accessibility barrier was created by limited viewing options— expensive art books, educational institutions, and museums. During the 90s during the wide public adoption of the internet, art traveled through the world’s veins at unprecedented speeds. In the case of Picasso’s painting of his mistress, it was created in 1937 and was archived starting in 1984, before the proliferating effects of the information age had time to build up momentum.
Just over 50% of museums' Picasso collections are on display. But this conversation isn’t isolated to Picasso. In a 2016 survey of major art institutions, it was reported just how much art created by famous figures is concealed from public view. Frida Kahlo, Jeff Koons, and Egon Schiele cumulatively have six works on display. Just under 30% of museum-controlled Monets are off-view in the basement. A Quartz article reported that “thirteen of the museums we surveyed collectively hold 862 [non-displayed] photographs [by Henri Cartier-Bresson]”. Another reports that just the top five private art collectors control eleven billion dollars of art, most of which are secretly archived for decades at a time before they are then resold at hiked prices to other collectors
The case is all laid out. Massive amounts of art are hidden from view— unknown. This places the people in positions of influence as the primary arbiter of the fabric of global culture. Think of all the recorded history left out of public discourse. Art movements haven’t been represented with the breadth of their actual size.
An even more haunting realization? There will realistically never be an end to these processes. There’s an expansive unexplored frontier of culture that will never happen.