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A spectre, to paraphrase one of the world’s most paraphrased sayings, is haunting the upper-upmarket auction rooms of England. The Getty factor threatens to deprive anyone with ambitions to buy a masterpiece of art of their sleep at night. The very mention of it is, apparently, enough to send prices rocketing away out into the great unknown where records are broken for the splashing out of huge amounts of money on a picture or a piece of sculpture. Broken sleep does not, of course, trouble the auctioneers, whose commission flourishes under the higher prices induced by the Getty factor.
This powerful influence operates from across the Atlantic, from the museum in Malibu. California endowed out of the riches of the late Paul Getty. It is an enormously wealthy museum, with an unprecedented amount of money available for building up its collection. If it shows any interest in a sale the bidding takes on a new force. This is much in Getty’s style for he was one of those capitalists who reap so much profit from their capital, and own so much wealth, that the accountants hardly know what it all adds up to. His money came from the oil industry; not that he actually drilled the wells, or pumped the oil himself—that was the role of the workers. So, to be more exact. Getty’s money came from the exploitation of the oil industry’s workers. In the time honoured tradition, having screwed vast amounts of surplus value from the useful, productive people. Getty assured himself a place in their affections as a public benefactor by giving a fraction back in things like the museum. That affection was mixed with some sympathy, for Getty was an embodiment of the theory, a popular comfort for penniless workers, that riches do not make for happiness. Clearly, Getty did not hold with the theory himself, to the end of his days preferring the misery of riches, living in lugubrious seclusion at a large Elizabethan manor in Surrey to the joys of poverty in a council high rise flat in somewhere like Hackney.
The Getty factor was active recently when the Duke of Devonshire—who is not renowned for being unhappy about his riches—sent a collection of ancient drawings for auction at Christies. This firm is in the top drawer in the trade; their staff are discreetly dinner-jacketed and, if requested, conceal a successful bidder’s identity in a civilised mumble. In this urbane atmosphere the Devonshire drawings were sold for over £21 million, of which at least £13½ million went to the Duke after he has paid tax and, of course, a commission to the suave auctioneers. The Getty museum shelled out some £7 million for seven items. Works of art are not typical of capitalist production; not being reproducible they are not commodities and do not, therefore, conform to the economic laws, such as the law of value, which govern the mass of capitalism's products. When they are exchanged, there are other influences at work.
The “loss” of the Devonshire drawings to overseas buyers was greeted with a predictable sigh of regret from the sort of people who worry about Paul Getty’s and the Duke of Devonshire’s happiness. The Guardian (5 July 1984) wailed:
The auction, with its crazy prices, has exposed the fickleness of the market and the country’s weakness in protecting its heritage.
This was predictable because there is usually a protest when some member of the British ruling class sells a work of art for export. No matter that it may have lain in some closely private collection, unseen by anyone apart from a privileged few; its export is regarded as a "loss to the nation". Some years ago the state set up a machinery designed to delay such exports, with a government-backed agency—the National Heritage Memorial Fund—which is supposed to intervene. But even by their own standards those who worry about this "national heritage" are talking nonsense. Very few works by British artists figure in the big sales: Devonshire, for example, sold pictures by Raphael (Italian). Van Dyck (Flemish). Rembrandt (Dutch). Holbein (German). It is stretching the sensible meaning of patriotism, nonsensical as it is, to attach a British nationality to a work which was wholly produced in another country by a foreign artist. The protests were in fact based on the crudest form of patriotism, the sort of madness which demands that British people should not only win all the wars and all the games of football, cricket and tennis and run the fastest races but should also make the best films and monopolise world trade and also, somewhere, own all the most coveted pieces of art.
Well one person who might agree about the wars, the sport and the trade is the Duke of Devonshire himself. A man of substance, he is the eleventh in a line of Dukes who began in 1694; before that they were not exactly on the breadline, being mere Barons, Earls and Marquesses. The Devonshire's—their family name is Cavendish—are interlocked through marriage with many other ancient tribes of the British ruling class. The present Duke went to Eton and Cambridge and during the war he did his appropriate bit to protect his riches in a fashionable regiment of the Guards. At a bad time for the Conservative Party, he was their unsuccessful candidate in Chesterfield. (The parliamentary seat of West Derbyshire had been held by a Cavendish, with one short break, since 1885 until a by-election in 1944. The then heir to the Dukedom was dutifully adopted as the Tory candidate but the voters perhaps misunderstood all that wartime propaganda about equality of sacrifice and decided that the Cavendishes had to sacrifice West Derbyshire. They elected a Labour Independent instead.)
The present Duke held some minor jobs under Harold Macmillan (another relation—he married the 9th Duke's daughter) and he is president of a number of depressingly titled charities like the Royal Hospital and Home for Incurables. He possesses huge houses at Chatsworth in Derbyshire and Lismore Castle in Co. Waterford and belongs to the traditional exclusive London clubs. He should be—and probably thinks of himself as—a stout patriot. Except that, not untypically, the blood of money runs for him rather thicker than the waters of patriotism. Devonshire could have done the patriotic thing and sold his drawings to "the nation” for about £5½ million, which would have satisfied the average pools punter. But he preferred to go to auction on the chance that this would bring in more than "the nation" were prepared to pay. This is not the first time the ruling class have shown that for them patriotism has a price and that it is the working class who are expected to accept all that nonsense without question or concern for their own interests.
The Cavendishes should know a thing or two about this particular confidence trick for they are among the oldest of British ruling class families. One of them killed Wat Tyler, which caused his father, who as a Chief Justice was not popular among the desperate peasantry of 14th century England, to be dragged revengefully from his home in Suffolk and beheaded. The family really took off in the 16th century, when William Cavendish was Gentleman-Usher to Cardinal Wolsey. The title is misleadingly urbane; the foundations of what Burke’s Peerage coyly calls his "greatness" were laid when Cavendish got his cut from the Dissolution of the Monasteries, an episode which promoted the fortunes of many a murderous feudal bandit.
The pictures sold by the present Duke were part of an enormous, vastly valuable collection—he still has about 2.000 of them—which his ancestors made in the 17th and 18th centuries. That was the time when the British ruling class were rising towards the world's dominant power. It is customary for such a class to buy, or plunder. works of art as an investment, or as expensive showpieces, or simply to assert their dominance. The stately homes of this country became crammed with art treasures from all over the world; as Britain declines as a world power they are draining away—to the regret of ignorant workers who think that their interests are involved in the power of their masters and mistresses.
The Devonshire sale was quickly followed by an anonymous buyer paying over £7 million for a Turner painting which had been owned by the late Lord Clark of television fame—another man who disappointed that popular working-class theory by apparently finding no inconsistency between riches and a contented, fulfilling life. A couple of days later a painting by a relatively minor 17th century artist brought £900,000 at Christies. Does this mean that, spurred on by the Getty factor, there will now be a rush of record-breaking sales? A slump is not an inappropriate time for the world's capitalists to invest their millions in some static articles rather than in speculatively dynamic production. At all events it shows that there is a section in society who are able to survive the recession in a style rather different from that of Social Security claimants. But of course there are some consolations for the workers: they do not have to worry about the Getty factor, which does not influence the price of prints of blue-faced Chinese women or of stampeding elephants or of a flight of plaster ducks climbing up the wall away from the stereo. What should worry the working class—indeed it should do more than worry them is the restriction and the distortion of their talents and their tastes which that represents. Their acquaintance with, and access to artistic experience is cruelly confined to the terms set by the ruling class and hampered by their need to spend almost all their time, their energy and their resources on the basic matter of getting a living. They should also concern themselves that it is from their labour alone that the wealth comes to be monopolised by a small group of world parasites, providing for them a lifestyle which thinks little of paying a fortune for a single work of art.
The smooth operators in the auction rooms, talking of money in millions, say it in another way. For the workers there is misery and exploitation and a poverty of access to the best things in life. For the capitalists it is different: not so much a pretty picture, more a way of life.
Ivan
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