Notes on the Art World

A portrait of supermodel Kate Moss painted by artist Lucien Freud fetched more than $6.65 million at auction. Freud shot from the top tier to superstardom when he painted the official Jubilee portrait of QE II. Freud is a British subject but not a sycophant. Witness the dark, complex, rather threatening portrait he painted of his sovereign. She looked like someone you would not want to meet in a dark alley -- or tunnel. Moss, who learned that Freud wanted to paint her by reading it in a magazine, sat for the work in 2002 while she was pregnant with Lila Grace, her first child. A friend and I were discussing this over a lunch of grilled prawns and saffron rice, and she asked, "How do contemporary artists make it into the big money? And are the prices worth it?" Good questions. She then mentioned three other heavy-hitting artists who pull in the megabucks: Cy Twombly, Brice Marden, and Richard Serra.

Lucien Freud is the son of Sigmund, the father of psychoanalysis, which, as much as anything else, defined the twentieth century. He put new words like subconscious and superego into our vocabulary, and was a recognizable world figure. Naturally, Lucien had all the connections, but also the talent. He inherited his father's fascination with the human psyche, but rather than talking to prone patients on couches, he paints portraits. Once he labored six months to get his wife's eyes right in a sketch. You meet one of his portraits and you don't forget it.

What about aspiring artists whose fathers, unlike Sigmund Freud, were butchers, bakers, and candlestick makers? If these artists keep working, will someone discover them sipping a soda like the movie star Lana Turner? Not likely. Today one has an art career played like a game of chess. The kingmakers, of course, are the dealers and the museum directors, but it doesn't hurt to have a MacArthur Foundation "genius" grant or a Guggenheim to join the faculty of a prominent art school or university with an exceptional department. Having a curator at a significant museum or art center like Detroit's DIA (www.dia.org) give you a show helps, too.

Not to say that breakaways don't exist. Jean-Michel Basquiat, the spectacularly talented African American who became famous through his lyrical and powerful graffiti, literally turned into an art star by roaming around Harlem with cans of spray paint, to say nothing of talent. Robert Rauschenberg, probably the dean of American artists, lived on the streets of New York for awhile, creating montages of found objects. One of Rauschenberg's first and most famous works, "Monogram" (1959), consisted of a stuffed angora goat, a tire, a police barrier, the heel of a shoe, a tennis ball, and paint. I remember talking to the abstract expressionist pioneer Clyfford Still, an admirer of Rauschenberg, who said, "He does it, he makes art, even with that bottle of Jack Daniels by his side, but most artists today are careerists and whores who chew the shoestrings of the downtown dealers. Money is their God, and that goes double for (the late) Mark Rothko. Great art ultimately comes from who you are. The true work of art is but a shadow of the divine perfection."