Make a great deal of money, that is. I was intrigued the other night to watch a film about the authentication of works of art.* In the specific case under examination the problem was to determine whether a drawing was really by the great British sculptor Henry Moore. The attempt to trace provenance is always fascinating, and reveals (if nothing else) what astonishing amounts opt information are hidden away in archives of one kind or another. The story that was uncovered was thought-provoking.
The drawing (finally authenticated as by Moore) had been in the hands of a German Jewish collector in the inter-war period. Work by Moore fell under the Nazi interdiction of “degenerate art”, and its owner sold it to somebody who had developed a special line in disposing of works that were similarly disapproved of officially, on markets outside of Germany. Without going into the details, my mind was wet off along a rather more general line of enquiry.
How do people make lots of money (and not only in art)? The answer I came up with is that it is essential that they are not too curious about the foundation of their fortune. They mustn’t know too much about the conditions under which their labour-force lives, nor about the environmental consequences of their production process and its product. They must not be too curious about the sources from which the capital they borrow come and the business company they keep. Certainly they must remain deeply incurious about the impact of the extraction of their raw materials. In our contemporary world of communication giants they must never ask too many questions about the cultural and moral consequences of the things communicated through their vehicles. If they are investing instead of producing, no questions should be asked about the activities to which their money is being directed. Curiosity about things like taxation (or more particularly, the evasion of taxation) is definitely a bad idea.
We like to think of art in terms of creativity and cultural ideals. In fact, however, it is also a very useful channel through which it is possible to launder dirty money, and to give the patina of cultural responsibility to activities which it is often thought to be kept in the dark.
- A regular BBC series entitled Fake or Fortune?