Artworks are paintings, sculpture, photographs, and installations that are made by amateurs in their homes, art professors in universities, and serious artists with or without commercial affiliations. Artworks may, or may not, have intrinsic value or monetary value, other than what the artist believes they are worth.  Non-utilitarian fashion objects, as opposed to utilitarian fashion objects that are worn or carried, such as expensive shoes and handbags, are artworks that have a lot of monetary but little intrinsic value.  Rather, they are “meaningful”, “innovative”, “politically correct”, etcetera, and they may set historical precedence within the ever-expanding arbitrary modulations in contemporary art.  These objects and their producers are known to a wide audience and are bought, sold, and traded through primary dealers, collectors, secondary dealers, and auction houses.  Collectors of non-utilitarian fashion objects often collect to accumulate artworks of an individual manufacturer or artworks in an identifiable style within a specific time period, much as a stamp or baseball card collector will strive to complete a series.  This differs from, but is not exclusive of, collectors of non-utilitarian fashion objects who collect for speculation. They look for young unknowns with primary dealers or visit select graduate schools to find artwork made by students in their early twenties.  They buy the product in hopes the aspiring artist becomes sufficiently famous to profit later in the secondary market.  Part of the dynamic is based on the reputation of the collector, how acute his or her “eye” has been, and what his or her status is within the layers of the business of international art.  The better the reputation of the collector the greater the chance that the artwork known to be in his or her collection will gain in monetary value.

Richard Serra’s  “Equal Weights and Measures”, six rectangular annealed steel blocks rested in Gagosian’s gymnasium size Chelsea gallery in New York in 2006.  Each was 4’ 3” by 5’ 3” by 6’ 3” and, if I correctly remember, approximately 40 tons apiece, lined in a row with each lying on a different face.  This is as usual in the simple but elegant systems Serra constructs.  On three different occasions I circled and stood in their presence.  I say “presence” because I had not encountered anything like these, they were not like dense stone; these objects with their patina of steel and rust made basalt appear light.  My grasp of how and of what the objects were made contributed to the feeling of the pull and repulsion of such massive density, in its brute simple and austere beauty.

Each block pressed cracks radiating in the concrete floor as I observed visitors wander in and, after a glance or two, pause to read a label on the wall to sum up their experience.  A few lingered.  In an interview I read some years ago, Serra said “nothing sucks the space out of a room like a Giacometti”.   This has been my experience, and it is especially true when we see a Giacometti in a white cube without the distraction of paintings; the interior of a white cube can define space as absolute.  Serra’s six steel weights in a white, sky-lit space did not suck the space so much as breathe it.  The expanse of the room, with its natural light, let gravity push and pull the mass crushed into compactness beyond its original molecular structure.  The solidity of the blocks cancelled all poetic nonsense.  Here was a case of presence versus appearance like no other.  It was the exact opposite of a mythical, personal, iconic, or spiritual presence, not in the sense of the spiritual’s negation of evil, but that the material compression, identical with the rectilinear forms, grounded any generalities.