The Price of Everything

La Cicciolina

 Pollock and Lucian Freud, painters whose styles have literally nothing to do with each other, share a similar persona and the figures they cut in the art world have little in common with the highly ideologically and monetarily infused nature of the current art world, but there are comparisons to be drawn between Brits like Auerbach, Bacon and Freud, and De Kooning, Pollock and Rothko and others of the Cedar Tavern set. Krasner and second generation female abstractionists such as Joan Mitchell and Grace Hartigan evince a similar romantic rage with respect to the artistic personality. In the case of Pollock, self-destruction is a part of the mythology. What a far cry from Jeff Koons, whose career is devoted to the commodification and monetization of art, a career btw that could have been the substance of a Brecht play. Nathaniel Kahn's The Price of Everything (2018) brilliantly describes the sea change in the world of art that evenly separates the midcentury work of the American abstractionists and the London School from what was to follow. Koons' brilliance btw should not be discountenanced. His "art" is an essay on the process of its own inception. Its process or product is its theme. The porn actress and later politician La Cicciolina, who was both Koons's subject and wife was, at one point, his Maecenus. The only similarity to Krasner and Pollock would be to say one was a woman and the other a man.