Pollock: Genius or Marketing

The photo below is of one of Jackson Pollock’s most recognized paintings, Autumn Rhythm (Number 30).

A question that immediately comes to mind, and especially for people who are not art connoisseurs, like me, is the following: why do we value a painting such as this? As a user comments on a Youtube video on Pollock’s work, the painting looks “like the apron of the guy who mixes paints at home depot”. However, how would the painting look like if we (and by “we” I mean here the general public, not only the experts) were to value it? A first answer to this question can be found in the work of CJ Hendry , whose paintings look so real that they seem to blur the limits between a photograph and a drawing. Here, the question of why we should value an artwork such as that would probably strike many as a clumsy movement on our part (it’s so obvious that there must be something amiss about someone who does not see it). We can then say that a first notion of value we embrace is value as the quality of a representation (evidently, quality does not have to refer to the faithfulness of a representation. Impressionistic representations are not faithful, and then their quality must be searched in other features -such as the use of color). Clearly, Pollock’s work cannot be evaluated by using this criterion, as there is nothing in the world a painting like Autumn Rhythm (Number 30) refers to.

A second alternative, closely related to the previous one, is skill. Here, our artistic judgments of value wouldn’t be grounded mainly on the canvas but on the artist’s skill (though most of the time we infer the skill from the canvas). The fact that our aesthetic judgements are shaken when, for instance, skill and representation quality do not coincide appears to speak in favor of the previous idea. Take, for example, the suggestion that modern masters used to employ devices like the camera obscura to paint their works.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uq9D0PMGYQc

We can probably imagine how Autumn Rhythm (Number 30) was made, but here is a video describing Pollock’s technique:

In the video, the movements associated with the technique of action painting are compared with those of a dancer. Dancing is, of course, something we can get to value in an aesthetic sense. However, it’s difficult to look for the reasons that would justify our valuing of the painting in the movements associated with the making of it. There are few commonalities between the kind of awe-inspiring movements associated with dancing performed at a high level and those associated with action painting. Action painting movements are the kind of thing someone would be able to do with almost zero training; professional dancing, in contrast, requires thousands of hours of diligent practice. (By the way, this is a judgement that relies on a third-party observation of behavior. If, for instance, Pollock had painted a replica of one of his works using the action painting method, we would be more than justified in believing that his skill level was something out of reach for most people).

A third place to look, in addition to the canvas and the skill, is the concept. Pollock is a central figure of abstract expressionism, a technique that people such as Dana Arnold consider closely related to the unconscious. In this reading, Pollock’s work is a representation of the often-ignored world of the unconscious mind, and the automaticity and spontaneity of its method a natural consequence of it. According to this, we should value Pollock’s work because it opens the doors to a reality that we rarely stop to consider and shows us its creative potential. This sounds good, but I don’t agree. In my opinion, accepting this interpretation amounts to taking a big leap of faith. If you compare Pollock’s with Salvador Dali’s work you can easily get my point; our unconscious life is weird, not random.

Even though automaticity is a word employed to describe works of art such as Pollock’s, I relate automaticity to goal-driven behaviors that have been carried out so regularly that eventually demand little or no attention to perform them.  Action painting is different in this respect. A better adjective to describe the technique is spontaneous, which the Cambridge dictionary defines as “happening or done in a natural, often sudden way, without any planning or without being forced”. Something spontaneous, due to its unpredictable character, captures our attention and is, in a descriptive sense, valued. The lack of restrictions and rules reflected in abstract painting can be a source of enjoyment in a world where pretty much everything else is regulated and monotonous.

Another source of value is probably related to originality. Originality does not necessarily have to be complex, an idea cleverly expressed by a YouTube user who commented on a video on Pollock: “anyone could have done it, but no one did”. I completely agree with a reading of this sentence as referring to the physical movements associated with action painting. However, there is another sense in which the comment is utterly false. There is a complete change of perspective when you believe that something like Autumn Rhythm (Number 30) can be regarded as art by the public; defying preconceived ideas is the kind of thing only a few are capable of.  

Finally, I would like to discuss another possibility that explained our valuing of Pollock’s work: marketing. In a nutshell, the video below states that people got to admire Pollock because they were simply following the publicized opinions of an art critic who was very close to Pollock.

This historical reading does not exclude the possibility that Pollock is actually valuable as an artist. But neither it excludes the possibility that the art critic, in fact, chose someone whose work is crap (Pollock). Maybe our egos misguided our minds; maybe the idea of someone smart (apparently) seeing something we didn’t was too much to bear. Perhaps, as a collective we didn’t want to appear stupid and then decided that yes, that Autumn Rythmn (Number 30) made sense to us. I have to confess that, even after the previous analysis, I am ambivalent about the whole issue of value. But this remains: the less clear it is for you to assign value to a product, the more easily a marketing communication about it can sway your opinions.