THE INDUSTRIAL COWBOY ART CARTEL

Bob Scriver, about 1964

It occurred to me yesterday, reviewing the obits, that because in the Sixties I married a man so much older than myself and became so totally absorbed into his life, that my enemies have all died of old age, two of them just last month.   This means that they were mostly Bob's enemies.  It’s not that I don’t have any enemies now or that I’m not vulnerable, but they are of different kinds and ways.  For instance, the political use of ginning up victimhood and using “compassion” as entitlement is fading on the rez.  But not among liberals who meddle with long questionnaires and evaluations.

The most vicious enemies were in the Cowboy Art world which was somehow a class war.  Art was translated to capital which in those days meant rich old men and professionals, because they needed a way to park their money.  People sold art by saying how valuable an investment it was.  But also by creating events where they and their younger wives could show off and play mind games.  This was when the buying and selling moved from galleries to auctions.

Charlie Russell's painting cabin next to his house.

These aficionado people were technical, esp in the worlds of dentistry, medicine and law, but the elaborate machines, the high potency meds, and the highly detailed regimes did not teach aesthetics.   They couldn’t tell good art from bad.  Investors looked at paintings and sculptures without knowing much more than what was being depicted and that their advisors were assuring them the work would rise in value for no reason other than that it already sold well.  They treated it like the stock market. The investment value moved to evaluating the artists instead of the art.  Then the artists were forced to be socially available, to present little flattering episodes in their homes, to become dancing bears.

There were exceptions.  Some people with a lot of money “richly” deserve it and handled it well, like traditional gentry.  They DID know art and were considerate of people who work at creating it.  Somehow they had been educated in the humanities, maybe because their families are sophisticated or because they went to a decent university.

But villains got into power in the Sixties and used their advantages to try to control artists.  A ring of co-conspirators -- mutually suspicious of each other but willing to collaborate at least temporarily -- arose to control the institutions -- at first museums and historical societies and later the auctions.  I call them the Industrial Cowboy Artist Cartel.  There were few Indians -- for a long time, none.

A few Cowboy Artists of America

Ironically, one of the models and sources of power was the Cowboy Artists of America, a kind of cooperative corralling of the big money something like the Oscars.  They were able to curate the art by making peer awards and organizing their own shows.  These guys -- almost always guys -- were echoes of their customers: all about money. 

And status.  Soon interstitiary characters such as dealers, specialty magazine editors, curators, and the directors of related institutions began to take control.  When dealing with status, building reputations esp. the ones about the non-artists, it was necessary to invent awards and titles, many of them coming from gratitude for money -- often given to charities or education.  An artist had to present a tableau of luxury in his home -- or else colorfully dwell in a shack where Cowboys and Indians magazine could send a girl reporter to report how Original and American he was and how he could make apple pie in a chuckwagon.

As the artists aged, some of the wheeler/dealers began to realize there was money in widows and power in female secondaries of various kinds.  The femmes had come into the game at a younger age and knew the secret stuff where the true profit often begins. (Like the silk petticoat belonging to a prostitute on which Charlie Russell had made a little sketch, but they were just friends.)  Mostly the W/D were unburdened by scruples or much education.  Nor the women either. 

I was younger, but a foundry hand rather than a glamour girl.  Also, I zigged off into academic religion which was to them quite invisible -- I mean, ethics and all that.  My enemies always had the problem of not understanding what I was up to.  My problem, if you want to label it that, was that being analytical and virtuous will not make any money and neither will moving among categories.  No one will praise you or thank you for these strategies.

Either my handicap or my reward was not caring about money, which meant I was free to do what I wanted rather than tending some capitalist machinery that I could pretend meant I was a success.  It also meant I had the privilege of being a loner, not having to accommodate someone else.  I’m trying to understand what it means to be a loner in old age when money can make life much more comfortable, but so far it doesn’t seem much different.

Gamers who control people with money, accumulate a circle of admirers, and win gratitude and awards, get sick and die just the same.  One would think that without them and their power, the truth could be told and that revealing their dark little hearts would be rewarding and even welcome.  It has always seemed to me that instead of all the phony praise at funerals, the pockets ought to be turned out in a final confession.  Maybe even restitution.  Blackfeet do that -- they call it a "Giveaway."

You name 'em.  I forgot to write it down.

Without those managers and curators constantly urging and guiding, the game of acquiring art loses its appeal.  Seven/Eleven stores once had a massive collection of fine Western photography.  It’s now dispersed.  Today the auctions that built up collections are being used to de-accession and scatter the assets.  The status indicators for the young are not so much in art and not so much in realism or patriotism, which are the two essentials for Western art.  Paintings are being sold for about what their original prices were years ago.  The elegant and exclusive galleries of the Sixties are now commonplace, cramming some streets in Santa Fe or Taos shoulder-to-shoulder.

Anyway, because Repubs are out and Dems are in, conservatives are seen as power-mongers and progressives are seen as invasive control freaks.  Cowboys and Indians don't sell as well as landscapes and animal portraits.  We’re about fed up with people in general and John Wayne’s world in particular.   Or maybe we're going back to the Fifties.

Saturday Evening Post cover by John Clymer

I really had not been paying much attention to my enemies.  One or two have asked for mercy when I turned the tables and began to write about them.  Others have managed to convert themselves into the kind of affable grandfathers that they imagine Charlie Russell to be.  The growing importance of women, Indians, Mexicans, and -- REALLY surprising -- Chinese realists. When the Saturday Evening Post and Colliers crashed, their comfortable illustrators had to become easel artists in a hurry, moving from Connecticut to Tulsa.  

But the death of slick magazines (probably due to television) helped that source of familiar Fifties art become respectable, because now history was mixed with nostalgia in a safe way. 

John Clymer's easel paintings

The real neighborhood social base of Bob and I in the Sixties was reservation people, mostly Blackfeet but also Metis (which we called “Cree”), with vivid personalities and survival level lifestyles.  We didn’t hobnob with rich people, weren’t very social with anyone because we were always working, and valued decades-long thick-and-thin friendships.  To outsiders the people they recognized were exotic, storybook characters who were willing to act out fantasies for a few weeks in summertime if they could figure out what those fantasies were.  We were a little like that, too.