by: Cameron MacKenzie
I used to work at a place that just shut down. I used to teach there, and I was proud to do it. It was an old and venerated institution packed with award-winning faculty who were at the top of their respective fields, and the students were intense, conscientious, and eager to contribute to the world. It was an art school in San Francisco. It taught people how to draw and paint and sculpt, but most importantly it taught--it tried to teach--people how to think like artists.
Because artists really do think in a different way. Anybody can have a one-off hit with a piece of art, but it takes somebody with deep knowledge, ability, and talent to make a career in a field where somebody like you or I wouldn’t even know where to begin (full disclosure: I taught philosophy; much easier to grade than art). Ansel Adams taught at this school. Dorothea Lang taught there. Annie Liebowitz went there. Katherine Bigelow went there. Jerry Garcia and Spike Jonze went there. But now it’s all over.
The school didn’t fail because it wasn’t known or respected or was struggling to find students. It failed because of what a veteran member of its faculty has called, “severe financial miscalculation.” Long story short, in a bull market that has been unseen in the history of human civilization, smack in the middle of a city that is crawling with more billionaires per capita than any other in the world, the school couldn’t get its financial house in order.
There’s a lot of moving pieces to a school, and I don’t pretend to know what they all are. Tuition is key, as is a large and constantly growing endowment; the competition for students is fierce, and one bad class can set a place deep in the red.
But I always believed that famous places, places with clout and reputation, would always find a way out, always somehow land on their feet. The market, however, doesn’t care about fame, or clout, or reputation. It cares about one thing, and once the school ran out of it, it was toast. No matter who taught there. No matter who went there. No matter how screwed the students are. And yes, it costs a lot of money to go to art school, but--and this might shock you--these kids are, for the most part, coming from families that could afford it. The safety net that will follow them throughout their lives has always been firmly in place. Except this time. So boo-hoo for the rich kids.
But I tell you all this, I think, to emphasize that nothing is safe from the movement of money. Not even a fancy art school for fancy parents to send their fancy kids, where everything seemed so insulated from the mendacity of capital. So the kids lose out. The faculty loses out. And we could even get sentimental and say that the “community” loses out. I mean, one of the more spectacular paintings of the 20th century, “The Rose,” was lost behind a false wall in the back of a classroom of this place for 20 years. Its library is one of the oldest on the West Coast and it’s gorgeous. Just last year they discovered a William Olmstead mural from the 1930s under about 12 coats of paint down a random hallway. The mural shows men working at a marble factory which, researchers figured out, used to be just across the street in what is now an Italian restaurant.
But that mural’s nothing compared to the monster piece of art put up by Diego Rivera in an exhibition hall on the campus. It’s a 20 foot tall mural of workers painting a mural of a huge worker. It’s a little meta, but that’s kind of the point. The laborer the men are painting is enormous, a King Kong vision of the guy with the lunch pail who does an honest day’s work. This is the guy who’s really keeping things going, the mural seems to say. He’s what we all need to tend to, and he’s more important than the president or the pope. But all he wants is exactly what any of us want. Just enough money so we don’t have to worry about money. Enough money so we can do the things we think are really important.
Rivera’s in the mural too--the guy painted his own fat ass hanging over one of the pieces of scaffolding, paint brush in hand. There’s always been a lot of talk about the, how shall I say, irony of this painting hanging in a place like this, about the disconnect between work and art, the gritty and the effete, the high and the low, the practical and the ephemeral. This is, I think, Rivera’s point.
But the mural’s still there, still stuck up on that wall inside of a closed down school. They thought about selling it to keep the place open but, imagine selling something like that. It’d be like sacrificing a little bit of your soul. Auctioning that off so you can put dollars in the hands of people who couldn’t manage it right the first five or six times.
They had it appraised anyway. It’s $50,000,000.00 dollars. Mark Zuckerberg, to take just one local example, makes that in a solid week.
Mark Van Proyen, “Mark Van Proyen on SFAI: 1871-2020,” Squarecylinder.com Art Reviews Art Museums Art Gallery Listings Northern California, April 1, 2020, https://www.squarecylinder.com/2020/04/mark-van-proyen-on-sfai-1871-2020/.
James Chen, “Market Milestones as the Bull Market Turns 10.” Investopedia, Oct. 16, 2019,
https://www.investopedia.com/market-milestones-as-the-bull-market-turns-10-4588903.
Theodore Schleifer, “One out of every 11,600 people in San Francisco is a billionaire,” Vox.com, May 9, 2019, https://www.vox.com/recode/2019/5/9/18537122/billionaire-study-wealthx-san-francisco.
Opinions expressed here are those of the author and not necessarily those of SagePoint Financial, Inc.