Monet Manet Money
The cover of Sotheby’s London Impressionist and modern art sale catalogue of February 2015 features Monet´s “Les Peupliers à Giverny’’. Sotheby’s has auctioned the work on Feb. 3 and it was sold for 10,789,000 GBP. This sale is particularly interesting because of the seller—the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The market is now so distorted and tilted toward contemporary art that 10 million GBP raised from the auction of a Monet is less than the cost of a large work by a contemporary art star like Andy Warhol, Gerhard Richter, Jeff Koons, and many others. Some works are considerably more than that. Is it really worth trading a Monet for a slice of Koons´s hanging locomotive? Since art and money go together like peanut butter and jelly, Peter Vahlefeld´s new paintings are the perfect metaphor for our twenty-first-century. One Century spent de-coding and re-constructing art history, a system so complex and contradictory in the hopes that something more than the sum of its parts might be communicated and devoted to emptying art of everything except what Karl Marx righteously called commodity fetish. As the English critic John Berger first argued in »Ways of Seeing«, oil painting as we know it is innately materialistic. The paint is a kind of material and when it is applied to canvas the result is an image that is essentially a kind of property that can be bought, traded, and moved from place to place—as well as photography, which has been associated with materialism since its invention. Despite its relative lack of physical presence compared to painting, photography serves to record the material reality in front of the lens. Historically, it is a product of our materialistic, industrial age. But today in our digital world—a world where everything is being instantly, infinitely and indefinitely reproduced—virtually anything from trash to home mortgages to art, may be monetized, in other words exchanged on an international market in an abstracted representational form. By treating digital prints in the same manner as painters treat canvas, Peter Vahlefeld tends to dematerialize both mediums, focusing on the interface between analog and digital painting. He recognizes that works of art in a capitalist culture inevitably are reduced to the condition of commodity. What he does is to short-circuit the process and start with the commodity—he over-paints advertisements for international galleries, museums, auction houses, and museum shop merchandising that form the base of his paintings. As it happens, the camera, the scanner and the computer have been comfortably assimilated into the practices of most contemporary artists. Peter Vahlefeld´s overpaintings of printed matter are scanned, over-painted again on his computer, before being transferred to canvas to be over-painted again, digitized again, and so forth, becoming a conceptual and formal construct, from the heterogeneous combining of elements. However, these works use technology rather than reflecting on digital visuality per se, hovering between the painted and the printed image, striving for something beyond both. Painting with photography and print and the refinement of modernist art with the vulgarities of mass cultural representation forces us to consider how we interpret