Art for Art's Sake
Van Gogh died in poverty. The highest price he fetched
for one of his paintings was $17. A hundred years later
a Japanese businessman paid $82,500,000 for van Gogh's
Portrait of Dr. Gachet.
Of
course everyone has heard of Vincent van Gogh. He's
been at the hub of the Impressionist Movement for generations.
His paintings are valuable because wherever there's
a wholesale focus of attention on something, the specter
of money is always nearby. So I was more than surprised
the other day to see an unsigned painting by an unknown
artist worth in the neighborhood of fifty million dollars.
The painting was leaning on an easel in front of a real
estate office in San Felipe.
There was no price tag on it. I only discovered its
value when I went into the office and learned it was
an artist's rendering of a future condominium complex
to be located south of town.
The man who told me this had eyes that flicked about
the office like a frog tagging houseflies with a particularly
adhesive tongue. He was high-octane and middle-aged
with a thick thatch of hair that hung in layers from
the crown of his head. It made him look like a palm
palapa on a moonless night. He was a member of the nomadic
realtor tribe that had recently learned San Felipe was
secretly wedded to the holy grail of their highly marketable
resort profile, a profile well proven to be as lucrative
as sharing DNA with a Rockefeller.
Resort-building real estate people all seem to share
the same lexicon, the same disinterest in local history
and geography, the same sign painter and the same desk,
where they sit with one hand in a box of adjectives,
all superlative, ready to toss them like confetti at
any head that crosses their threshold. They often partner
with neon-lit developers who dash about like dogs in
a sniffing fever, scenting their land parcels with power
poles, billboards, metal coyotes and cement fountains.
These developers are usually once-removed from public
contact but like the real estate agent, they will do
their best to fling verbal confetti when cornered. And
of course, both silently celebrate the uninformed buyer.
I sat in that office and while the unending superlatives
hailed about my ears, quietly staring out the window
at the ledge that made an ornament of a squat sand-filled
vase that sported a bouquet of cigarette butts. That
kind of bouquet is a common spore of real estate people.
It required a certain amount of spears and shield tactic,
but I learned there was no condominium building. Nothing
existed off the artist's canvas that echoed its color
and lines. There was an empty expanse of sand near the
sea where a few large earth-moving machines droned up
and down between surveyor's pins. I was made to image
the building was actually there, my condo readily accessible.
I was given a cerebral tour of my apartment, presented
the incomparable vista with a sweep of an arm. I was
even told what I would be doing with my evenings when
I lived there. And since the mind always confuses the
thought with the thing it represents, it was easy to
see how people could be swayed to sign papers in exchange
for an hour of confetti and an ocular tour of an artist's
depiction of the proposed project.
Once or twice I managed to coax a double dose of confetti
from the salesman with the mention of a key word or
phrase that obviously triggered a programmed response.
It was like watching a Carmelite whipping himself into
a lather of atonement. One of the words was fideicomiso.
Another was Title Insurance. A third was notario.
I
must have absently nodded once because a paper-clipped
manuscript suddenly appeared under my nose which I was
expected to sign. The paperwork represented a series
of strings that were engineered to legally extract $300,000
from me. The real estate man seemed unconcerned I lived
in a trailer and that it would take me one hundred years
to save that amount of money. To him the amount was
a single brush stroke on the canvas on the sidewalk
outside his office.
Scores of real estate venues have appeared in San Felipe.
They all have artist's renderings of various condominiums,
track homes, gated communities and golf courses. Each
painting represents millions of dollars to its owner.
And somewhere in their basement studios the artists
are furiously dashing them out, receiving their modern-day
equivalent of seventeen dollars for each one.
Meanwhile, throughout the turbid activities of the
real estate people and the developers, the desert and
mountains suffer the silliness with stoic grace. They
know the security of longevity which elegantly outlasts
fideicomisos and title insurance. They have staked their
place in the geological vastness of the planet's diurnal
clock. They are patient, which is the perfect antidote
for today's local climate of impatience.
Of course I left without signing anything. It's sad
that many people do not. They unfortunately confuse
a real estate salesman's passion for money with an enthusiasm
for an unsubstantiated building project. It can't bee
too tragic though. If you look west you can see the
mountains smiling. Or maybe it's just they way Darwin's
shadow hangs across them.
