When Art Meets Nature
Who gets to decide how do we decide what art to protect in an age of climate change-fueled disasters?
About five years ago, my wife and I adopted the wonderful Icelandic tradition of giving each other a book on Christmas Eve. We’ll pour a cup of tea (or a glass of wine), unwrap the often brown craft paper wrapping and dig into our new book for a half hour or so. It’s a great way to get some momentum to read more in the new year.
This year, I got two books that couldn’t appear to be more different.
“The Art Thief” by Michael Finkel, a nonfiction New York Times bestseller about a European art thief. The main character and his accomplice girlfriend steal artistic treasures from small museums with little to no security and store them in his attic room in his mother’s house. Psychological experts assessing the thief say he stole not for the thrill or to sell on the black market, but his assessment of the beauty of the pieces. The scheme eventually unravels and without revealing the entire ending, many of the stolen items end up in a river and possibly buried in a field.
“Fire on the Mountain” by Edward Abbey is a fictional tale of an ornery old rancher who refuses to sell his land in rural New Mexico to the government for missile testing ‘in the public interest’. His efforts also inevitably unravel but in more nuanced fashion. Despite the land being functionally useless to the rancher - a financial loss most years in terms of raising cattle - he fights leaving because of his connection to and appreciation of the unique beauty of the place.
The rancher and the art thief share a crucial trait - an appreciation of the aesthetic value more than the functional value.
Both books came to mind when I came across an article in The Guardian this week about the wildfires in Los Angeles.
LA fires could test Getty Center’s claim of being safest place to store artwork
To protect them, the Getty Center in Los Angeles was built in 1997 as “a marvel of anti-fire engineering”, complete with fire-resistant stone and concrete, protected steel, and set in well-irrigated landscaping.
While most of the news justifiably focuses on the human and housing loss and valiant efforts of the firefighters and other first responders fighting the wildfires, the article got me thinking about art.
I had just spent a week in Los Angeles at the end of December where I visited the Museum of Contemporary Art, The Broad, and Hauser & Wirth’s huge space in Downtown. I’ve also seen (via a documentary, unfortunately not in person) David Hockney’s incredible house in the Hollywood Hills (the nearby Sunset Fire was quickly contained) that is a piece of art in and of itself.
While these arts space have been spared so far, we’re starting to get our heads around the large amount of art that has been destroyed in these fires.
On top of the LA wildfires, in early January I made a trek down to Houston to see the recently reopened Rothko Chapel. The structure was created as a non-denominational chapel for spiritual contemplation featuring a handful of dark, almost brooding pieces by Mark Rothko.
Rothko Chapel had to close in July 2024 after the structure and some of the Rothko work inside experienced water damage from Hurricane Beryl.
Hurricane season started earlier than ever thanks to record high ocean temperatures fueled by global warming. “That heat is what allowed Beryl to become the earliest storm ever recorded in the Atlantic to reach Category 4, and then Category 5, status” according to reporting from NPR.
The experience inside the Chapel - even with a triptych missing from the east wall while it undergoes restoration - is incredible. Photos are not allowed, so visitors just sit on the benches taking in Rothko’s incredible work. There are even meditation cushions along one side.
It’s worth noting that the Rothko Chapel is on the grounds of the Menil Collection. The Menil Collection was founded - and largely funded - by John de Menil and Dominique de Menil. Dominique’s maiden name is Schlumberger. Yes, that Schlumberger of Schlumberger Limited (now called SLB), the world's largest offshore drilling company and the world's largest offshore drilling contractor by revenue. Dominique was the family heiress and John became an executive at Schlumberger. Many readers will know how the oil and gas industry - a huge backer of the arts generally as a means to maintain its social license - is connected to climate change.
Regardless, the examples of the Los Angeles wildfires and Hurricane Beryl raise the question - what should we do when art literally meets nature?
Many of our art centers in the US and Europe are at severe risk of harm from climate change. And there are private collectors with significant holdings around the world. Not every collector or even every city has a fortified building like the Getty Center to store work, if storing work is even possible during something like a fast-moving wildfire.
I started to think about this in two different ways.
The first is the location of the work itself. What responsibility do art owners - public and private - have to maintain work, particularly art of public interest?
Judging by the wealth in Malibu and Pacific Palisades where average home prices are in the millions of dollars, I am sure noteworthy artworks were destroyed in the recent wildfires, but should we expect humans to risk their own safety or that of their family to protect work in the public interest?
Even in “The Art Thief” as the thief starts to lose interest in his heists, the work stored in the attic falls into disrepair. By the time the work is recovered from the river and other locations, some of the pieces with immense cultural value are beyond restoration.
Should we require - in the public interest - that works of importance be stored in protected locations, especially if they are in high risk costal cities like New York and Los Angeles?
The second aspect is understanding the value itself of work.
Public sculpture installations - for example - that are destroyed in a hurricane or flood are a loss of aesthetic value and likely the societal value of access to art. These works were not made to be sold and therefore may have no assessment on their monetary value outside of the money paid for the land, commission, materials, etc.
Privately-owned art by individuals, museums or galleries often does have a market-assessed value. That makes insuring them easier but may not fully capture the societal and cultural value of important work. The value of work like Joseph Beuys’ Multiples that were created in the hundreds is not monetarily high, but culturally high.(Beuys also would often include political or environmental messaging in the work, making it of ideological value as well.)
Even then, there is no accounting for individual taste and preference. Like the ornery rancher’s land in New Mexico and many of the pieces stolen in “The Art Thief”, a lot of art is was worth a lot more to an individual than it is valued on the market.
If we have to prioritize protecting work from the risk of damage from climate change, should that be based on monetary value alone? Is work of high societal or cultural value that should be protected in the public interest, even if is currently in private ownership?
With corporations providing support to the arts and the wealthiest of society among the main buyers, who gets to decide what art is worth protecting? Many artists would not be able to make living without this support.
Vincent Van Gogh was famously ignored by the art world during his lifetime and died in poverty. To publication date, five of his pieces have been auctioned off for more than $120M each. And his piece ‘Sunflowers’ has been a target of climate activists looking to draw attention to their cause.
Could we miss the next Van Gogh because Masterworks hasn’t turned one of their pieces into an investment asset yet?
I don’t know the answers to these questions or even have a firm point of view yet. What I did start to think about is how we can upload a file of a song or a film to digital cloud, far away from any natural disaster. But even the most advanced virtual reality or image capture technology can’t capture the sheer power of a piece like Frank Stella’s “Damascus Gate (Stretch Variation III)”, which I stood in front of at the Museum of Fine Art in Houston a little more than a week ago.
In that way, the visual arts is a lot like nature itself.
I can snap a photograph - like the one below - of Zabriskie Point in Death Valley as the sun begins to set. I can show you the variation in color and texture. I can use scale to show you how small our human presence is in the space of his vast natural beauty site. Still, like seeing the clean lines of Stella’s work or brushstrokes of Cy Twombly’s Untitled (detail), 1988, it’s nothing compared to seeing it and feeling it in person.
In the case of spaces of natural beauty, the National Parks in the United States were created to meet the need of protection in the face of expansion.
The grandeur of the American West inspired the idea of national parks. There, vast landscapes, still untouched by development filled the eye. Artists, authors, and scientists struggled to capture the beauty they encountered and to record and share their discoveries. But they worried. What would happen when westward expansion arrived on the doorstep of the wilderness? (National Parks Service)
Designating National Parks and Monuments is essentially our government’s way of looking at nature for more than just its monetary value.
The establishment of the National Park Service is justified by considerations of good administration, of the value of natural beauty as a National asset, and of the effectiveness of outdoor life and recreation in the production of good citizenship. - Theodore Roosevelt
I believe we should be asking a similar question about the value of art in the age of climate change expansion.
Our nation’s artists and artistic production is a national asset.
Engaging in artistic creation that stretches beyond the rigid measures of capitalism can make us better citizens as use it to imagine possible futures.
Art has value that can’t be insured, just like the value of Zabriskie Point.
What if we don’t just have a National Gallery, but National Galleries? Locations around the United States like our National Parks, designed like the Getty Center, to store and display works of art with incalculable value to the United States and beyond.
It would be a shame to not ask these questions and debate potential solutions until it’s too late. And with the surge in extreme weather events driven by climate change, we don’t know exactly when too late will be.
“What is the yucca good for? How could I answer a question like that? I know how the yucca feels about it but I couldn’t put it into words any more than a yucca can.” - John Vogelin, “Fire on the Mountain” by Edward Abbey
Thanks for reading -
Rick