The stranglehold of glitter and graffiti on Cleveland art buyers

There’s trouble in River City, my friends! Oh we’ve got Trouble with a capital T that rhymes with G and that stands for glitter and graffiti! It’s as alluring to newly minted millionaires as the siren’s song was to Odysseus. I pride myself on staunchly steering my clients away from oversized glistening portraits of Uncle Pennybags passing GO, and I often feel like the sailors who tied the famed sea captain to the ship. It’s the cross I bear, I suppose, but it’s the Lord’s work.

But seriously! Yall! What is it with the tacky and EXPENSIVE so-called red-chip art?? Glitter and graffiti seems to have a particular stranglehold on the 2-comma-club members of Cleveland and I really just do not understand it. I suppose money can’t buy taste, but it can buy an art advisor who will tell you to please not waste it on flavor-of-the-week gaudy, decorative crap. An artist who appropriates Robert Indiana’s iconic LOVE compositions and embellishes them with some lenticular situation and garlands of flowers is called APPROPRIATION ART. It is not original; and as I tell my children when they are trying to be funny but actually misbehaving, “It’s not cute and it’s not funny.” And guys, people are dropping BIG dollars on this stuff. (Apologies if that’s you….well #sorrynotsorry actually.)

How do I know about this wild phenomenon in my fair city? Well, TBH, we have been perusing the local real estate in search of some new digs, and I have been unpleasantly surprised at some of the art collections in the homes we have toured—a lot of glitz, a lot of glam, and a shocking amount of f-bombs (in the art, not out of my mouth, well, maybe silently I WTF’d a couple of times…)

I hear you imploring me, “Why is this happening, Casey? For God’s sake, WHY?!” I have my suspicions and I may lose some friends over this next part. I think there are some local purveyors in high-visibility locations around town that are capitalizing on a naive marketplace or a generation of digital natives who only like what their feed feeds them. And to that point, I think Cleveland, to some degree, is a naive market without access to a robust economy of art-buying options that sees the three-comma-clubbers in Silicon Valley hoarding this stuff and so it’s the trendy thing to do. They have a hard time finding the better alternatives. That’s not to say they don’t exist. (I see you Shaheen and Abattoir!) Perhaps some see it as a status symbol because it is HIGHLY recognizable and unmistakeable. (Unmistakably horrid, if you ask me…but apparently no one is.) It reminds me of the Dooney & Burke thing that happened in middle school, which was also a trend for which I staunchly and proudly sat on the sidelines. Those bags were heinous and yet every cool girl in my school had one. WOOF!

I digress. I actually take great pride in my fellow Clevelanders for having an innate appreciation for art thanks to our stalwart art museums. We KNOW what good art is, yall!! WE KNOW BETTER! This is why this situation honestly befuddles my brain. How can we have two of the most important art museums in their respective arenas and yet so many Cleveland-based millennials with disposable income are filling their homes with the worst of the worst. I might even contend that expensive, tacky, diamond-dusted, faux street art is worse than buying decorator art from HomeGoods. Now thems is fightin’ words.

And that brings me to an adjacent beef I have with my generation. How can one drop TWENTY THOUSAND DOLLARS on art that will NOT hold its value and claim you are an ART COLLECTOR and LOVER OF ART and then not support our local ART institutions??? Hmmm??? I’m waiting for an answer… I’m getting heart palpitations just writing this. I serve both of our local art institutions in various capacities and have chatted with counterparts in other cities about their struggles. This is a huge, universal problem. Millenials are not carrying on the torch of philanthropy from the previous generation.

See my point? People who are buying this stuff want the cache or the status or the wow factor. I suspect if you asked them to tell you about the artists, they would barely even be able to tell you their names. Ok, let me pause for a second. IF you are a buyer of these wares AND you can tell me about the artists who made the works in your collection, THEN I will let you off the hook. That tells me that you have a genuine connection with the work….for some reason…and we can still be friends even if we disagree on your taste in art. I will always condone buying art that you love and that genuinely resonates with you. I would also let you off the hook if you unknowingly equated price tag with quality. Perhaps you thought this is what good art must be if it is that expensive and all the billionaires are doing it. BUT «insert finger wag» if you’re going for status and shock value, we can really do better.

If you have $20k to drop on art, perhaps I can set you up with an emerging artist doing something really cool for $10k and you can donate the rest to an institution of your choosing? Win/win! And, AnD, AND maybe, just maybe that artist will go on to knock it out of the park because you supported their practice early-on and then you can donate that work to that institution one day! Wouldn’t that just be the bee’s knees?!

Maybe I’m off my rocker. Maybe I’m missing something here. I would love to hear your thoughts on the matter. If you buy this stuff and love it, I would really like to hear from you. Why do you buy it? Why do you like it? This is a safe space and all opinions are valid (despite my fiery rant). Please DM me or comment to get a conversation started.

Now, in the words and image of David Shrigley…

PS – I linked it above but I’ll call it out explicitly here, Artnet just posted a really good article that delves into this phenomenon more deeply and gives some historical context. If this is a topic that interests you, I’d recommend the read.