SELLING THE SIZZLE
The sizzle is not the steak, but art has been sold for its sizzle from the beginning. In fact, the sizzle was sometime invented in order to sell steak. This is particularly true of art, especially new genres that people don’t really know yet.
A whole body of sizzles happened when sculpture converted from making statues out of marble to casting them in bronze. Works chiseled from stone were One-of-a-Kind and copies had to be chiseled from another stone all over again, using the first as a guide. Works cast in bronze went through an elaborate process of original in clay, a rubbery reversal in something that could start gooey and then get firm, a wax replica made from that mold, a reverse again created by submerging it in fire-resistant plaster that started gooey and got firm and then baking the wax out to create a sculpture replica-reversal space, and pouring in bronze so hot it was fluid but got firm as it cooled. Then chop off the plaster.
This is not the sizzle. This is hard work and even hard to understand, but it can create detailed, lustrous, accurate bronze versions of something modeled in clay. It was invented in France, sidelining the marbles of Italy, about the time of the forming of the United States.
https://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/abrc/hd_abrc.htm
A important source of sizzle is associating something with famous and admired people. (At one time that included people in government.)
Art sizzles with uniqueness, so people were assured that though bronzes could be replicated, they would be limited as to number of casting. This was more important in the days when the molds from clay were made from gelatin that deteriorated with use so that early casts were better. Nowadays with plastic rubber molds, deteriorating is much controlled. Though damage can happen to details, sometimes the worst damage is the distortion of the whole rubbery mold, losing its whole shape. Some use a plaster support to keep the rubber in place.
Usually the projected number to be made and the number in the sequence of the specific casting is recorded on the base, along with the name of the artist and maybe the year of the casting or the year of the original creation. These are indicators of value. One of our customers only bought the 5th casting of any bronze, which was a personal conceit. No reason.
I testified in defense of Bob when Wolf Pogzeba, now deceased, ordered a bronze and was told which number he could expect. In the end, another customer failed to pay for his casting of the same bronze but he had a different number. Bob simply ground off the previous number and cut in Pogzeba’s number. Pogzeba claimed this changed the value of his bronze and sued. He lost. Pogzeba was a wheeler-dealer and those people live and die by sizzle. I don’t know how he even knew the bronze number had been changed.
The conventions that were invented with the advent of bronze casting ran into trouble when they conflicted with modern merchandizing. For instance, Bob created the bronze “No More Buffalo,” a portrait of Eddie Big Beaver with a spear, and said he would cast 12 copies. This was at the time considered a “high end” number. The fewer the copies, the more expensive it would be. But this bronze sold out quickly. To maintain the sizzle number would be to lose sales.
Like a book publisher, Bob hit on the idea of “editions”, so now there were a limited number of castings in a “second edition.” He also found the idea of the “artist’s copy” which comes from the art world of 2-dimensional work like prints or lithographs. The idea is that the copies made to study the success of the process should not be counted as part of the “edition.” What the Montana Historical Society has includes many of Bob’s “artist’s copies.” (The MHS hopes that the sizzle of the artists’ works will be associated with the institution.)
This was the beginning of my moral/ethical/legal internal discussion. So much of this was arbitrary. But I had been raised to respect the rule of law as agreed and recorded in documents. When I was later working for animal control and tasked with writing a new version of that very “rule of law”, the questions were sharper. Unless one simply responded to a list of little problems of definition, etc., one had to go to the most primary principles of having laws at all. Mostly they are for the people who have no sense of how to behave.
But these art sizzle “laws” I’m talking about were really only practical conventions to sell more art. Sellers argued that the artist would be more valuable later as his reputation grew, that rareness made work more valuable, that certain artists sizzled more than others, that popularity correlated with value, and other add-ons.
One painter claimed his pictures were more valuable than others because he used more colors. Another claimed his were more valuable because he only used three colors. No one went to quality of casting, evocation of reality, or skill of execution, because they just didn’t know enough. They relied on experts who deliberately confused them with sizzle.
In truth, an object “is what it is” and the art of it is between the creator and the acquirer, mediated by the actual object, regardless of sizzle, all designated in the steak. If you can follow this metaphor that uses the marketing of art for illustration, you may realize that the principles and practices also apply to government, religion, and most other human sales enterprises. The goal seems to be to get people into agreement but the secret goal is to make some people better than others, or at least into a state where they think they are.
“Better” too often means “more money.” Or maybe it means fantasy, like the idea of miracles or eternal life or a boat that can hold two of every species on the planet. The dark side of that, a logical dichotomy, is declaring some things of no value by creating stink instead of sizzle. “Bad” art is unskilled, made by stigmatized people or pornographers. In truth art — except for the fellow who recently sold an invisible painting — is just itself. Neither good nor bad. Just there.
