What About Mozart? What About Murder?: Reasoning From Cases by Becker Howard S

Author:Becker, Howard S. [Becker, Howard S.]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2014-08-22T04:00:00+00:00

THE ADRIAN GIFT

Dennis Adrian early recognized the artistic gifts of a group of Chicago artists who came to be known first as “The Hairy Who” and later, more respectably, as the Chicago Imagists. The artists involved included Roger Brown, Jim Nutt, Ed Paschke, and others. As a result of Adrian’s championing of their work, and of the concurrent activities of the art critic of a major Chicago newspaper (Franz Schulze of the Chicago Sun-Times), a local gallery owner (Phyliss Kind), and a number of Chicago collectors (some of them active in creating the then-new Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago) who Adrian advised on their art acquisitions, the work of this group was widely exhibited and collected and consequently rose substantially in value.

Adrian himself didn’t have much money: “I have had to form a collection with what are, not to put too fine a point on it, rather less than average means” (Adrian 1982, 7). He lived simply, had no steady employment (“trying to exist as a critic and teacher of art history”), and didn’t deal in pictures privately, as so many such critics and advisers do. But he had a large collection of these now valuable paintings, bought at the beginnings of the artists’ careers for relatively little. Some people might have thought, and in fact some people in some circles in Chicago’s art community apparently did think, that his championing of the Chicago Imagists was a clever way of providing for his old age. No one used language that blunt, although the critic of the rival newspaper in Chicago, Alan Artner (1982) of the Chicago Tribune, came close in a review published when the collection was first exhibited. And, because these realities don’t always wear their appropriate sociological labels on their sleeves, we have to read between the lines and interpret the innuendo and metaphor to understand the mechanisms at work. I’ll provide some marginal commentary to make the meanings clearer:

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