Art crime
Taki
New York The American Elsie de Wolfe, or Lady Mendl, as she became late in life, put interior decoration on the map. She was a friend of people such as Coco Chanel and Douglas Fairbanks, had asked a young but already famous Salvador Dali what he did for a living, and became known among us Greeks for expostulating to a fellow American who was complaining about the Parthenon, 'But it's beige, my colour...' Elsie is no longer with us, having left this world in 1950 at the Villa Trianon, Versailles, which she had restored and decorated and bequeathed to France. De Wolfe was also known for choosing paintings based on whether they matched her sofas. (Stick that van Gogh next to that blue damask. . . ) To put it mildly, she never developed any deep appreciation of art. Which brings me to the present brouhaha in Berlin and Mick Flick, the billionaire German heir whose collection has just opened in Berlin's Hamburger Bahnhof to loud protests from — well, people who protest about everything except lousy art. Let's take it from the top.
Friedrich Christian Flick (Mick to those who know the difference between a Lowenstein and a Lichtenstein — the latter is the real deal) is the grandson and heir of Friedrich Flick, a German industrialist who employed slave labour in his arms factories during the war. Flick did time after the war, but rebuilt his empire in West Germany and ended up the world's fifth richest man by the time he died in 1972. Here I have to declare an interest. The contrary, in fact. My father shut his factories in Greece despite great German pressure, and all the good it did him was that the communists blew them up after the liberation. Bullshit and political correctness aside, I can't see Flick Senior refusing to use slave labour and remaining alive, what with the Nazis losing the war and escalating their demands for arms and ammo. As it's the victors who get to write history, Flick will always be known as a war criminal. In my hook, his grandson Mick is
also a criminal of sorts solely because of the art he has chosen to collect, mind you. The protesters claim that the collection is tainted by association with Flick family history, and that Mick is trying to whitewash his name. Again, this is bullshit. As someone once said, all great fortunes derive from great crimes, but Flick's moolah derives from what his grandfather did after the war, not before. Be that as it may, who cares? Mick's generation has nothing to be ashamed of, except their taste in art.
And there's more. Billboards plastered by 'artists' outside the museum mocked Mick, calling him a tax-evader and one who refuses to declare his fortune. Too bad. Mick Flick lives in Switzerland, as I do, and until Big Brother comes along — and he's just around the corner — why should Mick declare his fortune to anyone except the Swiss authorities? I have known him for a very long time, and I must admit he means well but goes about it the wrong way. I suspect, and here I'm guessing, he craves respectability, but from whom? Among noble Germans, the Bismarcks are, and always will be, the Bismarcks, and the Flicks are, and always will be, the Flicks. No art collection, no philanthropy, however great, will ever change this. (Mick married the divine Maya Schoenburg, my cousin by marriage, was divorced, but has proved a wonderful father and a generous ex-husband.) The people Mick is trying to impress. guessing again, are those who will never forgive him for benefiting from a biological accident — his birth. The so-called chattering classes, the humourless, earnest, small-minded folk who seek to convey the image of occupying the moral high ground.
No, Mick's only crime is his choice of 'are.
saw some of it in his chalet in Gstaad some years ago, and it is black-humoured non-art, neon sculptures, hyper-realist crap. Diego, as in Velazquez, would have had all these so-called artists broken on the rack. A New York Times art critic wrote that the collection gave the impression of having been busily acquired and buzz-driven. 'There are rooms for Duchamp, Dieter Roth, Nam June Paik, Jason Rhodes, Eija-Liisa Ahtila (not the Hun), Pipilloti Rist ' and other names I have never heard of. Except for that arch-phoney Duchamp. He's the one who originated the crap about art being art if an artist declares it to be so. His white porcelain pissoir standing on its back is known as 'Fountain', and, according to Duchamp, 'I threw the urinal in their faces, and now they admire it for its aesthetic beauty.' In his new history of art, Paul Johnson views art as 'the ordering instinct that makes society possible'. The Flick collection makes society impossible. According to Andy Warhol, art is what you can get away with. Someone's gotten away with murder, and Flick has paid lotsa moolah for it. Mick Flick is a nice man but has dumped very lousy art on the poor Berliners. The protests should be against that, not Mick's moolah and background.
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