Money isn't everything.
Or wait — is it? Given the transformation of the quaint old art world into today’s immense and mighty art industry, that maxim holds about as much water as a Conceptual Art sieve.
With the traditional roles of curator and dealer eroding, hands are wringing about the growing part that money plays in both the economic and cultural currency of art. Consider the following synchronicity: a show of the visionary midcentury artist Forrest Bess is included in the latest Whitney Biennial; at the same time, another show of the artist’s work is up at Christie’s in Midtown.
But Amy Cappellazzo, who put together the Christie’s show of the late Mr. Bess’s work, does not see a conflict in investing things with more than one kind of value. As the chairwoman of postwar and contemporary development at Christie’s, Ms. Cappellazzo started off in the art world as a curator, but found herself drawn to ways of merging her curatorial sensitivity with her entrepreneurial drive.
And more than 10 years after joining Christie’s, she has even come up with something akin to a religion about it, however irreligious it may sound.
“I believe in the power of objects,” she said, stating the credo of what may someday come to be down as Cappellazzism. “I am a pretty earthly creature myself, and I don’t have a lot of spiritual yearnings or distractions.”
Appropriately for someone so grounded in the material world, Ms. Cappellazzo has on her desk a hunk of terra firma itself: an attractive fist-size formation of quartz crystal. It is, as she will frankly admit, nothing special.
The crystal was given to her as a casual gift by an acquaintance; it has no sentimental value. She holds no beliefs that it channels new-age energy from the universe to her chakras. Clear quartz is a very common crystal, and her specimen has no marked trait to make it special: it’s not huge, or strikingly shaped, or colored, or perfectly clear. It does not have any facet that imbues quartz with value.
“It’s pretty modest,” she said. “In a way, it is a dumb rock. But that is sweet. I kind of like that. So the thing is, it is totally phenomenological. Like, it is something if I think so: this dumb rock could actually be imbued with tremendous power if I wanted it to be.”
Not that it doesn’t have its assets.
“It’s a good nervous fetish toy,” she said. “Sometimes I hold it when I am on the phone doing a deal or I have to really think about something long and hard. You kind of rub it. You wear it down a bit. It is also a little sharp, so it stings back at you, puts you in your place. And it never disappoints in terms of the way it looks. It is weighty and has presence, and it never gets dusty or fingerprinty. It requires nothing from me.”
So, mundane or not, the crystal is literally a touchstone for Ms. Cappellazzo’s brand of materialism: the belief that, simply put, only matter matters. Still, she went so far as to liken it to a rosary or mezuza, insofar as she is drawn to things that represent bigger ideas.
“I am just interested in the artifacts of a religion or culture, the remains of it, rather than it itself,” she said. “What are the visuals they left behind? That’s usually more my question. You know, is there any good food associated with it?”
“It’s funny,” she added. “I am a hard-core materialist more than a spiritualist, if you are putting me on the continuum. But if this is what I picked to talk about, I am clearly not that materialistic because it is not very interesting or special.”
In the end, something is worth only what you invest in it, whether the currency is one the world agrees on or a personal one that is valueless to others. Money isn’t everything. Meaning is.
