DEATH, TAXES, AND ART (C)1997 Alan M. Schwartz Art before 1837 was utilitarian ability to render. That summed to recording with astounding fidelity what the European eye saw or the mind in kind imagined. Arabian graven image religious proscription sired art of intricate and precise geometric patterns perhaps interwoven with stylistic calligraphy. Good taste excluded from art vast numbers of untalented population. Art proceeded affably until three shocks unhinged it: photography (who needs an artist?), drugs (unkempt fantasy), and the ever- hungry US tax code. Louis Daguerre brought forth his daguerreotype in 1837. A lens and a photosensitized plate made mostly moot two dimensional art cultivated since the Renaissance. If you wanted a realistic image you hired a technician. Anybody could do it. 1800s' European ethnobotany was deficient in recreational pharmaceuticals. Belladonna alkaloids (deadly nightshade) were witchcraft's annoying stuff. Ergot was feared for St. Anthony's Fire, local chemistry being ill-suited to unfolding LSD from vasoconstrictive lysergic alkaloids. Hemp became rope. Magic mushrooms, anuran toxins, mescaline, kava kava... had yet to spread from the New World and Pacific islands. Europe exercised tobacco, coffee, and alcohol. England was in thrall to gin. The more refined French gamboled with absinthe as their brains were rewired, pickled, and serially destroyed by its contained thujone (from wormwood). Absinthe's cerebral swizzle stick gave French artists new and dangerous visions. 15 April to 15 May 1874 saw French photographer Nadar's studio showing of nascent Impressionist canvases to public indifference and distaste. 1872-5 saw Monet, Renoir, Pissaro, and Sisley. 1876-86 saw Cezanne, Degas, Guillaumin, Morisot, Gauguin, and Cassatt. Hostile critic Louis Leroy seized Claude Monet's "Impressionism: Sunrise 1872" as emblematic of the whole sordid affair. As with Yankee Doodle Dandy screeched by British soldiers outside colonial churches, trifling Russian political hacks calling themselves Bolsheviks (big guys), and a bad German pun acronym adopted by the Nazis, French artists embraced the label and ran with it. Gauguin begat Fauvism; Redon and Suerat Symbolism; van Gogh Expressionism; Toulouse-Lautrec Art Nouveau; Picasso and Braque Cubism. British art critic Roger Fry called the flourishing ordure Post-Impressionism and sang anathemas in trade for his supper. Brilliant blues at low price occupied artists' palettes courtesy of Jean Guimet's 1828 synthesis of ultramarine. For all that, hardly a French canvas sold until the 1920s. Americans were doing well as the 20th century yawned. Robber Barons free from dunning personal income tax amassed incredible individual wealth: Andrew Carnegie, Jay Gould, J.P. Morgan, Harry Sinclair, Cornelius Vanderbilt, the Astors, Charles Schwab, John Rockefeller, Henry Ford, Joe Kennedy. The folks at the end of the list suffered. Income tax was declared unconstitutional in 1895 (Pollock vs Farmer's Lan & Trust Co.). A one sentence 16th Amendment to the Constitution fixed that in 1913, with a maximum 7% levied upon more than $500,000. WWI in 1918 saw the rate top 77%. It dropped back to 25% 1925-28. The very rich were poked in the eye with a sharp stick. Money was worthless. They ran to Europe to buy tasteful chattels beyond the reach of the Internal Revenue Service. Income tax rose to 78% in 1936 and a searing 94% in 1944. What was imbued with social cachet, cheap, and in large but limited (absinthe-accelerated artist mortality) supply? What glaring baubles caught the heathen eye of wealthy Ugly Americans? Paris was inundated with unsalable Impressionist, Neo- Impressionist, and Post-Impressionist canvases. They were vacuumed up for a song by American high society. Travelers returned home and sold the brightly colored crap back and forth to each other at auction, doubling and redoubling prices without apparent limit. Vast monies ascended from the void. Even cultured doyens empathic to aesthetics blanched at pigment- daubed cloth selling for six and seven figures. The Dutch tulip market collapse was not forgotten. The tiger must be dismounted. The culminating step was charitable museum donation for one final appraisal boost, followed by tax write-off. Museums popped up like mushrooms from manure, managed by the wealthy. Required was the willing suspension of disbelief by a vast laity (Liberal Arts education, no problem) and collusion of the IRS (which always prefers going after soft targets like the common man). It was a brilliant stroke, a grand strategy and a telling tactic. Art expanded to embrace not talent but chutzpah. Anyone suitably bold and adept to repackage industrial urinals as "installations" and make it stick to wealthy patrons was an artist. Universities besieged by surly people with pygmy minds demanding education suddenly had voluminous arts knowledge to vend (and without a trigonometric function in sight). Were is virtuous art today? It shudders within advertising and computer games. Never mind. Applaud this museum installation!