When Money Shadows Art, What Do We Lose?

I have been to both sides of the art world in recent weeks. But I’m not talking about skills, different mediums or reputation. I’m talking about money.

The recent Audain Gala at the Fairmont Chateau Whistler raised over a million dollars for the Audain Art Museum. Styled as an art auction, the gala is the museum’s principal fundraising event of the year. It was a glittering affair; people turned out in their finest haute couture, updos and natty suits to bid on donated artwork amidst a catered three-course dinner. Wine flowed like a river alongside your choice of beef or fish, a fancy salad and poached pears.

I was there on the invitation of a friend. It was fascinating to watch it all go down: the people, the partying, the art itself. But there was something that felt a little strange about the experience because while art was at the centre of the fête, money held the floor.

The galloping patter of a professional auctioneer called out the prices of the art to a bejewelled, begowned crowd of over 500 people. The prices climbed ever higher amidst an ambience of friendly competition among participants.

The outside world, with all its impossible, awful stuff, felt far away — another reality entirely. Inside the ballroom of the hotel, folks were drinking, dancing and having a grand old time. I don’t intend to criticize the Audain’s efforts to fundraise — believe me, I get it — but the extravagance felt strange at this particular moment in time. Maybe simply because the forces of darkness this year seem so monstrous and outsized, and so ready to gobble up culture for its own purposes.

The experience stayed with me and resurfaced a few weeks later at a very different art event.

A world away from the grand ballroom of the Fairmont Chateau Whistler, the West End Community Centre Association was putting on its annual Art in the City event this spring. Now in its 20th year, Art in the City is an art market open to participation by creatives across Vancouver. I’d never taken part in it before, but since it was taking place only a few blocks from my apartment building and I’d produced more artwork than I knew what to do with, I thought, “What the heck!”

For three days on the first weekend in May, I sat at my assigned table in the West End Community Centre, while people came and looked. Built in 1978, the community centre on Denman Street is showing its age; the ceiling panels in the ice rink are starting to come down and the edges of things are nicked and worn. But the place is thronged with people using the library and the fitness area, taking classes, or just hanging out and talking. It feels deeply democratic and very neighbourly.

Sometimes passersby bought my paintings and drawings. It was occasionally a little awkward, but mostly it was quite sweet. A shy little girl, so quiet I could barely hear her, asked if she could buy a painting of a fox for her sister’s birthday.

There were plenty of conversations to be had, not just with the people visiting the event, but with the artists who were there to sell their work. It was an eclectic group who ran the gamut from longtime professionals to folks who were discovering their craft. I was happy to be among them; it felt humbling but also human to be part of a group of people making things because they wanted to, sharing them with others.

But money was the one place where things felt a little strange.

If I could just give my work away, that’s probably what I would do. I’m far more accustomed to giving drawings and paintings away to friends than I am in the habit of selling it, but the Art in the City event is a market, a place for artists to sell their wares. So, one has to decide what kind of monetary value to place on your work. It’s not as easy as you might think. Other than covering the costs of paint and canvas, it is worth $20 or $200? I’m still struggling with that.

From art to industrial complex

Over the course of the weekend, I had time to think. One of the things that surfaced was the apocryphal story of Vincent van Gogh taking a wheelbarrow piled high with his paintings to barter with his landlady. Both the artist and his art collection were summarily dismissed as being worthless.

It's an emblematic story; the works that turned out to be among the most expensive paintings in Western art history were once deemed to be junk indicates the variability and artifice of monetary value as a means to assign worth.

If not for the foresight and thoughtfulness of van Gogh’s sister-in-law Johanna van Gogh-Bonger, his body of work might have vanished into obscurity. Her commitment to posthumously promoting van Gogh’s paintings included writing to critics, editing his letters and lending work for early exhibitions in order to give the public the opportunity to make up their own minds.

The painter’s ascent from dire poverty, desperation, mental illness and suffering to becoming one of the most celebrated and successful artists also carries complexities. In his lifetime, van Gogh had scant success. He sold a couple of his works but also bartered his paintings for food and other necessities. He also traded with other artists and his impact on the art world continues to roll out in countless ways.

Arguably van Gogh helped lay the groundwork for subsequent art movements like Expressionism and Fauvism, but it was the drama of his life story that proved as impactful as his work: tortured genius, that missing ear, madness and an early violent death — the details are familiar from films, books and exhibitions galore. It’s sometimes a bit of an abrupt experience to see his actual paintings in all their ordinary and extraordinary glory.

Recent touring exhibits that offered projections of van Gogh’s work blown up to massive proportions brought on mixed audience reactions because of the way money and art converged in those shows.

I remember being taken aback by the ticket prices alone of those travelling shows. They seemed to be all sound, fury and technical complexity, but there was no actual art on display; there were only Instagram-friendly digital projections on the wall, offering the watered-down flavour of the thing without the real stuff.

The experience of taking in van Gogh’s artwork in this way seemed, in many ways, at odds with what I have always valued about his paintings, namely an obsession with the ordinary details of the world, flowers, faces, stars, cafés and workers going about their labours. Humble stuff.

Seen anew through his work, life in all its vivid, pulsing energy comes tumbling out, bursting with colour and texture, all shade and nuances of emotion duly represented.

That he became the epicentre of a huge business, or what one could call the van Gogh industrial complex, feels so weird given what he chose to paint.

Art is necessary as breathing. Is money, too?

The art industry is so large that it can almost defy comprehension. It can be easy to forget that at its heart is a relatively simple thing: the need to make stuff.

And the experience — of making and viewing art — is profound. Anyone who has come across a famous work in the flesh has probably experienced a visceral reaction to it, the wavery sensation that feels like heat ripples on a highway. There’s even a physiological term for what happens when a person viscerally reacts to a thing of great and singular beauty: Stendhal syndrome.

I remember seeing a charcoal study for Leonardo da Vinci’s Virgin of the Rocks in the National Gallery in London. The drawing was large, the edges of the paper were ragged, almost transparent with age, but you could see how da Vinci’s arm had moved. This small detail affected me deeply: the evidence that indicated an actual person had made this, struggled with it, felt like giving up, but persevered.

Back at the West End Community Centre’s Art in the City market, something happened over the course of the weekend that I didn’t expect. When people I didn’t know bought things and took them away, a pang of grief, sharp as razor nick, moved through me. These things that I made and lived with for a while were now headed out into the world to places I’d probably never see. It felt like sending your kids off to university. Except that they will never come home again.

But by the end of the weekend, I was glad that I had participated. The one thing that is humbling about going through an event with other artists is that you realize you’re not special or unique: there are scads of other people doing exactly what you’re doing, sometimes much better, everyone engaged in their own struggle.

Taking one’s place in this thing that humans have done since the beginning of our species feels like stepping into a vast continuum, a ribbon of common experience and purpose. It connects us here in 2025 to some ancient unnamed human, crouched low in the caves of Lascaux trying to capture the essence of a running horse, the beefy heft of aurochs, or the tawny hide of a lion.

We ask a lot of art. We ask it to carry our ideas and understanding about the state of the world, and we ask it to explain us to ourselves. We ask it to parse the big stuff, notoriously complex issues like racism, misogyny, intolerance, things that has plagued human societies in perpetuity.

Like the imperfect people who make it, art isn’t always pure of purpose. But it is necessary, almost as much as breathing.

Money is necessary too, I suppose. I just wish the two weren’t as intimately conjoined as they are.

After everything else falls away — politics evolve and then devolve, and society reinvents itself again — art remains, carved into the flesh of the world. It’s a sacred reminder of who we are that continues on long after we’re gone.