Is art a way to make money, or something that enriches the world? The question is trickier than it seems at first glance. Those who make art see that work as something others have to pay for, because at the very least it involves labour and materials, and also generates intangible value. The story therefore begins with that intangible value, because the artist himself has bitterly little to say about it.
Anyone walking through a museum is delighted by all the beauty on display, but is not going to pay for every single work of art. The entrance ticket was already expensive enough. Ultimately, this makes the creators of original work increasingly invisible.
The question of what is real, and what is fake, plays a leading role in this Holland Festival. In really every performance I experienced, it's about it. The performance ROHTKO, which was shown for the first time in the Netherlands on Wednesday 25 June, takes it up a notch. Latvian theatre-maker Łukasz Twarkowski unpacks with a four-hour show full of spinning stages, filmed scenes and rock-hard beats, and everything revolves around the question of whether we can still determine what art is at all, and whether we should care about it.
Forgery
ROHTKO is about Mark Rothko. The painter of those insanely making monochrome canvases gained extra reputation at the beginning of this century because a world-renowned gallery in New York had sold a whole pile of forgeries of his work for real. When it became clear that the canvases had not been painted by Rothko, millions of claims followed. Those who had first enjoyed their million-dollar purchase could never again look at the same canvas unbroken when it turned out that it came from a Chinese copy shop. What was wrong with the sense of that knowledge?
In the Far East, different conventions about intellectual property prevail than here. Where 'our' architect Ben van Berkel was still in the first years after construction wanted to see money for every photograph that featured 'his' Erasmus Bridge, copying Van Gogh's Sunflowers in China is more of a tribute than a business model. And: the better the copy, the prettier.
Much of the good
So that's how you get to the site where Japanese dancer Kawaguchi has been travelling the world for 12 years with a copy of Kazuo Ohno's improvised feel dance. The questions he raises on the difference between copy and original, are actually at the heart of ROHTKO.
Twarkowski's (so not to be confused with that filmmaker without the 'w') four-hour Latvian show is sometimes very much of a good thing. The stage of the Rabozaal in Amsterdam's Stadsschouwburg (City Theatre) accommodates moving containers that house a lifelike replica of the Chinese restaurant in New York where the art scene loved to get its dumplings in the 1980s. A motley parade of characters, including Rothko himself, swirl around each other, while the direction does such a good job of mixing everything up in time and space that we lose track in the auditorium.
Perverse revenue models
That is exactly the intention, because the questions the show wants to raise are not about who did or made what where, but about what we consider authentic or fake, and who decides what something is worth. In the visual-art world in particular, the earning models are often perverse, and everyone watches everyone else to know what is good and bad.
The show ends as a heavy-handed version of the film The Square, known for that out-of-control Gorilla performance at a fundraising dinner. We no longer know what we know and feel. Because after four hours of supremacy, the performance gives you this conclusively: in the entire value chain of art, it is the artist himself who has ended up deeper and deeper at the bottom of the food pyramid.
