Goodwill Bolotowsky

Sotheby's is set to auction off two formalist paintings by Ilya Bolotowsky on Sept 21. They were found at a Goodwill in North Carolina on sale for about $10 a piece. Beth Feeman, the pet-portraitist who purchased them, intended to paint over them. Happily, she discovered their art-historical value before repurposing them. Sotheby's has valued them between $15,000 and $20,000.
                The story reminded me of the recent death of Herb Vogel, a postal service employee who amassed a valuable and critically adored art collection. It also reminded me of the film "Who the #$&% is Jackson Pollock?", the story of a truck-driver who purchases a painting for $5 at a thrift store and then becomes embroiled in a quixotic quest to prove that the canvas is a lost Jackson Pollock. Thirdly, it reminded me of the first time I heard Bolotowsky's name. In 1990, A mural he made while working through the WPA was rediscovered in a Brooklyn housing project. It had been painted over sometime after WWII.
               The common thread between these stories is the disconnect between regular working people and fine art. Herb Vogel is considered such an important figure in the art world because he was an authentic blue collar guy who nonetheless "got" modern and contemporary art. The rareness of this is what made him so special. Bolotowsky's work represents a particularly difficult form of modern art for many people to appreciate. Ms. Feeman in fact was not only indifferent to the works she encountered, but actually disliked them. The workers who painted over the Bolotowsky mural in Williamsburg perhaps felt the same way. Surely, they were unaware of the mural's monetary value.
                    The painting in "Who the #$&% is Jackson Pollock?" is somewhat different. In this case we have a blue collar individual asserting the high value of an artwork in the face of dismissal from the established art world. The most heart-breaking part of the movie is that the piece is almost certainly not a Pollock. The most detestable character (and their a lot of them in the film) is the snobbish expert who dismisses the painting as a fake after a brief look. The worst part is, he is right. It is not a Pollock. He can tell just by looking at it, and the truck-driver could not.
                    I don't know what conclusions to draw from these episodes. It seems the artist and the critic are either self-congratulatory elitists, or that they are swindlers. Either idea saddens me. What is it about formal abstraction that provokes such distaste in people who have not been conceptually indoctrinated? Are not color and shape the music of the eyes? What will do without Herb Vogel?