the merchant is the enemy

“Le marchand—voila l’ennemi”, the merchant is the enemy, said Picasso (Making Modernism, Picasso and the Creation of the Market for 20th Century Art, Fitzgerald, 1995, University of California Press). If that was the case, it gives new meaning to sleeping with the enemy. In the same book, Picasso was quoted that he’d “like to live like a poor man with a lot of money.” In the grandeur he grew to inhabit, that is an expansive notion of poverty. Lastly, Renoir stated: “There’s only one indicator for telling the value of paintings, and that is the sales room” (ibid). You get the feeling he’d be fabricating today.