Those PhDs were my parents, and I’m pretty sure my career as a critic has its roots in that art — art that we’d never have lived with but for an outfit called Multiples Inc. During its decadelong heyday, in a space on Madison Avenue in New York, the company made and sold new kinds of art that invited something close to mass production, allowing prices that even some young academics could manage. The company was born in a spirit “close to the socialist idea that art should be accessible,” Goodman recalled a few years ago. “Artists who questioned the status of art as a luxury commodity embraced multiples as a more democratic art form,” reads a wall text at the Museum of Modern Art, whose recent expansion has made room for an entire gallery dedicated to “The Art of the Multiple.”Early on, the goal was to replace the handmade expressionism of the 1950s with work that explored the materials and mass production of the Space Age. By the ’80s, when Multiples Inc. was mostly reduced to publishing prints, the serious art market was becoming utterly driven by “top prices for unique works,” according to Swiss curator Dieter Schwarz, who organised the Multiples show at Goodman. That hasn’t meant the absolute death of art produced in editions.

Source: bd News24 January 09, 2021 04:18 UTC