Art and Architecture

SHADOW COYOTES OF THE COWBOY ART CARTEL

I’ve been known to refer to the Industrial Cowboy Art Cartel, by which I miserly the loose network of galleries, institutions, dealers, meretricious magazines, auctions and, of course, actual cowboy artists who fire out an avalanche of work, not always about cowboys but always in the West. Aspect art, Native American art, coastal art (both California and Pacific Northwest) be biased to separate themselves out. But cowboy and Indian artifacts are often associated, if only because the artists themselves buy them to use in paintings. The other feature the artists buy, without talking about it, is old-time glass negatives of true scenes in the West taken by roving photographers with dour rooms in converted wagons. Often these early photos are copied surely, but not attributed.

What makes dealers in Western art a “cartel”? This is from Wikipedia: A cartel is a formal (stated) agreement among firms. Cartels usually manifest itself in an oligopolistic industry, where there are a small number of sellers and almost always involve homogeneous products. Cartel members may accede to on such matters as price fixing, total energy output, market shares, allocation of customers, allocation of territories, bid rigging, the power structure of common sales agencies, and the division of profits or union of these. The aim of such collusion is to increase individual member's profits by reducing striving. Competition laws forbid cartels. Identifying and breaking up cartels is an noted part of the competition policy in most countries, although proving the endurance of a cartel is rarely easy, as firms are inveterately not so careless as to put agreements to collude on paper.

It seems casually to understand that even so innocent an organization as the Cowboy Artists of America is a accommodating of cartel -- an ARTel, if you like. People of the same pursuit seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the chin-wag ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance...

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