Theft by Peter Carey

“I don’t know if my story is grand enough to be a tragedy, although a lot of shitty stuff did happen. It is certainly a love story but that did not begin until midway through the shitty stuff, by which time I had not only lost my eight-year-old son, but also my house and studio in Sydney where I had once been about as famous as a painter could expect in his own backyard. It was the year I should have got the Order of Australia—why not!—look at who they give them to. Instead my child was stolen from me and I was eviscerated by divorce lawyers and gaoled for attempting to retrieve my own best work which had been declared Marital Assets.”

The opening lines of Theft by Peter Carey.

The contrast inherent in the first sentence is characteristic of Michael “Butcher” Boone, one of the two narrators of the novel. On the one hand, he aspires to—or at least thinks in terms of—the scope and sweep, the grandeur, of tragedy. On the other hand, he undermines his aspiration with course language and the lack of control its use suggests; he even undermines the stature of the very condition he aspires to by implying that tragedy may be no more than “a lot of shitty stuff.” He exhibits enough self-awareness to express doubt that his story rises to the level of tragedy, but in doing so, he signals his hope that it does; one even suspects that his expression of doubt may be no more than a gesture, a socially acceptable fig-leaf for his inner conviction that it does.

As the title suggests, Theft is interested in questions of value: the very notion of theft implies value, generally commercial value; who would go to the trouble of stealing something if it was valueless?

It’s particularly concerned with the process by which commercial value becomes attached to art, and with the tension between commercial and aesthetic value. Butcher speaks about the latter in terms of people who do or do not have “the eye,” though for me that just raises the question of whether aesthetic value is inherent in the work—there for the eye that can to see—or whether it is something that exists, like beauty, only in the eye of the beholder. Butcher himself embraces the former view.

Aesthetic and commercial value do not necessarily correlate, it seems to me, though people tend to behave as if they do, or at least ought to. This even in spite of evidence to the contrary, such as when Butcher feels his own work to be undervalued by the marketplace; he’s convinced this results not from a flawed theory of correlation, but rather from a failure of the market to appreciate the work’s “true” worth. (That his work possesses aesthetic value he takes for granted.) He resists the notion that commercial value is exactly what the market will bear and nothing else.

The book is also concerned with the ways in which other factors, beyond the aesthetic element, contribute to the commercial value of a painting: authenticity, scarcity, fashion. Michael himself, now that he is out of jail, is repeatedly said to be “out of fashion,” and the prices his work might attract suffer accordingly. The notion of authenticity, meanwhile, raises an issue of authority: who gets to decide what’s authentic? Much of the story revolves around questions of authenticity as they apply to the work of a painter named Leibovitz.

It’s interesting that most of the scams perpetrated in the book do not involve outright fakes, but rather unfinished or abandoned originals that have been manipulated to varying degrees and/or assigned false dates. The very same work may have different commercial values depending on when it was painted; a painting from 1913 is a great Leibovitz, we are told, one from 1920, not so much. This rather undermines any correlation between commercial and inherent aesthetic value; if the value of the work were completely intrinsic, then the timing of its creation should be irrelevant.

This interest in the commercialization of art is likewise signaled in those opening lines above by the reference to Marital Assets. Talk about a term that strips away the aesthetic element altogether!