A journalist goes undercover to reveal the absurdity of the art scene

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/a-journalist-goes-undercover-to-reveal-the-absurdity-of-the-art-scene/ar-BB1htWBT

by ccamrobertson • 2 years ago

36 33 2 years ago

ahartmetz2• 2 years ago

Well yeah, there is obviously a lot of bullshit in the art scene.

My "favorite" are quite pedestrian looking artworks that only (supposedly) become interesting through some nebulous explanation text full of five-dollar words. If it tells me that the material is glass from the Trinity tests or sewer sludge, OK I'll take it, that's interesting. I like clever names, too. If the artist otherwise wanted to say something that the artwork doesn't say, that's a failure of the work IMO.

xyzzy123• 2 years ago

The context is often the most interesting part of the art though (while I admit pretentious wording also often rubs me the wrong way). Like the shroud of turin is just a dirty cloth if you don't appreciate the historicity of it.

bozhark• 2 years ago

It’s just a dirty cloth though.

ahartmetz2• 2 years ago

Yeah honestly, I would have a much higher opinion of such texts without the pretentious wording.

ompogUe2• 2 years ago

This! Many, many times I have talked to artists or read their statements, and seen that they are totally out of touch with how to actually communicate with their art. If you tell me your intentions for a piece, what you are trying to communicate, and coming at the piece without that information I see nothing to do with your intentions, you have failed. And the saddest part is when they have expectations that the audience will understand (or care) that all of the "meaning" they are trying to convey falls flat without the words.

I tend to go around the galleries without reading titles or statements. I get more out of it making my own meaning from your work, while being able to pay closer attention to formal qualities.

haswell• 2 years ago

they are totally out of touch with how to actually communicate with their art

It sounds like you have a preference for a particular kind of art, and you’re expecting all artists to conform to that preference.

If you tell me your intentions for a piece, what you are trying to communicate, and coming at the piece without that information I see nothing to do with your intentions, you have failed

This again seems to come from an expectation that all artists produce a particular kind of work. It’s possible that they’ve failed if measured against that particular preference, but that failure is relative to the preference.

To me, a piece that requires context and explanation is just another genre of work, and it’s a genre I appreciate. It can reveal that the creation journey often looks nothing like the finished product, and for many artists, the value of the work comes primarily from the process of expression.

This doesn’t have to be your cup of tea. But neither does it make the work a failure.

_kb2• 2 years ago

That's a phenomena common across mediums. There's a certain point - it doesn't matter if it's visual, sculpture, dance, theatre, literary, or sound - where the work itself seems to become immaterial (and arguably aesthetically horrid) and the focus shifts to the process that preceeds it.

Without an 'in' or background in the often niche cultural (to borrow a word from my art wank school education) milieu it's grown from, that aspect is often opaque. Much like the article states: it's nothing more than a filter and social signalling mechanism.

The same holds true in software and technology. There's an endless continuum libraries, languages, tools and machines out there which have trivial impact on the world but are absolute objects of beauty when you know what's inside.

timmaxw3• 2 years ago

The reason people complain about "high art" is because we're told that everyone should aspire to appreciate high art, and that people who appreciate high art are somehow better than the general public, even though it's deliberately niche and opaque.

There's an endless continuum libraries, languages, tools and machines out there which have trivial impact on the world but are absolute objects of beauty when you know what's inside.

Imagine if the SF MOMA were replaced with a museum full of those niche libraries and languages, showing these absolute objects of beauty to the general public, and (implicitly) saying "you ought to appreciate the beauty; if you can't appreciate e.g. the beauty of the Haskell programming language is, you're ignorant".

mdhb• 2 years ago

I think a lot of the financial side of the art scene tends to make a lot more sense when you look at it through the lens of money laundering.

It actually has a very similar set of dynamics that people might be more familiar with via NFTs.

But is an ideal vehicle to start moving large sums of money around where nobody can objectively agree on a price and you need a receipt to ensure the money is legitimate.

keiferski3• 2 years ago

I recommend a book called Boom: Mad Money, Mega Dealers, and the Rise of Contemporary Art for a more neutral take on the art world and why art prices are so high. It’s easy to just call it “money laundering” but I think that is a lazy answer.

Of the many reasons why the art world is the way it is, I think a few are particularly interesting.

One has to do with commodification: in the last few hundred years, nearly every type of thing has become commodified: photographs (via digital cameras and social media), furniture (IKEA, etc.), and now with AI, words and digital images. And yet – the art object really hasn’t become commodified. There is only one art object treated as the authentic Mona Lisa/Rothko No. 6/ etc. And so from a certain point of view, the art market is a recognition of this fact that certain classes of objects will become more valuable because they cannot be commodified. This makes them entirely worthwhile investments on their own terms and you don’t need a vast conspiracy to underpin that market.

Another interesting reason is how artists have somewhat merged with celebrities, which the Boom book covers. This started happening with Warhol but took off in the 80s. Artists are a kind of celebrity that instead of selling millions of books/concert tickets/music albums/etc., package all of their “fame value” into a smaller number of objects.

amadeuspagel3• 2 years ago

Art doesn't yield dividends or interest, the only way to make money with art is by selling it, this is not investment but speculation.

The point about commodification is interesting. There is some need for unique and expensive physical objects, but not as an investment, rather as a way of showing off and feeling wealth.

keiferski3• 2 years ago

Valuable artworks are often used as collateral for loans and other financial instruments, so they can be used to make money.

There was a time when art, while hopefully pleasurable to own, was a non-performing asset financially. No longer. As the worlds of art and finance increasingly converge, leveraging art collections to unlock liquidity has become a healthily growing sector, according to its participants. There are two main groups of players: specialist lenders, who loan against art and other assets, and banks, who as part of their service will give loans to their clients, their art and other assets being the collateral.

https://www.theartnewspaper.com/2023/03/08/art-loans-spike-a...

amanaplanacanal• 2 years ago

It started way before Warhol. Picasso and Dali were notorious self promoters.

keiferski3• 2 years ago

Sure, self promotion goes back a long long time, to Dürer at least. I meant more in the modern sense of “celebrity.”

amadeuspagel3• 2 years ago

The book sounds fun, the review gets tedious at the end, whining about faux populism (as opposed to vrai populism?), blaming art collectors -- if only there was some way to make sure to only sell art to the right people.

It sounds like the author had fun reading the book, started writing a fun review, but then it dawned on him that the book questioned a bit more of the art world then he was comfortable with, so he found a scapegoat in collectors.

gwern• 2 years ago

Mirror of "International Art English" since the original website was broken for me: https://gwern.net/doc/culture/2012-rule.pdf

low_tech_love• 2 years ago

"...where the cultural elite can no longer exclude people based on race, gender or sexual identity, so they come up with clever new ways to build moats around their little castles."

Oh, wow. Best thought I've heard for a while. As an immigrant living in Northern Europe, this basically explains 90% of my daily life.

BobaFloutist4• 2 years ago

The reason the wealthy have such influence over the economics of making and selling art is that the non-wealthy are more or less categorically opposed to paying appropriate prices for art.

timmaxw3• 2 years ago

The non-wealthy regularly pay for books, music, movies, video games, etc. Hollywood is a $40B/year industry. All these industries follow a model of "make a work of art, then sell infinite copies"; this makes it possible to sell the copies at reasonable prices. These prices are appropriate, and the non-wealthy pay them.

The "high art" world, on the other hand, fetishizes the original physical work of art. If an expert painter spends weeks on a painting, then they must sell it for enough money to cover "weeks of an expert's income"; so of course only wealthy people will be able to afford it. How is this price more "appropriate" than the prices that non-wealthy people pay?

BobaFloutist4• 2 years ago

Non wealthy people are largely not willing to pay for books, movies, videogames (I will admit to not knowing about music) what it actually costs to make them. The industries are able to sidestep this by underpaying (all but the highest profile) artists and massively scaling up marketing budgets, but people routinely underestimate the time and effort involved in producing art, even the "infinite copies" version.

throwaway8877• 2 years ago

There are many forms of art. In many cases people can get for themselves cheap reproductions and could plaster their bedrooms with it if they ever wanted. Or if that is not good enough for them and they can't get original works of some famous expensive artist then they can find some starving ones and get their works.

pketh• 2 years ago

If you find the linked website as reader hostile as I did, here's a more readable archived version: https://archive.is/vFZet

A journalist goes undercover to reveal the absurdity of the art scene

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