or stuff like this by Lee Ufan (whose art was featured at the Guggenheim not too long ago. As an example one of his vertical blue-line pieces sold for $410,000):
Call me ignorant but I just do not see how this stuff gets valued so highly. I don’t understand what sets this stuff apart from art anyone else makes. Why can’t I make a painting that’s just a shade of red and sell it for millions? What is the differentiating factor that makes some art successful/valuable and others not?
We’re just going to be told that we don’t understand…you know that, right?
I suspect that there’s a moneyed class that likes to think they understand. Through successful marketing, connections, whathaveyou, an artist catches the attention of this class.
They start talking about him/throwing money at him. Next think you know, art critics and others in the art community have to start taking the artist seriously in order to be taken seriously themselves.
The monster feeds itself. It creates value where there is none.
These are folks who were well known to be skilled artists, and turned that skill towards a different style of art than anyone else was doing.
It’s not like these guys were sitting around wishing they knew enough about painting to do a nice landscape, or paint fruit in a bowl. That shit was just old and boring, they decided to make something artistic, something that evokes emotion without sticking to the bland old idea of representational art. That is a bold concept when it’s new, and takes more than just the ability to paint straight lines.
Contemporary art is harder to deal with, I think, because the frontier has been broken already. Where else do you go when “anything goes” was the rage 75 years ago? Wow, a crucifix in a jar of pee… it’s ok, I guess, but it’s not nearly as good as that placenta art we saw before.
Whee! It’s time for the latest round of the SDMB’s biannual “modern art is a scam” discussion!
A lot of abstract pieces don’t work well as tiny images on a computer screen. Actually, neither do a lot of realist pieces, but with a realist painting you can at least say “oh, hey, it’s a boat”, even if you can’t appreciate the nuances of the physical paint on the canvas. So unless you’ve actually seen some of these works in person, its hard to have any sort of meaningful opinion about them.
Secondly, another hurdle people have a hard time getting over is the idea that pictures are supposed to mean things. They look at piece of abstract art and say “What’s that supposed to mean?” like the picture was a puzzle with some deep secret they’re supposed to figure out. Or they decide the meaning of the painting is something vacuous like “Look at me, I’m an artistic rebel!”
What they’re missing is that it’s possible to look at something without imposing a fixed meaning on it. Why this is such a radical idea is confusing to me, since we listen to music that way all the time. No one expects there to be some hidden message inside the structure of a Bach cantata. The structure of the notes in time isn’t about anything other than itself.
When I look at abstract art, I don’t think about what it means. I just enjoy the process of looking. Some arrangements of paint on canvas are interesting to look at in and of themselves, not because they contain some sooper-secret sophisticated message about the meaning of life. If an artist is particularly good at arranging paint in such a way that a lot of people find it interesting to look at, then his paintings sell for more.
I realize that some people have a hard time understanding that other people might honestly like things that they don’t. There’s a tendency to think that if someone likes something that’s obviously crap to us they must be doing it as a scam or a put-on: “You like Thomas Kinkade paintings? Seriously? You’re kidding, right?” But the thing is, people like what they like. And while its possible that sometimes people might pretend to like something to gain status, it’s hard to believe that abstract art could keep chugging along for decades if everyone involved was just engaged in a massive act of self-delusion. So, rather than acting like a snob and insisting that everyone must conform to your own aesthetic tastes, it’s generally better to shrug your shoulders and say “Eh … it doesn’t work for me, but clearly it does for you. Different strokes.”
Well, first of all, have you tried? Until you’ve tried, I don’t see why you should assume that you can’t do it.
Sometimes works require a lot more technical skill than you’d think. Mondriaan is pretty easy but Pollack takes a lot of work to not end up just looking muddy.
But the big thing is mainly that people are willing to pay that amount of money for it. Some would say that once you’ve paid some millions of dollars for a painting, you’re loathe to admit if you think you got taken but really, do we care what other people do with their money?
You might be interested in learning a little bit about art history. For so long art was how we saw places. Most people never moved more than 50 miles from their birthplace. If you lived in farm country, art was the only way you’d ever see mountains or the sea. Artists who could evocatively and accurately reproduce landscapes and people were lauded because they were the best at capturing visual information. But then we invented photography and the art world epxerienced an extreme period of introspection. If I can take a perfectly accurate picture of a bowl of fruit, why should I paint it? If my betrothed’s father can take a picture of her to send to me, why waste time with a portrait? So people started breaking art down to see if they could find what its purpose was and along the way they came up with a variety of new modes of artistic expression including minimalism which is an attempt to see just how minute one can go and still evoke something.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with not liking art or a particular style of art, by the way. My university had some buildings done in a particularly soviet sort of way. I believe the style is referred to as Brutalist. My art major friends always raved about it. I thought and still do that they look like concrete ass.
Here is a lesson I tell my kids all the time: Things are worth no more and no less than people are willing to pay for them. That glass a water is worth everything you have if you are dying of thirst. It is worth nothing at all if you aren’t thirsty. That painting is worth that much because * someone is willing to pay that much for it*. That’s the only reason.
I think the question of ‘why does it sell for so much money’ is pretty subjective, and doesn’t really have to do with whether I like it or not. It sells for a lot of money because people have decided they will pay that. And I believe, though I have no proof, that the end result of that process is ‘it’s expensive because we want art to be expensive’.
The second questions, whether I like it, is getting muddled in the discussion. I like plenty of modern art. Because I like looking at it. Same reason that I enjoy going to a museum to look at many different forms of art. I have little knowledge of the history or even many of the methods used, but as you say, I like looking.
Show me a canvas covered in uniform green, or a few black likes with a few colored boxes, maybe I’m interested maybe I’m not. But you will have an extremely hard time convincing me that there’s something intrinsic to the work that makes it worth millions of dollars.
Yeah, I totally agree with you. That’s one that would be fun to stand in front of.
Conspicuous consumption + marketing + social pressure.
We spend a lot of resources on things that are expensive because they are expensive and demonstrating that we can buy expensive things has social value. And, in turn, people spend a lot of time cultivating the idea that something is rare and valuable to get people to spend lots of money on it.
Why do people pay extra for diamonds over other clear crystals when it takes a professional with a loupe to tell the difference? Why is a reproduction of art worth less than the original if it has in fact passed as original for decades? Clearly in both cases there’s no intrinsic difference in the experience. And note that the latter is not limited to modern art or to a particular style. If you believe there is any painting that is worth $millions, I assure you that unless you’re well-trained in the detection of art forgery, there are plenty of people out there who can make a copy that’ll fool you for much less.
Yeah. Really. Who cares? Art is worth what people think it’s worth. Let the market decide. I personally am not a fan of minimalism and have mixed feeling about Piet Mondrian (who I don’t quite think of as “minimalist”), but I am a fan of expressionism, like Kandinsky and Pollack, etc., who folks like to classify as hacks or charlatans or whatever, and who I think are absolute geniuses. Full stop. Why worry about it? If somebody wants to pay a few million dollars for another version of white on white, who gives a fuck?
I’m guessing that the really big bucks are paid when people decide: this isn’t just art, it’s history, too. In its most basic form, the artist is dead, but has influenced a number of subsequent artists. There are now a finite number of ‘influential works’ that represent the way that artist changed the way people make art.
I hate professional sports and modern art with an equal loathing, but in all fairness it must be said that playing sports well does require a certain amount of talent. Whereas pouring paint on a canvas to create random splotches does not require any talent at all.
