A Caravaggio has inherent value because it's a cultural artifact. I would argue that it has no inherent value because it's a cultural artifact. It's just paint

A Caravaggio has inherent value because it's a cultural artifact. I would argue that it has no inherent value because it's a cultural artifact. It's just paint on a canvas. It only has value because the culture thinks it does. Thought experiment 1: suppose you took a Caravaggio -- say, The Musicians (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Musicians_(Caravaggio) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Musicians_(Caravaggio)), hanging in the Metropolitan Museum of Art -- and shipped it to a hunter-gatherer culture in Papua New Guinea. Would they value it to the same degree as the people of New York or Rome? Thought experiment 2: suppose the same painting (back in the Met) were suddenly discovered to be a forgery. Would it still have the same value? Modern art is such a subjective field it's meaningless to discuss what is and what is not. Again, I disagree; almost the entire meaning of modern art is discussing what is and what is not art. Art has followed the path of many human endeavors -- it has expanded over time to fill all the cracks and crevices of the space of what could possibly be art, like a species evolving and adapting to fill every ecological niche. Think of a massive Venn diagram, where each circle represents an individual's view of what is "art". That Caravaggio would probably fall squarely in the intersection of the what the vast majority of (Western) humans would consider art. Picasso? Still very much "art" for most people. Pollock, Rothko? Hmm... How about Sol Lewitt's wall drawings? Anyway, you get the point. What's interesting about modern art (to me) is precisely that it shifts the discourse from "ooh, this person paints really nice pictures" to the much more fundamental question of "what the heck is art?" Modern art is experimental philosophy. It's a lot easier to answer the question "is music created by AI really music" How about an AI designed to replicate the work of John Cage? ;)