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> Andy Warhol's Campbell Soup sold for $11.7 Million. Does money define art?

• twopens 7y ago
  So how do you define art? And can you tell it apart from Pornography? As someone who usually doesn't get art, especially the more traditional forms, looking in to that box a lot of what I see makes no sense to me and some of it I couldn't tell apart from an acclaimed artist and a child. As far as I can tell Art is whatever a large enough group of people decides is art based on consensus.
  • setr 7y ago
    Money is a conflated metric in the arts; it's largely an investment, and you're really investing in the "cool" factor (the cooler the artist gets, the better the resale value of his work). By following the money, you're mainly watching a popularity contest (and Warhol was nothing if not cool). Art itself is of course nebulous, and has multiple branches of thought, but at it's most basic is just something that's "thought-provoking and interesting", which is best defined by contrast to those things we can all generally agree is mindless (eg marvel, porn).. somehow we'd also like to include technical skill, but it's neither sufficient nor necessary. And then you just have to navigate the history, niches and social groups that exist around it; some work isn't interesting, but an army of pretentious fucknuggets will swing by and tell you it is (but without explaining shit). Some work is interesting, but your own pretentions will stop you from seeing it (often humorous work go right over people's heads, because they're too busy looking for a "deeper" meaning, or assuming it exists and don't bother processing any further). And some work is only interesting given a certain context/history (eg duchamp's famous urinal, which broke down art circles for decades).