6 ms·

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

36 points by ccamrobertson 3y ago

ahartmetz 3y 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 3y 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 3y ago
    It’s just a dirty cloth though.
    - Smoosh 3y ago
      12th century deepfake.
      - graemep 3y ago
        Probably 13th or 14th century, I thought? BUT such a good fake of that age is interesting and valuable in itself.
  - ahartmetz 3y ago
    Yeah honestly, I would have a much higher opinion of such texts without the pretentious wording.
    - greenie_beans 3y ago
      https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2013/jan/27/users-guide-international-art-english https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2013/jan/27/users-g...
- ompogUe 3y 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 3y 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.
    - ompogUe 3y ago
      Yes, you are correct, it doesn't make the work a failure. However, with my practice and my intentions, I personally do think I have failed if I need a statement to explain the piece. In addition to contemporary audiences, I like to think of how future archaeologists might interpret an artifact, without any explicit context. > 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. I can get behind this. The issue for me is that artists who rely too heavily on their statements to impart meaning might be limiting themselves in their visual vocabulary and the conversation. Having known people who get upset when they are trying to convey very specific concepts outlined in their statement, but audience members choose to interpret it differently, the failure, to me, is within them, not the piece. Part of my problem might be that when I was starting out, the only places in a gallery available for words was the name of the show and the title.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- _kb 3y 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.
  - timmaxw 3y 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".
    - _kb 3y ago
      I believe that's called HN.
deepnet 3y ago
[flagged]
- waqf 3y ago
  You're an AI, aren't you?
  - deepnet 3y ago
    No I am not, it used to be thought useful on hnews to summarise & tl;dr the article. I guess not so much now. I think this looks like an interesting book and have pre-ordered it from Waterstones. I was hoping to see a bit of hnews discussion on the article. I make and like art.
mdhb 3y 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.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
keiferski 3y 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.
- amadeuspagel 3y 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.
  - keiferski 3y 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-as-specialist-lenders-multiply https://www.theartnewspaper.com/2023/03/08/art-loans-spike-a...
amadeuspagel 3y 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 3y ago
Mirror of "International Art English" since the original website was broken for me: https://gwern.net/doc/culture/2012-rule.pdf https://gwern.net/doc/culture/2012-rule.pdf
low_tech_love 3y 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.
BobaFloutist 3y 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.
- timmaxw 3y 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?
  - BobaFloutist 3y 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.
    - timmaxw 3y ago
      > Non wealthy people are largely not willing to pay ... what it actually costs to make them The general public pays enough money to pay the artists' salaries, plus the marketing budget and all the other costs. Otherwise Hollywood would go out of business.
      - BobaFloutist 3y ago
        Yes, but the artists salaries are typically insufficient to actually support their lives. Hollywood exists because enough people are excited enough by the idea of working for Hollywood that they're willing to accept fairly subpar working conditions and pay to get a chance to do what they love. Art is almost universally subject to a "passion tax".
pketh 3y ago
If you find the linked website as reader hostile as I did, here's a more readable archived version: https://archive.is/vFZet https://archive.is/vFZet

36 points by ccamrobertson 3y 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 3y 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 3y ago
  It’s just a dirty cloth though.
  - Smoosh 3y ago
    12th century deepfake.
    - graemep 3y ago
      Probably 13th or 14th century, I thought? BUT such a good fake of that age is interesting and valuable in itself.
- ahartmetz 3y ago
  Yeah honestly, I would have a much higher opinion of such texts without the pretentious wording.
  - greenie_beans 3y ago
    https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2013/jan/27/users-guide-international-art-english https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2013/jan/27/users-g...
ompogUe 3y 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 3y 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.
  - ompogUe 3y ago
    Yes, you are correct, it doesn't make the work a failure. However, with my practice and my intentions, I personally do think I have failed if I need a statement to explain the piece. In addition to contemporary audiences, I like to think of how future archaeologists might interpret an artifact, without any explicit context. > 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. I can get behind this. The issue for me is that artists who rely too heavily on their statements to impart meaning might be limiting themselves in their visual vocabulary and the conversation. Having known people who get upset when they are trying to convey very specific concepts outlined in their statement, but audience members choose to interpret it differently, the failure, to me, is within them, not the piece. Part of my problem might be that when I was starting out, the only places in a gallery available for words was the name of the show and the title.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
_kb 3y 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.
- timmaxw 3y 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".
  - _kb 3y ago
    I believe that's called HN.

deepnet 3y ago

[flagged]

waqf 3y ago
You're an AI, aren't you?
- deepnet 3y ago
  No I am not, it used to be thought useful on hnews to summarise & tl;dr the article. I guess not so much now. I think this looks like an interesting book and have pre-ordered it from Waterstones. I was hoping to see a bit of hnews discussion on the article. I make and like art.

mdhb 3y 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.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

keiferski 3y 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.

amadeuspagel 3y 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.
- keiferski 3y 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-as-specialist-lenders-multiply https://www.theartnewspaper.com/2023/03/08/art-loans-spike-a...

amadeuspagel 3y 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 3y ago

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

low_tech_love 3y 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.

BobaFloutist 3y 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.

timmaxw 3y 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?
- BobaFloutist 3y 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.
  - timmaxw 3y ago
    > Non wealthy people are largely not willing to pay ... what it actually costs to make them The general public pays enough money to pay the artists' salaries, plus the marketing budget and all the other costs. Otherwise Hollywood would go out of business.
    - BobaFloutist 3y ago
      Yes, but the artists salaries are typically insufficient to actually support their lives. Hollywood exists because enough people are excited enough by the idea of working for Hollywood that they're willing to accept fairly subpar working conditions and pay to get a chance to do what they love. Art is almost universally subject to a "passion tax".

pketh 3y ago

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