I follow the contemporary art world pretty closely, and a feeling I often get is that it's merely a giant collection of individuals expressing themselves in a way that fits into the market system of galleries, museums, auctions, etc. There are of course artists focused on political causes, but for the most part it is entirely devoid of any centralized ethos or ideal.
While this situation is freeing for the individual artist, I can't help but look at previous eras – say, the Italian Renaissance, or the high point of Ottoman miniature painting [1] – and admire the lack of complete self-expression. Instead, you had a much narrower focus of acceptable work and topics, with the result that artists were all engaged with basically the same art forms and the same topics, across the entirety of the artistic community. For example, both da Vinci and Raphael were painting Madonnas [2], whereas today you'd certainly never have two world-famous painters in direct competition working on the same type of painting – because their value is determined by their individuality and self-expression, not their expertise/skill.
This is a widespread post-modern culture thing and not limited to art, of course, and probably won't go away for a long, long time, or at least until you get a massive society-wide idea like Christianity to take root again.
The “art world” is wildly divorced from the tastes of the majority of people in society - one could uncharitably but not inaccurately characterise the modern art world as a means to arrange for low cost materials to be purchased for vast sums in tax advantageous ways.
If we look at an art form where there is a lot of validation by the majority of people, tv and films, we see people “painting the same thing” all the time because that’s what the “zeitgeist” is interested in
500 years ago there were very few books and the west European zeitgeist was mostly the bible anyway.
>The “art world” is wildly divorced from the tastes of the majority of people in society
Is this supposed to be a bad thing? Because, if that's what you're saying, then what is your idea of "art"? Something that you can buy, have promptly delivered and hanged on a wall to decorate a space and get compliments from passers-by?
Would you like if all music was something designed to be played on the radio or in malls to decorate musically the environment?
>Because, if that's what you're saying, then what is your idea of "art"? Something that you can buy, have promptly delivered and hanged on a wall to decorate a space and get compliments from passers-by?
Let's start with making a space more beautiful, and see where it takes us from here.
Definition could also include connecting with us (difficult if "divorced" from our tastes), enriching the culture, and serving a higher purpose...
>Would you like if all music was something designed to be played on the radio or in malls to decorate musically the environment?
You got it backwards. That's what modern art is currently. Only that the environment isn't a mall but a gallery or some rich person's wall.
That's why its "wildly divorced from the tastes of the majority of people in society".
Because it's either banal or high concept wankery. So like music being either musack or some avant guarde exercize for other academics to applaud. In the art world we could use some Beatles or Animal Collective or Aphex Twin or Aurora or Tame Impala or even some Taylor Swift and Luis Fonzi.
Something designed to elicit an emotional reaction from human beings. It doesn't have to be a pleasant emotional reaction, but there should be one. On that metric the modern art world has with their art, generally speaking, failed. You can't be completely divorced from people and still elicit emotional reactions. Your swings just miss.
Hilariously enough, the art world itself, continues to elicit quite strong emotional reactions, even if the art itself does not. It's possible the entirety of the art scene is actually wildly successful performance art that went entirely over my head.
>> one could uncharitably but not inaccurately characterise the modern art world as a means to arrange for low cost materials to be purchased for vast sums in tax advantageous ways.
> Is this supposed to be a bad thing? Because, if that's what you're saying, then what is your idea of "art"? Something that you can buy, have promptly delivered and hanged on a wall to decorate a space and get compliments from passers-by?
Are you disagreeing with the comment’s view of the contemporary art world’s POSIWID? The initial question seemed to disagree but the stawman you constructed concords with the parent’s pov, albeit focused on the decoration instead of the tax benefit.
In music, there are a wide variety of genres with a wide variety of sophistication. And for the most part, there are serious artists doing serious work in all genres, including pop, c&w, hiphop, etc. The most esoteric Jazz musician will have pop artists she admires.
The art world seems to be divided into impenetrable pieces that you need 10 years of education before you can understand how they "engage with the conversation", and dross that is supposedly only suitable for motel 6 bathroom walls.
Most of the art economy is money laundering with a defensive wall of sophistication put up around it. Most people know the emperor has no body paint, but it's not worth having a bunch of sophisticates sneer at you to bother voicing an opinion.
In music, the pitch-and-harmony-related content matters---that stuff we can capture in traditional sheet music---but it isn't everything, by a long shot.
You might think some pop song is hogwash, until you hear cover after cover that cannot nail it.
But I wouldn’t describe it as gatekeeping at all. It’s just complexity that isn’t immediately obvious to the layman.
Much of contemporary art is the same way. Outsiders without any knowledge may think it’s a giant scam, but there are plenty of logical reasons, historical or ideological or otherwise, for artists making the things they do and collectors buying those things. You might not like those reasons and they might not be good ones, but I’m not seeing anyone even elucidate what they are in the first place.
I think it was explained pretty well in other comments: it's gatekeeping in the name of "protecting the business" where the main business is only one thing: money laundering. Sure, there are people still buying art to display on their walls, but that's not where the big money is. There's exactly zero painters selling millions of copies of their work the way any halfway decent singer would sell, although everybody decorates their walls with something.
This. The modern art world is predominantly a tax evasion and racketeering scheme, designed to transfer assets outside the influence of national and international law.
How does it work? And what’s the evidence that this is true? People love to say this but I’ve never seen anyone go beyond the surface on the took. The impression I get is it’s mostly people who don’t know what they’re talking about repeating a pleasing idea.
It's used for money laundering, wealth transfer and tax avoidance. You buy and sell art, especially art that permanently resides in freeports, with cash, with shell companies that don't declare their ultimate beneficiary. You then avoid anyone knowing that you paid criminal X or criminal X paid you with the proceeds of crime. You avoid your government knowing that you have $XXX,XXX,XXX of assets stashed away that you're not declaring. You don't pay capital gains tax on it. And so on.
Governments around the world have been passing legislation in the past few years, and putting diplomatic pressure on governments of other tax havens, to tighten scrutiny of these international financial transactions.
You're providing evidence that crime exists, not that art as a whole is "predominantly a tax evasion and racketeering scheme". Where is the evidence that this represents the majority of art purchases?
It's also weird to even call this a tax dodge. If you make money in New York and not London then you should be paying taxes to New York and not London because your operations are using New York streets and New York sewers and hiring kids from New York schools etc., and that's what those taxes are paying for. You haven't used any of London's infrastructure to do it so they don't get any of the money.
If you make money in some free port or <unspecified location> which is so un-tied to any other jurisdiction that you have no meaningful operations in any of them, why should any of them have a claim to the money? None of them have done anything to earn it.
Art is definitely used as a tax dodge by the wealthy, but to suggest that the entire ecosystem is nothing but that is not correct. People that say this usually lack a deeper understanding of contemporary art.
I'm still not clear how this is even supposed to be tax evasion. If you're not operating in a jurisdiction then you shouldn't owe them any taxes. Which jurisdiction is even alleged to be owed the money, and on what basis?
Well, presumably the whole concept of a Freeport is kind of a “hack” against the tax system. These items are treated as if they’re in transit, but they are stored indefinitely.
They're treated as if they're outside of the jurisdiction, because they are. It's not a hack, it's just a fact. It's not even weird. The weird expectation is that areas outside of a given country's jurisdiction wouldn't exist.
US citizens owe the US government taxes on their income regardless where it was earned, barring some specific exclusions. At any rate, where a company is registered or where an asset is held doesn't necessarily have much bearing on where work is done or what infrastructure is used and to what extent.
> US citizens owe the US government taxes on their income regardless where it was earned, barring some specific exclusions.
That seems like the flaw here, not the other thing. Why should the US government have any entitlement to tax activity that occurs entirely outside their jurisdiction?
> At any rate, where a company is registered or where an asset is held doesn't necessarily have much bearing on where work is done or what infrastructure is used and to what extent.
But that's the point. They're meant to tax in the places where this sort of thing happens. If you have a building somewhere, there is property tax. If you make sales somewhere, there is sales tax or VAT. If you have employees somewhere (or are an employee and perform work somewhere), there is payroll tax.
Storing art can be done most anywhere, so naturally it happens in the places that allow it under the most favorable terms, but what's the problem there? It's the same as companies putting their facilities in some other jurisdiction because it has lower taxes. It's the normal and expected thing and one of the rare incentives for governments to improve their cost efficiency through competition.
>That seems like the flaw here, not the other thing. Why should the US government have any entitlement to tax activity that occurs entirely outside their jurisdiction?
Tax evasion doesn't cease to be tax evasion because you don't feel like you owe the government taxes.
Whereas it does cease to be tax evasion when it literally isn't tax evasion, it's tax avoidance. And then people are complaining about this as if it shouldn't be possible, when it should be the default. To owe a jurisdiction taxes you should have to be doing something in it.
For starters, you can purchase and store art in an airport storage area where it never goes through any customs. [0]
Presumably, this is art that will accrue in value, but is (rarely) ever viewed, so is purely a financial vehicle for maintaining and transferring ownership of wealth outside any taxation jurisdiction.
Another game is the ultra rich and famous getting richer. Art is valued not just for its objective aesthetic appeal (ha ha! As if!!) but based on its providence. Meaning who created it, and also its history. Included who has owned it.
If you are Oprah Winfrey, and you purchase some art that only the top 1% of 1% can afford. It is likely that when you sell it, not only will the exclusivity of the particular artifact itself have gained value, but now that his has been owned by Oprah, it will be worth even more. And by modeling the value she places on art, she validates these extreme price levels both when buying and selling, which benefits the whole art world. [1]
Which, in full circle, makes art even more useful as a financial instrument.
This is one of the main reasons that wealth taxes are bad policy. There are many assets that could have significant value, but the value is highly subjective. Since an accurate valuation is impossible and the range of plausible valuations is wide, it inherently becomes a system for arbitrage and distorts investment into whatever assets minimize the tax.
Overestimating the value of hard-to-price assets is massively destructive (people get rid of and make no attempt to acquire those assets because the tax exceeds their value; no more art), but setting their value to zero or otherwise underestimating their value does exactly as you're seeing.
Nearly all other taxes solve this by applying the tax when a transaction occurs and the current value is known in the form of the price being paid by the buyer to the seller.
There's an easy fix for that. You tell the government how much it is worth for tax purposes. If the government thinks you have underestimated it they reserve the right to buy it at that price.
As written on that wiki page it’s completely impractical:
> Others are able to purchase the property from the owner at the taxed price at any time, forcing a sale.
The idea is apparently supposed to “improve societal welfare”, but the reality is it would favor the wealthiest who could afford to have and hold property, while everyone else would be at the mercy of those richer than them.
This is almost certainly never going to actually exist, so this is all idle speculation, but if it was real I don't think it would necessarily play out as you describe. The wealthy would be paying way more in tax than they are now (they have to, or their own assets would be sold as well), which would result in a much more generous system of income redistribution. They'd also need to generate constant cash flow to prevent that property from being sold, so I think you'd have fewer "idle rich" on passive income.
I suspect the stable equilibrium would be a lot more renting rather than property ownership, but also a much more generous welfare state such that this was not a problem, since few people would want/need to keep a house as a store of value.
> The wealthy would be paying way more in tax than they are now (they have to, or their own assets would be sold as well)
That has nothing to do with the concept. The rate of the tax is separate from how it operates.
> I suspect the stable equilibrium would be a lot more renting rather than property ownership
Then the person doing the renting out would be paying the tax (and incurring the associated risks) and passing it on as higher rents. What does that help?
The problem here is assets that are hard to value. Not just in a subjective sense (what is a piece of art really worth?), but in a very practical sense. Take the things we have very good pricing information on -- stocks. If a share of Google is worth $100 and then six months later it's worth $110, but you put down $100 on the form -- objectively its market price at the time -- now someone can lift your shares off of you for a discount because the value changed and they raced to the filing office before you did. Now imagine the same thing but for something that doesn't have a high trading volume or an observable market price at any given time, but can still suddenly change in value over time.
Then it gets worse. Many types of property have a value to the owner which is different than their market value.
Suppose you operate a self-storage company. You have a piece of property which is objectively worth $500,000 where you operate your business. You declare that it's worth $500,000, because it is. Now a competitor can buy it off you for that amount just to grief you, because even though that's the value of the property, in order to move you have to contact all your customers and have them come and pick up their stuff, pay real estate commissions to find and purchase an otherwise identical property to move your business to, shut down your business while you hire contractors to move all your storage lockers to the new property etc.
Meanwhile the competitor just buys it from you for $500,000 and sells it to anyone but you for $500,000 (easy because that's it's true market value), causing you all this trouble and poaching half your customers in the process.
It's the kind of thing academics come up with which has enormous negative consequences in practice.
>The problem here is assets that are hard to value. Not just in a subjective sense (what is a piece of art really worth?), but in a very practical sense. Take the things we have very good pricing information on -- stocks. If a share of Google is worth $100 and then six months later it's worth $110, but you put down $100 on the form -- objectively its market price at the time --
This isn't a problem at all. You can let the brokerage report the value on your behalf. It's weird that you picked stocks specifically, because those are actually very easy to value. That's why your brokerage can provide you with a very precise number that fluctuates every time you log in.
>now someone can lift your shares off of you for a discount because the value changed and they raced to the filing office before you did.
That someone would be the government, and the government would presumably put a bid in anticipation of your filing. When you file your taxes in April 2025 and you say your grand masterpiece is worth $1.2 million, the tax office can be prepared to say "yup, that sounds like a good price to us. Now sell it to us for that price" at the point when you file your taxes.
>Then it gets worse. Many types of property have a value to the owner which is different than their market value.
How on earth is that worse? If you put the property in at market value then the government will not try to buy it from you. They'll be going after the low hanging fruit - the guy who valued a picasso at $1 million, not the guy whose grandmother passed down a family heirloom nobody else gives a shit about.
>Suppose you operate a self-storage company. You have a piece of property which is objectively worth $500,000 where you operate your business. You declare that it's worth $500,000, because it is. Now a competitor can buy it off you for that amount just to grief you
Government, not competitor. If the government employee responsible for finding underpriced assets and bidding on them put a $500k bid on $500k property then their bonus is not likely to amount to much. They'll be aiming for $1 million bids on $10 million property.
Yes, if you let anybody bid on things it could cause more issues which require mitigation. Even then, if you put in a threshold that they have to bid 10-15% over then this would stem abuse. Imagine a competitor trying to "grief" you by overpaying $50-75k for your assets.
Something tells me that you will still object.
>It's the kind of thing academics come up with
Sometimes people who object to the practicalities of a tax are actually objecting to it on principle.
> This isn't a problem at all. You can let the brokerage report the value on your behalf.
How does that help? The value is constantly in flux. They would still have to be faster than the other party (presumably well-heeled large investment banks with fast computers) trying to pick up stocks at a discount to their current value.
Conversely, trying to asses the value non-continuously leads to all kinds of weirdness where people temporarily shift their holdings to more advantageous asset classes on the day the form has to be filed. Or it just provides a method for defeating the tax entirely: On the day before your filing day you sell all your stocks and use the money to buy an assortment of esoterica from your buddy, declare it to have minimal value (because no one else could easily use or sell it), then the next day you sell some other difficult-to-value stuff back to them for the original amount of money and put the money back into stocks. In general people could arrange for the asset someone could deprive them of to be something nobody else would want.
> It's weird that you picked stocks specifically, because those are actually very easy to value.
If someone wants to own 51% of a company, they typically have to pay you a price for your shares above where they're currently trading. But it's really only those last few shares that yield majority voting rights which have that higher value, not all of them. Not even the 49% they don't buy. And yet every individual share is perfectly fungible, so how are you supposed to value them to reflect the amount you could normally get, without giving up the control premium you would be entitled to if a buyer comes who wants a controlling interest?
> That someone would be the government, and the government would presumably put a bid in anticipation of your filing.
This completely defeats the premise of the tax on both ends. You now have the government rather than potential buyers assessing the value of the property, they still have to estimate the value of hard-to-value assets and the whole thing just becomes a game of trying to guess the government assessor's secret estimate of your property value. Not to mention the fun new game where you acquire or create hard-to-value assets that you personally know are not worth very much or will otherwise be overestimated by the government assessor, and then try to come in just under their assessment value so they overpay you for them.
And how is the government supposed to anticipate your filing if neither of you know it's about to happen? If you're in the business of trade you could have bought and sold something in the time it takes them to estimate its value. What happens for a company with diverse inventory and a high turnover rate?
> If you put the property in at market value then the government will not try to buy it from you. They'll be going after the low hanging fruit - the guy who valued a picasso at $1 million, not the guy whose grandmother passed down a family heirloom nobody else gives a shit about.
This is an adversarial process. If you can value a $100M asset at $2M and not lose it unless you go below $1M then that's what everybody is going to do. It would be an entire industry dedicated to valuing property just above the threshold where the government would actually take it, with everyone striving to operate just at the threshold, wherever that is. You can't put a safety margin in because the market will just remove it.
It's like the speed limit. It doesn't matter if the sign says 55, if you only get a ticket at 70 then traffic moves at 69 and anybody who gets ticketed for going 58 is going to be surprised and resentful.
> Government, not competitor.
Then how is this solving the government's problem in valuing things? The whole point is to let anybody do it so the market can decide if someone is undervaluing their property.
> Even then, if you put in a threshold that they have to bid 10-15% over then this would stem abuse. Imagine a competitor trying to "grief" you by overpaying $50-75k for your assets.
They've interrupted your business, stolen half your customers and possibly caused you to exit the market. That could easily be worth $50-75k.
Also notice this is identical to just telling people to overpay their taxes by 10-15% by overvaluing their assets, because anyone whose assets are fungible would just undervalue them by the allotted threshold, and for others 10-15% is nowhere near enough. There isn't any specific fixed margin because the cost of being forced to sell an asset can be arbitrarily large. Suppose you buy a piece of property that you're now using as the terminus for a $100M undersea cable. The property is just an arbitrary acre of land but the $100M cable is now fixed in place.
Or take software for example. The Linux kernel is "free" but how much grief would it cause if people suddenly couldn't use it anymore? Does Linus Torvalds have enough money to pay the taxes every year on the one-time amount old Microsoft would pay to make that happen?
> Sometimes people who object to the practicalities of a tax are actually objecting to it on principle.
Sometimes people who like the principle of a tax dismiss the practicalities.
Of course it is. In many countries there is tax on liquid assets. Thats why these people buy art, cars etc. Things the tax authority cannot easily identify. Its also easy to transport these goods to another country. Its easy to change the value temporarily so you can move funds arround very easily.
I know some people doing it and storing their stuff in Dubai. Tax evasion is number one reason.
The tastes of the majority of people in society are for things they have already seen. It does not follow that we should only produce things that are similar to what has gone before.
If feel that with Youtube you get a touch of the Zeitgeist. There are some milquetoast channels like 'Hoovie's Garage', 'Rich Rebuilds', that tap into what average people are interested in watching.
You can also see the small changes in the medium; everybody at once adopting click-bait titles once one person was successful with it. As soon as a channel gets some success like 'Hand Tool Restoration' then everyone starts doing the same thing.
If anyone reading this likes handtool restoration but has not come across the "my mechanics" channel, you have to check it out!
I agree with your assessment, but would add that sometimes fads popularize people with such skill and attention to detail that their success is well deserved. My Mechanics is one of those cases.
Additional to this, there's also the industrialization making tools more affordable, the globalization questioning the hetero-/homogeneous structure of the "zeitgeist", and an exploration into the unlimited possibilities of what an artistic medium could be.
I would say it's even more fascinating that despite the richness in today's world that we can still find some common ground at all.
I think the best art is done within constraints -- namely because it forces the artists to be creative within those constraints. Their creativity is what is inspiring.
When anything goes, you get splatters of paint on a canvas, which is much less interesting as it's much less creative. That, and the market forces as you said -- it's not creative, it's just signaling and marketing.
It's not high art, but what I admire about the original Star Wars film is that it was so difficult getting it made -- it took passion, talent, and craftsmanship to make a movie like that possible -- they had to literally invent new ways of doing things for that to be possible. Seeing the same kinds of movies today, where it's all done on computer -- requires less craft, less creativity -- and that's why these modern movies all feel uninspired.
Interesting take on Star Wars, because I think it should rather be used as a counterexample: Star Wars was made during the starting era of the "Blockbuster"-movie[0]. Just after movies like Jaws (1975) were a huge success at the box office two years earlier, studios were willing to throw money at directors to counteract any creative constraints.
Far better examples would have been The Blairwitch Project (1999) or Following (1998).
> you had a much narrower focus of acceptable work and topics, with the result that artists were all engaged with basically the same art forms and the same topics, across the entirety of the artistic community. For example, both da Vinci and Raphael were painting Madonnas
Mightn't this have to do with the fact that most paintings back then were commissioned by rich clients, who were probably competing with each other in some way? "Aha, my painting of Madonna is better than yours!" sort of thing
(I know nothing about art history, so I'd be happy to learn why this is silly :P)
That might have been a part, but it's more that the idea of self-expression as the prime value in art is mostly a 20th century thing. The falling off of skill, realism, and other similar metrics is also a 20th century thing and largely came from photography and mass manufacturing. There's probably an essay or book out there covering the two intertwining topics, but I can't think of any offhand.
It's also worth noting that artists themselves were more directly competitive. Da Vinci and Michelangelo had a bit of a rivalry, for example:
You can't really imagine this happening between top contemporary artists today. "Gerhard Richter says he's a better painter than Takashi Murakami," is a headline that wouldn't make much sense.
The way I think about it is high art is considered innovative for its time.
By the time of the advent of photography, the skills of realistic painting had been fully fleshed out. Aside from the ultra-realism movement, there was no where left to go, hence turning inward w/ impressionism forward.
As modernism progressed, the avenues left to explore seem to get increasingly wild and crude in an effort to say something different... seemingly all that's left now for modern art is to share some unique perspective of the world, the rougher the medium, the better. Marcel Duchamp's Fountain is spectacular to me because it really called where it was all ending up.
> The way I think about it is high art is considered innovative for its time.
> By the time of the advent of photography, the skills of realistic painting had been fully fleshed out. Aside from the ultra-realism movement, there was no where left to go, hence turning inward w/ impressionism forward.
IMO instead of innovating, painters gave up when photography hit the scene. Just completely threw in the towel.
To this day, every method of printing has a very limited color space that fails entirely to capture the vibrancy and brilliance possible with paints. Paintings like the Blue Boy are impossible to truly convey in CMYK and painters like Hans Holbein the younger were capable of photorealism in the 16th century that took until the mid to late 20th century to replicate with photography, with the added benefit of artistic license.
I think it's entirely artists' fault that they lost the plot in the 19th and 20th century. It wasn't until graphic design software took away their advantage of the imagination-to-paper pipeline that they were truly doomed.
Sidenote: I think impressionism predates photography becoming a competitor. It doesn't predate the first photographs, but the movement started decades before photography was good enough to threaten artists.
Artists in the art world seem to have bought in to a nihilistic worldview, too. My impression of the NYC artistic world (literary and visual) of the early 20th century is a bunch of people having parties and trying unsuccessfully to find meaning in life.
While I feel in general most modern art is BS (ie. I went to a Mark Rothko exhibition in Paris recently and still don't 'get' it, that godly color theory application or whatnot) I do feel some of the turn of the 20th century stuff fascinating and highly creative - folks like Klimt for instance.
The way I think of it is taking the neurosis of the human mind and putting it out on a medium in all its glory. I don't have a deep knowledge of art history though so I'm not sure if there is much of a prior, I just am aware of the bigger movements.
There's probably an essay or book out there covering the two intertwining topics, but I can't think of any offhand.
'The work of art in an age of mechanical reproduction' by Walter Benjamin is a great read. There's a short but dense preface outlining the topic in purely Marxist terms; Benjamin was a Marxist and the essay was written in 1935 following his flight from Nazi Germany. However, the body of the essay develops its argument from first principles and doesn't require familiarity or agreement with Marxist theory to appreciate.
Sorry if that wasn't clear. I didn't mean that artists are less skilled today, but that realism and technical skill are generally considered less important today than in the past. "Top" artists today are usually not considered so because they have amazing technical skills at drawing/painting/etc. The metrics for success are a bunch of other things I won't get into here, but hyperrealistic portraits aren't typically considered to be art worthy of being in Gagosian and Hauser & Wirth (two of the top contemporary art galleries.) Whereas they would have been in the era of say, Dürer.
Video games, movies, etc. typically do care more about skill and realism, but they're a different thing from "fine art", i.e., art in art galleries.
Your video game comment made me think: maybe the modern equivalent of the art scenario I mentioned is in commercial art like video games or movies, both of which still have genres and are often directly compared to each other – "Call of Duty is a better FPS than Medal of Honor," and so on.
It makes a lot more sense to consider Hollywood and video games as the proper successors to classical art, and to see contemporary art as only a small strand in the evolution of art.
Somehow someone managed to convince the world that Hollywood is not real art, but some other arbitrary weird stuff is.
(To avoid confusion, I personally love the arbitrary weird stuff.)
The world knows this is art but some bullshit artists, pun intended, in New York pretend like it is not. Then other bullshit artists in other cities follow what the bullshit artists in New York are doing because most aren't creative or free thinkers at all.
I love galleries personally but it is a class of non-creative, closed minded, bullshit artists at this point.
Also because those bullshit artists are aware the big money is in this bullshit world, so they give their best to get in and profit. You certainly don't get rich drawing for Bethesda, while in the art gallery business you maybe maybe maybe could.
The thing about technical skills in drawing today is that you can learn them. Artists do know how to draw hyper realistically and if you have good fine motor skills, you can systematically learn it. End result is like a photography tho and it all costs a lot of time.
Meaning, whereas in the past, if you was the first one to figure out, say, perspective or some color, you was able to draw what others could not. You did something knew and you are remembered for it. Today, if you can draw super realistic portrait, you are one of many talented artists who learned that from a books and classes.
> As for realism: isn't this still very much the goal of plenty of video game design, TV/movies, and various other forms of art?
No one knows artists behind video games. I do not thing realism is the distinguishing things behind artists who do video games, movies or tv. It is more of scene design, lightning, camera work etc that gets to be judged from the art side.
Artist here. Artists are indeed less skilled today, but there is an effort to improve the situation (ARC). Google 'twilight of painting'.
Concept artists are highly skilled, but they do something different than the painters of yore. They turn around decent looking stuff in a few hours. It's very impressive, but it (naturally) lacks the depth & thoughtfulness achieved by painters like Caillebotte.
I think that there is something else happening. We as a society don't really recognize industrial design. Some Youtube channels like 'Technology Connections' does.
Perhaps in the future we'll spend more time recognizing the mastery of craft that industrial designers put into creating household lamps and such. Especially since the history is pilling up and ready to be mined for interesting content.
Fun fact: Michelangelo was hired after a heavy snow storm in 1494 to build snow sculptures around the city of Florence — just before the Medici were exiled.
Right - but the point of the portraits was for rich people to have their likeness captured. Nowadays, this is simple with cameras - a big driver of the market disappeared.
I see art and religion as completely misunderstood in modern times. Art was the original science of materials. Early creatives simply manipulated the surrounding materials until they achieved mastery and understanding. This is what drives human achievement. Once a repeatable understanding is achieved the development effort morphs into science.
The contemporary art world was birthed from the financial industry. The financial art world can be very different than an individual's study of materials and the surrounding culture.
The financial art world of today may have no relevance to what is deemed art in 2054.
It's easy to look back at history and build a simple narrative, but during that time a lot of art was being made even by amateurs and people without much money. And the majority of drawings and paintings that are done are going to be lose to time and only the most well cared for survive. And then there are different types - pottery, basket weaving, etc. In several hundred years, the majority of art created now will be lost and people will be able to create a simple narrative about the art of our era as well.
Ironically the "individual self expression" is uniform - a certain kind of tame depoliticised artistic creativity marketed as a hustle. It's there all the way down from Gagosian to Etsy.
And there are good reasons for it, and also good reasons why you'll find ab ex in bank foyers and very expensive homes.
There's always been a tight and complex relationship between art, money, and power, and there's always been a propaganda angle, or at least a statement of public values, to public imagery.
But so far as I know the 20th century was the first time state agencies began inventing new aesthetic traditions for political ends (socialist realism in the USSR, ab ex in the US).
I know nothing about (contemporary) art. But my SO attended Gage Academy, an atelier model org intent on training working artists. (Versus most higher-ed art studies which train degrees in art.)
> ...but for the most part it is entirely devoid of any centralized ethos or ideal.
The Gage artists give a lot of thought to balancing individual expression and earning a living.
If there is a shared ethos or ideal among this local community of artists, I'd guess it's: how to keep making art.
Agree, but i don't think postmodernism can go away. One thing i find fascinating about postmodernism is how antagonistic it is.
As it core, it's deeply anti-metanarrative, and i think that it's main structural characteristic. Which is, in a way, a bit anti-intuition, as we like to understand the world with meta-narratives.
I won't go into politics (basically, all parties create metanarrative, all use postmodernist arguments against each others), but one sign the world is really becoming postmodern is the state of particle physics, where physicists are more and more critical of theories seeking to unite general relativity and quantum mechanics. Once string theory and other "unifying" theories are completely abandoned (probably won't happen, but i'll never know), postmodernism will have become mainstream.
I don't disagree, but post-modernism's anti-meta-narrative and anti-institution sensibilities are a response to the failings of meta-narratives and institutions as they exist within modernism. Specifically the gaps in meta-narratives and institutions in terms of what and who they don't apply to are self-evident and their mere existence is a powerful critique of modernism.
Post-modernism too can't escape critique embodied today in the constellation of meta-modernism's ideas.
> Specifically the gaps in meta-narratives and institutions in terms of what and who they don't apply to are self-evident and their mere existence is a powerful critique of [post]modernism.
Postmodernism is precisely as guilty of this — so framing it as a rejection of that concept from modernism seems wrong.
Rather, they just shallowly applied the same failings to different groups and patted themselves on the back for vapid virtue. Which suggests that postmodernism is instead the abandonment of principle for self indulgence — echoed from the artistic (collapse of skill into banal “self expression”) to the political (calling institutional racism by euphemisms such as “anti-racism”).
I have trouble not being harsh here. I will state that your understanding seems common in the Anglo world, for whatever reasons.
Even Britannica's dictionary editor don't seem to have read either Lyotard or Deleuze, and base its definition of a misreading (or mistranslation most likely, but I don't have proofs) of Derrida. Derrida later denied this reading, quite directly in "Twentieth-Century Literary Theory: An Introductory Anthologie", quite early (within the first 80 pages).
Anyway, this 'Rather, they just shallowly applied the same failings to different groups' is nonsensical when talking about postmodernism. I'm not sure exactly what you mean by 'failings', but the idea of using 'groups' to describe anything is quite ant-postmodernist. To be pedantic, a key idea is that any binary distinction is sustained by its negation, and groups are typical binary distinction.
Honestly I will say it: I didn't read a lot about consciousness, so I tend to ask questions rather than give my uninformed opinion on a thread about Chalmers' last book. I would like that people giving their opinion about postmodernism read a bit before, even if it's only baudrillard (I will still hurt, but at least I won't feel like I have to explain basics I'm not sure I totally master).
> Anyway, this 'Rather, they just shallowly applied the same failings to different groups' is nonsensical when talking about postmodernism.
In practice, postmodernists failed in precisely the way that I quoted in my post.
You say you’re “having trouble not being harsh”, but your criticism would be more sound if you didn’t seem to have trouble reading — to the point you didn’t read my comment.
> I'm not sure exactly what you mean by 'failings',
Eg, here you seem not to comprehend that my comment is replying to the quoted text, and hence means the failings of modernism that were highlighted by the post I replied to (and quoted).
My usage of the word “failings” is to mirror the usage in that post — and you’re ignoring what’s happening in the discussion to feign ignorance for a cheap rhetorical flourish.
> I'm not sure exactly what you mean by 'failings', but the idea of using 'groups' to describe anything is quite ant-postmodernist.
My exact point was that postmodernists claim this — and yet, fall into precisely the same group-based policy that the post I replied to said they were opposing.
Ie, that they’re hypocrites.
> I would like that people giving their opinion about postmodernism read a bit before
You’re living down to my criticism: you’re proclaiming some virtue you clearly don’t practice yourself — since you didn’t even read my comment, as evidenced by your failure to reply on the substance.
So your comment has only reinforced my conclusion:
The countries that adopted postmodernist beliefs collapsed within a few generations because postmodernist ideas are incoherent mindrot incapable of leading to human flourishing — and will be gone in under 150 years from their conception, due to their own defective nature.
In the US, for instance, we’re seeing a rejection of precisely that — and the accompanying collapse of media companies steeped in a postmodern ethos.
No, it’s a rhetorical dead end because it says that everything has equal value and therefore nothing has value. Developing the idea is impossible because it has done away with the elements of reason.
> I follow the contemporary art world pretty closely, and a feeling I often get is that it's merely a giant collection of individuals expressing themselves in a way that fits into the market system of galleries, museums, auctions, etc.
Same. Agreed. Where are you finding art elsewhere, then?
In terms of fine art, I mostly just follow individual artists and read art history books about past art movements / art forms. I don't have any specific suggestions, unfortunately.
We can probably travel the first clear instance of such self expression to the romantic era. Probably Goya who was the Spanish court painter but whose uncomissined black paintings were uniquely personal.
No I'm sure you can find clear examples of painting purely for self-expression much earlier than Goya. What's new-ish is that the structure of the art world/market is set up to incentivize self-expression.
> No I'm sure you can find clear examples of painting purely for self-expression much earlier than Goya
Name one.
Perhaps one can mention artists like Caravagio and El Greco. But all such artists addressed themes that were common: the bible and the clasiics. The unique thing about the romantic movement was that they placed immediate human experience above god and godliness.
Honestly, check out Goya's black paintings and you will see what I am talking about. I challenge you to find an equivalent precedent.
I don't know about that, I think cave painting was highly meme driven.
Chauvet Cave and Lascaux are similar (lots of overlapping paintings of large animals), but some 16,000 years separate them. Is that individual self-expression? It looks to me like entrenched tradition.
Stencil paintings of hands are a common theme, but bizarrely are found all over the world: Argentina, France, North Africa, Australia. This too can only be a meme, I think. Possibly the method, spitting out paint, was the meme, and the idea of making stencils of hands arose naturally by accident in all these places, but even then there is no sign of real individual self-expression going on. It's also intriguing to me that three of the places I mentioned (on three different continents!) include stencils of animal hands (large birds or lizards).
Maybe. But I feel that the stuff our ancient ancestors did on walls is a different class of activity to that which we now call art. I suspect that their paintings were done as a votive: maybe as part of a prayer or a ceremony.
There are too many things that are grouped under the same word: 'art'. Objects which serve different functions should not share the same name.
Art is creativity expressed under a constraint. That constraint can be the medium, the style, or even something as arbitrary as writing a novel without using the letter 'e'.
I've noticed that most of the truly great works of art (in my opinion) have been works produced under unusually restrictive constraints.
I'm not sure if this trend will continue for as long as you fear.
Individual expression had had some boosts during the Renaissance, during Romanticism (perhaps due to atheism, as a first response to globalism, and due to scientific discoveries regarding the mind) and again after World War II (perhaps due to the "American Dream" propaganda, and perhaps even as a way to fight communism?).
A strange culture developed where narcissistic art critics praised even more narcissistic artists, supporting the notion that these artists were actually responsible for their amazing ideas.
I sincerely hope that I'm not the only one who is no longer interested in this state of affairs. Aside from some misguided nonsense, the woke cancel culture seems to have provided some welcome balance here, and when the dust settles it may become preferable again to be a modest artist once more.
I for one am not so convinced that individual expression is worthy of so much praise. I'd rather see people care for the weak instead of for the wealthy. Perhaps Hacker News is not the best place to vent such ideas though :)
I think it'll continue as long as high-end artworks are financial instruments. There is a lot of money invested in the idea that a painting by X well-known artist is worth millions and will continue to be worth millions.
That said, the art market is currently way down, and just anecdotally I feel like a lot of New Money (especially tech money) isn't that interested in art as much as the previous rich oligarchs were, so it may simply become less popular over time.
If there's one critical thing we need is differences in opinion. Please continue sharing as it forces me to think differently - here and everywhere.
I'm all for helping others, and especially the weakest. But when I see students and other folks with full bellies and ideas considered the "weak" that's when I'm lost.
> Individual expression had had some boosts during the Renaissance, during Romanticism (perhaps due to atheism, as a first response to globalism, and due to scientific discoveries regarding the mind) and again after World War II (perhaps due to the "American Dream" propaganda, and perhaps even as a way to fight communism?).
My understanding is that "individual expression" has been with us firmly since Romanticism (it was Beethoven who first promoted the idea that great artists are above kings). The whole "art for art's sake", artist as a high priest of culture etc. - these were all ideas that dominated the XIX century. They kind of withered in XX century after WW1, WW2 and Holocaust, and were replaced by post-modern modes of expression (i.e. we abandon search of the truth via art, because there is no "the" truth).
Some confusion here: is self-expression about expressing personal moral ideas, perhaps political ideas? Because "art for art's sake" was originally (with the aesthetic movement of the 1870s) in opposition to didactic purposes for art. It was supposed to be about beauty rather than telling the audience something (which in mainstream art at the time typically meant something hamfistedly "improving").
While this situation is freeing for the individual artist, I can't help but look at previous eras – say, the Italian Renaissance, or the high point of Ottoman miniature painting [1] – and admire the lack of complete self-expression. Instead, you had a much narrower focus of acceptable work and topics, with the result that artists were all engaged with basically the same art forms and the same topics, across the entirety of the artistic community. For example, both da Vinci and Raphael were painting Madonnas [2], whereas today you'd certainly never have two world-famous painters in direct competition working on the same type of painting – because their value is determined by their individuality and self-expression, not their expertise/skill.
This is a widespread post-modern culture thing and not limited to art, of course, and probably won't go away for a long, long time, or at least until you get a massive society-wide idea like Christianity to take root again.
1. The book "My Name is Red" by Orhan Pamuk is all about this. Great book. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Name_Is_Red
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madonna_(art)