Dumb and dumber audiences, the museum directors’ lament. Well, if they want movie posters we’ll cook up a traveling exhibit, scanty attire and guns a blazin’, mindless action and prostituted art. The board has been insisting we keep up appearances with cars in the parking lot when fronting for their convenient philanthropies. One suspects, considering the current state of contemporary art, that someone’s heart is in the wrong place.
It’s amusing, sorta, when institutions cause a problem and then complain about it. Woeful indeed is the state of visual art these days, the grant dependent crowd flogging gender and racial motifs with the flimsiest of backgrounds and only casual control of their medium, whatever it might be. The already famous are farming it out anyway. Oh glamorous art establishment, as your dollar-drunk cruise ship sinks slowly in your own poisonous lagoon, surrounded by multi-million dollar flotsam, smears and drips and half-baked signage, we bid farewell.
Out here we’re concerned about distribution, ownership, the real business of making art in the real world. Fame must be nice, so many people chase, but it seems relatively unimportant to the reasonably secure adult engaged with work and family, normal. Do they like art? Well, no, not the stuff they see featured on the news, in the magazines, covered tabloid style online. Conceptual art is over their heads, off their view-screens, call them dummies if you must. When they think about the art at all they must first confront a tsunami of corny stunts, preposterous nonsense -- Christo’s fence, Koon’s Popeye, Hirst’s pickled goat, who’s a dummy?
It’s much easier to start from the bottom than the top. An actual market for art doesn’t begin the bidding at fifty million, more probably three or four hundred. May not be top-notch, the artist isn’t attempting to make a living but trying hard, revealing potential, probably getting better. One out of ten in this price range will be worth the money, probably more, and it’s a good place to start. It’s up to you to figure out which one it is, and if you make a mistake won’t hurt too bad. As soon as you take this first step automatic processes engage, gears slip into position, and you’re accepted into the club.
Sometimes called ‘buyer’s remorse,’ there’s a simple mechanism in our heads that second guesses every dollar spent, and makes us smarter for next time, we rely on it. Use it like an escalator when learning about art. Simply seeing other art will inevitably inform you if you made the right choice, and if not you’ll be smarter about it next time, see? After a while you’ll understand why some paintings are worth more, even a lot more, and it won’t have anything to do with the artist’s social life, or even who they are.
It’s amusing, sorta, when institutions cause a problem and then complain about it. Woeful indeed is the state of visual art these days, the grant dependent crowd flogging gender and racial motifs with the flimsiest of backgrounds and only casual control of their medium, whatever it might be. The already famous are farming it out anyway. Oh glamorous art establishment, as your dollar-drunk cruise ship sinks slowly in your own poisonous lagoon, surrounded by multi-million dollar flotsam, smears and drips and half-baked signage, we bid farewell.
Out here we’re concerned about distribution, ownership, the real business of making art in the real world. Fame must be nice, so many people chase, but it seems relatively unimportant to the reasonably secure adult engaged with work and family, normal. Do they like art? Well, no, not the stuff they see featured on the news, in the magazines, covered tabloid style online. Conceptual art is over their heads, off their view-screens, call them dummies if you must. When they think about the art at all they must first confront a tsunami of corny stunts, preposterous nonsense -- Christo’s fence, Koon’s Popeye, Hirst’s pickled goat, who’s a dummy?
It’s much easier to start from the bottom than the top. An actual market for art doesn’t begin the bidding at fifty million, more probably three or four hundred. May not be top-notch, the artist isn’t attempting to make a living but trying hard, revealing potential, probably getting better. One out of ten in this price range will be worth the money, probably more, and it’s a good place to start. It’s up to you to figure out which one it is, and if you make a mistake won’t hurt too bad. As soon as you take this first step automatic processes engage, gears slip into position, and you’re accepted into the club.
Sometimes called ‘buyer’s remorse,’ there’s a simple mechanism in our heads that second guesses every dollar spent, and makes us smarter for next time, we rely on it. Use it like an escalator when learning about art. Simply seeing other art will inevitably inform you if you made the right choice, and if not you’ll be smarter about it next time, see? After a while you’ll understand why some paintings are worth more, even a lot more, and it won’t have anything to do with the artist’s social life, or even who they are.
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