Wednesday, November 26, 2014

The Contemporary Art Bubble

An amazing article from a classically trained artist who is predicting the collapse of the "contemporary" art bubble.  He uses some interesting statistics, one in particular where there is five times as many galleries displaying art made in the past 60 years as there are galleries displaying art in the past 4,000.

Anyway, I am not art collector, but my general rule of thumb is, "If I can do it, then it isn't art."  And sadly, that's most art today.

9 comments:

One Fat Oz Guy said...

But Cap, you just don't understand.
I pissed off an art student one day when he was putting me down for not knowing a bunch of 'famous' contemporary artists' names.
I said "just because no one understands you doesn't make you an artist, more of a teenage girl".
He didn't like that.

Anonymous said...

A lot of old art is religious art and not particularly interesting.

Max said...

Yes but that art was painted on huge canvases in a detail I only see in Asian realistic painters. So even though I don't like it, I find Michelangelo still more impressive and the better artist than the guy who painted a white circle in a black rectangle.

Anonymous said...

For a good site with lots of great art, and a great explanation of why Realism in classic art is coming back, take a look Art Renewal Center
https://www.artrenewal.org/articles/Philosophy/Why_Realism/why_realism.php

PaladinPhil said...

I have to file that video and website under two categories. 1.) TL:DR and 2.) Conspiracy nut job.

That being said he is speaking a kernel of truth about "modern art".

I give this for your viewing pleasure in a 1/4 of the time a perfect summation of the whole world of art and sort of how we got here today by an actual art professor.

http://youtu.be/lNI07egoefc

Take The Red Pill said...

The most fitting display place for the majority of contemporary "art" is on a refrigerator.

With the thoughts you'd be thinkin said...

It's weird that the CIA stuff is basically true:
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/modern-art-was-cia-weapon-1578808.html
http://capitalismmagazine.com/2013/09/cia-funder-trash-terrorists/

Peregrine John said...

My mercenary heart (lightly charred) suggests a different reaction to the problem that art which I can do is actually salable: Make some and sell it.

Anonymous said...

That's not much of a prediction. The only reason he gives in support for his prediction is that "all bubbles eventually burst", postulating without offering any substantiation that it is a bubble in the first place.

A bubble, in financial terms, is an inflation of asset values caused by a sudden but unsustainable influx of buyer money, typically reinforced by a large part of the sales going to investors buying it for later resell, rather than to end users. The latter being the main cause for spectacular crashes.

Now, if a large share of all modern art was traded between investors betting on ever-rising prices, that would indeed be the makings of a bubble, but he isn't even making that case.

All his writing comes down eventually to "I hate modern art and I resent how it gets more attention than classical fine art, and I can't imagine how anyone could feel differently, therefore it must be a passing fad". And it might be a passing fad indeed, but even if it is, the following depreciation of modern art prices would not be the bursting of a bubble, just an ordinary price decline following changing demand patterns.

-Red Knight