Potemkin wrote:During his libel trial against John Ruskin, when James McNeill Whistler was asked by the defence's barrister: "The labour of two days is that for which you ask two hundred guineas?", he replied: "No, I ask it for the knowledge I have gained in the work of a lifetime."
A bit like how we pay doctors a very high wage due to the level of training and education required to be a competent doctor.
People who have greater socially valued skills that require great investment may push for a better wage/salary.
However, Art is unusual as the work of a graphic designer may fall in line with this sort of thinking but the commodification of artworks seems to not really follow the same logic and hence the absurd prices they can fetch when one markets them right. Where it seems as if people mistake price for value of art in a way that may not really correspond, hence one could pay millions for something that aesthetically and culturally is quite lacking.
https://www.theartstory.org/critic/hughes-robert/Hughes has much to say about the emergence of the domineering art market that arose in the 1960s and has only gained in power since. He views the market as both a necessary evil and a constant force for struggling artists to combat just to survive. When it came to Picasso, Hughes stated that he "was a millionaire at forty and that didn't harm him." When it came to Warhol on the other hand, Hughes cited the danger of an artist who clings to the market. Hughes admits to liking Warhol's early works, and gives him credit for being savvy and an instrument of cultural change, for somehow presaging the effects of mass media and capitalizing on it. What bothers Hughes is that Warhol became "exceedingly trivial" and exploitative of the art world. Hughes indicates that when people pay millions of dollars at auction for a Warhol, this is the worst of both worlds: both Warhol and the art market exploited one another for mutual gains, but instead of discerning art lovers recognizing this historical gaffe, people end up paying thousands for something he scribbled on a cocktail napkin, because the art market has unapologetically fetishized Warhol's work.
Hughes wrote for The New York Review of Books in 1984, "There is no historical precedent for the price structure of art in the late twentieth century. Never before have the visual arts been the subject - beneficiary or victim, whatever your view of the matter - of such extreme inflation and fetishization."
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/aug/07/robert-hughes-quotes-best"The new job of art is to sit on the wall and get more expensive."
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"So much of art – not all of it thank god, but a lot of it – has just become a kind of cruddy game for the self-aggrandisement of the rich and the ignorant, it is a kind of bad but useful business."
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"What strip mining is to nature the art market has become to culture."
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2008/10/hugh-o14.htmlIn a contemporary documentary on that auction, Scull declared that "Acquisition is...probably the most exciting kind of involvement" in art. In practice, this has meant an increasing importance of collectors, who bulk-buy art by individual artists as a means of pushing up prices. "The market is manipulated by collectors who decide to bid up the work of an artist [whose work they already own]," explains Hughes. "So when artist X comes up...the collectors all bid it up, so that they can then multiply the value of their existing holdings in artist X by the value of the inflated sale."
This has two knock-on effects for public viewing of art. Galleries, which have been the sole access to such works for ordinary people, are priced out of the market by a layer of financial oligarchs. "Instead of being the common property of humankind...art becomes the particular property of somebody who can afford it. And when you have some Russian squillionaire who started buying art three minutes ago but has the GNP of Georgia in his pocket, how can museums compete? They can't--which causes great social harm."
The other effect, which Hughes outlined with withering contempt, is that the galleries collude in this process. New wings are funded by and named after private benefactors. Galleries acquire works that drive up the market value of those artists. Hughes has elsewhere been particularly critical of museum curators who have given credence to Damien Hirst's "originality and the importance of his ‘ideas.' "
He has criticised both London's Tate and New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art for playing along with this. Hedge fund broker Steve Cohen bought Hirst's original shark in formaldehyde, The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, for $12 million. Hirst has a number of smaller sharks awaiting similar treatment for future customers. The original maintains its price and guarantees the price of its successors, even as it wrinkles and decays, to large extent because of its exposure in galleries like the Met. Hughes reserves much of his scorn for the exhibition of this work ("The Met should be ashamed"), which he describes as "a dismal trophy of...[n]othing beyond the fatuity of art-world greed."
As his interviews with collectors and advisors showed, this process has led to a direct assault on the idea that art should have any significance or meaning. His interview with Alberto Mugrabi, one of the leading collectors of Warhol, was particularly revealing. Hughes has written thoughtfully about some of Warhol's early work, but he is dismissive of most of his oeuvre and seemed about to choke with surprise at hearing the artist described as a "visionary."
Mugrabi is one of the clearest examples of what Hughes is describing: having bid unsuccessfully for a Warhol self-portrait two years ago, he told press, "I'm only helping my collection. If I don't get it, I'm keeping the market healthy." His lawyer said Mugrabi's father Jose had been among the first to see "not only Warhol's importance as an artist, but the economic upside of collecting him." These comments were made last year when the Mugrabis were negotiating the sale of some pictures to form the basis of a dedicated Warhol museum somewhere in the Middle East. John Martin of the Gulf Art Fair called Warhol the "obvious choice" for such a museum. "As a modern brand name, no one is bigger than Warhol."
When Hirst announced his direct auction, he made a big play that this marked the liberation of the artist from the manipulation of gallery-owners and dealers. Even before the auction took place, Hughes was scathing about such claims, noting that the auction houses are "now scarcely distinguishable from private dealers." As details emerged afterwards, it became ever clearer that the Sotheby's auction was yet another example of the process outlined by Hughes. Hirst has grown fabulously rich, if that is somehow supposed to signify the "liberation" of the artist. But even he is dependent to a great extent on the bidding of his dealers, Jay Jopling and Larry Gagosian, who bought some works and bid up some of the pieces less likely to do well. Hughes has called the art world the biggest unregulated market outside of illicit drugs.
It was, it must be said, difficult to suppress a cheer at the thoroughness of Hughes's demolition job. His acuity made him a difficult act to follow: the second programme in the series saw Marcel Theroux prostrate before all the thinking Hughes was condemning, repeatedly capable only of asking how much a painting was worth. The trend has been to look at the price tag, and commentators are left mute before the artworks.
Unsurprisingly, Hughes was excoriated by some for his exposé. One of the most dismissive responses came from Germaine Greer. Writing in the Guardian, Greer accused Hughes of "not getting" Hirst. Embracing everything Hughes had fought against in his programme, she elevated the banality of Hirst's work to the level of a artistic statement in itself and hailed his marketing genius as an act of creation: "Damien Hirst is a brand, because the art form of the 21st century is marketing. To develop so strong a brand on so conspicuously threadbare a rationale is hugely creative--revolutionary even."
She dismissed Hughes with a glib, "Bob dear, the Sotheby's auction was the work."
At bottom, Greer was attacking Hughes's view that art should have some substance and meaning ("Hughes still believes that great art can be guaranteed to survive the ravages of time, because of its intrinsic merit. Hirst knows better"). Talking of Rauschenberg, Hughes said his work made us "experience things more clearly." He dismissed the notion that the marketing of vacuous artworks itself constituted a work of art. There is, he said correctly, no critique of decadence in such work, which is clearly aimed at a layer of the wealthy who want something that claims to be challenging without actually being so. It is decadence. As Hughes has put it, "No wonder so many business big-shots go for Hirst: his work is both simple-minded and sensationalist."
There is, too, in Greer's attack, an attempt to reduce this to a dispute between Hughes and Hirst. As Hughes makes clear, Hirst is simply one of the more successful of a string of artists producing such inferior work. Nurtured by collectors/entrepreneurs (in Hirst's case Charles Saatchi) as part of their investment portfolio, these figures turn away from artistic explorations. Instead, they have their workshops turning out the requisite number of pieces, of recognisable design, devoid of artistic merit. Hughes's film makes the valuable point that volume production is an essential function of any artist that might be considered to be "collectable." Producing art on what is effectively an industrial scale-particularly in the case of Warhol and Hirst-in itself must lead to a churning out of empty pieces. Hughes points the finger at these artists: "[T]he presence of a Hirst...is a sure sign of dullness of taste.... Where you see Hirsts you will also see Jeff Koons's balloons, Jean-Michel Basquiat's stoned scribbles, Richard Prince's feeble jokes and pin-ups of nurses and, inevitably, scads of really bad, really late Warhols."
What is left of art if it is reduced to an exchange-value, it doesn't have a clear use-value in a functional sense but it can represent something cultural which need not be so crudely utilitarian.
ANy sentimentality is quite clearly stripped away in this process.
I guess Walter Benjamin really did put his finger on the issue when he analyzed the age of mechanical reproduction and it's effect on art. Never before have we been drowned in so much imagery and all in relation to advertising, marketing and the flow of money.
https://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/pdfs/For%20Ethical%20Politics.pdf#page90
-For Ethical Politics
- By FiveofSwords
- By Godstud