There's no cosmic valuation service which puts a price tag on things. The monetary value of anything is whatever someone with money is willing to pay for it.
That applies to a diamond as big as your head, a house, your time, a painted piece of canvas, and everything else.
Art is an extreme example of this, since the value of any art is entirely subjective.
Pollock, for example, could have gone to his local dump and salvaged canvas from a discarded army surplus tent and gathered up half empty cans of paint. The value of those materials would have been nil. If he'd lived in 1800, nobody would have seen his flicks of paint as "art", and so the value of his paintings would have been nil, and therefore his value as an artist would have been nil.
However, he happened to live in a time when people with money saw his products as new and original, and so his canvases had value.
Jean-Michel Basquiat is getting a resurgence of publicity at the moment, since next year is the 30th anniversary of his death. As far as I can tell, he's still lauded by the majority of the art community, but if you want to understand how the art market works, Google "Basquat is crap" and have a read of some of the critical assessments.
He's a good example of how the art market finds a novel product, mythologizes the artist, hypes their work, and slaps a ridiculous price tag on it. Everyone makes money out of this. Often the artist makes enough to go into full self-destruct mode, and then the value of the art goes even higher, and the dealers and investors are all happy.
I think Pollock today is somewhat of an interesting question though..
To attempt to put myself in the shoes of someone back then, I could perhaps have a more visceral response to the subversiveness of this, in contrast to realist and even expressionist paintings, as well as its novelty.
I think it was an interesting and useful experiment to have a sort of 'abstract expressionism' in art.
But in 2017, with what the internet has become, to the younger generation and more technologically adapt older folk, novelty itself has become far less novel I believe.
And also, abstract art, in the sense of Pollock's work is something many more people today are not surprised by falling under the label of 'art'.
Yes there is the "you like what you like" pov, which I accept but I'd like to challenge that more.
Because I think there is a case to be made that reading or listening to music can allow the average person to connect with and feel what an artist is attempting to articulate emotionally, much more viscerally than by looking at paint on a canvas.
It could be that I'm just not tuned into it, which I'm fine with, but that's I guess what I'm asking, is if abstract expressionist paintings can in fact show an artist's self, which is I believe the intended goal.
I personally only see an artist's personality in that I see their attempt to do this, so perhaps I see emotion which would be analogous to a person writing "I am sad", but I don't feel emotion, which would be analogous to a person crafting emotive poetry to express this feeling.
I much prefer contemporary art, and can enjoy the minimalism and concepts and absurdity as the artist intended
Edit: Also I accept the economics of this(why Pollock is worth millions) is an entirely separate issue.
Why the hell is splashes of paint worth millions?
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There's no cosmic valuation service which puts a price tag on things. The monetary value of anything is whatever someone with money is willing to pay for it.
That applies to a diamond as big as your head, a house, your time, a painted piece of canvas, and everything else.
Art is an extreme example of this, since the value of any art is entirely subjective.
Pollock, for example, could have gone to his local dump and salvaged canvas from a discarded army surplus tent and gathered up half empty cans of paint. The value of those materials would have been nil. If he'd lived in 1800, nobody would have seen his flicks of paint as "art", and so the value of his paintings would have been nil, and therefore his value as an artist would have been nil.
However, he happened to live in a time when people with money saw his products as new and original, and so his canvases had value.
Jean-Michel Basquiat is getting a resurgence of publicity at the moment, since next year is the 30th anniversary of his death. As far as I can tell, he's still lauded by the majority of the art community, but if you want to understand how the art market works, Google "Basquat is crap" and have a read of some of the critical assessments.
He's a good example of how the art market finds a novel product, mythologizes the artist, hypes their work, and slaps a ridiculous price tag on it. Everyone makes money out of this. Often the artist makes enough to go into full self-destruct mode, and then the value of the art goes even higher, and the dealers and investors are all happy.
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rayb12
5 years ago
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I think Pollock today is somewhat of an interesting question though..
To attempt to put myself in the shoes of someone back then, I could perhaps have a more visceral response to the subversiveness of this, in contrast to realist and even expressionist paintings, as well as its novelty.
I think it was an interesting and useful experiment to have a sort of 'abstract expressionism' in art.
But in 2017, with what the internet has become, to the younger generation and more technologically adapt older folk, novelty itself has become far less novel I believe.
And also, abstract art, in the sense of Pollock's work is something many more people today are not surprised by falling under the label of 'art'.
Yes there is the "you like what you like" pov, which I accept but I'd like to challenge that more.
Because I think there is a case to be made that reading or listening to music can allow the average person to connect with and feel what an artist is attempting to articulate emotionally, much more viscerally than by looking at paint on a canvas.
It could be that I'm just not tuned into it, which I'm fine with, but that's I guess what I'm asking, is if abstract expressionist paintings can in fact show an artist's self, which is I believe the intended goal.
I personally only see an artist's personality in that I see their attempt to do this, so perhaps I see emotion which would be analogous to a person writing "I am sad", but I don't feel emotion, which would be analogous to a person crafting emotive poetry to express this feeling.
I much prefer contemporary art, and can enjoy the minimalism and concepts and absurdity as the artist intended
Edit: Also I accept the economics of this(why Pollock is worth millions) is an entirely separate issue.