The Art world is a money laundering scam

Plus blatantly overpriced pieces of "art" can be the perfect cover for large sums of money to change hands without raising suspicion.

Most definitely.

The purpose of a good deal of contemporary visual art is elitism. They are daring you to say "that's not art..." because it puts you in an indefensible position. Anything can be art. They are looking for you to react the way you have in this post so that they can snicker at you behind your back for being a rube. The agenda isn't any sort of grand plan to change society. They just want to feel superior.

i think the people you think this is mocking don't even factor into the equation. This is more for the elites to play games with each other. There is art made that intentionally mocks the buyer -- some are in on the joke, and others become the assholes who think they're cultured when they're the laughing stock of high society.

Think about who the elites of the art world are. Do you think they put that much care and thought into the proletariat they already know they're superior to? NO! They're playing games with each other, mocking each other. The point is not to laugh at the no moneys, the point is to laugh at the new moneys.

Oh, I know exactly what you mean! I hate the fact that some of this stuff is considered "art". ANYONE could do it! Reminds me of when I watch Antiques Roadshow and they will have something that looks like my child made in preschool. It will be worth thousands! What??? My 3 year old could have done that!

Here is an example that angers me. The Alexander Calder mobile that looks like a wire coat hanger. Looks like a piece of junk my kid would have made in preschool! It is worth $400,000 to $1 million!

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/roadshow/season/15/miami-beach-fl/appraisals/alexander-calder-mobile-ca-1950--201003A30/

It's worth what someone is willing to pay for it. No one is willing to buy your kid's stupid art because it's meaningless to the world of art. It only had any value to you.

Calder's works are worth money because they were made by Alexander Calder, a man who spent his life working on his body of work, refining his craft, and creating pieces that play with the balance of color and weight and movement in a three dimensional space.

He took the two dimensional work of people like Kandinsky and he extrapolated it into three dimensions.

It hadn't been done before and hadn't been done as well as he did it. Your child simply couldn't do what he did.

Anyone could make that wire hanger mobile.

I think you should try. I'm not saying you couldn't, but I think you should give it a shot. Calder notoriously did use simple materials, often times that meant he was using wire hangers, as the wire was a good gauge for holding a form and was cheap and available to him when he was young.

The struggle with his work is balance.

You need to balance the lengths of the wire to hold the form with minimal movement and none of the pieces touching as it twirls.

I'm not challenging you to be rude, I know for fact your pre schooler couldn't make a mobile like that and I think if you sat down and tried, you'd see that it's difficult but not impossible.

Calder's work was supposed to be light and fun and playful, he'd make these big models of the circus and when asked why he said he just loved the circus and loved seeing people having fun. That's why it makes me sad to see you dismiss it like this.

Do you ever sit and make art with your children?

My children are now 19 and 21. But when they were younger, I would sit with them and make all sorts of art projects. I definitely nurtured their artistic creativity. Also, I'm a huge reader. So because of me, both of them love reading books.

Okay, from what you are saying, Calder sounds like an engineer. I'll look more into him.

My reason for asking about doing art with your kids is that the experience is worth so much more than the final product, right?

That's kind of how the art world is. Calder offered something valuable to the world of art that's more expensive than just any individual piece. So even a small mobile like the one you cited is embued with his whole career and everything he gave to the art world.

It wasn't Calder who priced it this high, it's his legacy which drove the price up. The same way you'd value your own children's art much more highly than I would, it means more to you.

If engineering interests you, I think you should check out Richard Serra. His art look like big slabs of steel, until you read into them and realize they're not attached to anything, and he sends them slightly to use their own weight to hold them up. So his pieces become this interplay between weight and form and space.

There's actually this funny story of how he was asked to do a piece for the Foley Federal Plaza in NYC which he installed in 1981. It was this big square plaza that federal workers used every day. Serra installed a piece he called the Tilted Arc which was just this big long iron slab that spiced the plaza in half. He transformed a public space and ended up upsetting all these buttoned up feds who worked there and ended up complaining and eventually going to trial to have it removed.

I don't know where you live, but if you ever find yourself in the lower Hudson valley above NYC, check out the DIA Beacon, which is a beautiful sculpture museum and makes a really lovely afternoon.

I'm more into beautiful paintings. Here is one of my favorite artists. I have 3 of his prints.

https://ipaintchampions.myshopify.com/

Hey, sorry for my late reply, but I was enjoying responding to you about art

Those are nice paintings, they're technically well executed, etc.

But the reason those sell for around 125 a print, and not more, is because they don't really say anything.

After the invention of the camera, painting changed drastically. It was no longer required for showing someone something that they can't see with their own eyes.

A fun aside, there was actually a ton of sub-par struggling artists who left Europe early after the British started colonizing America. They left because they weren't finding work BUT there was a need for landscape painters in America to paint the colonies and send the paintings back to England for sale. It was the only way to see America, without a multiple day potentially deadly ship journey across the Atlantic.

Anyway, after the camera, there was no need for representative art anymore, so the art world changed and adapted. Painters tried new styles, new methods, etc. Expressionism was what happened when painters said, "So how can I represent this landscape without just painting what I see?"

Instead, they painted the feeling of what they saw. Van Gogh painted the wind. Money painted the color.

From there, painters started abstracting the imagine further. Kandinsky painted motion with color and shape. Picasso painted emotion with color and shape.

Artists at this point, were breaking down what art was and reinventing it. They all had amazing technical skill. Picasso was a master far beyond what anyone should be able to accomplish in a lifetime of artwork and he was able to push the medium further and really challenge the way you can represent an imagine or a feeling.

I do not mean to say this as some attack or something on the artist you enjoy. His technical skill is good, his paintings and illustrations are high quality. But in terms of the larger world of art, he's not using the medium to say anything.

And that's okay. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder and if you see something that really ticks that rush of endorphins in your brain and makes you say, "Oh! I love this!" then you're not wrong, your body isn't lying. And no matter how pompus and shitty some art critic may make you feel about it... You're. Not. Wrong.

You can like what you like, I just ask that you keep an open mind, understand that behind all artwork is context, and context which explains why you're looking as a painting that looks like a blue square that belongs in the MOMA.

Have you read any of the other comments in this thread? About the CIA getting involved in the modern art movement to promote it?

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/modern-art-was-cia-weapon-1578808.html

I appreciate you taking the time to write such a lengthy response/comment for me. But ANYONE could paint a blue square like you provided in a link. It doesn't belong in a museum.

Yes, I can like what I like. And you can like what you like. 🙂

But I never told you the context of the blue square. That artist invented that color blue. It was impossible to make that exact shade with the natural pigments provided by mother nature.

So he chemically engineered it himself. It was one of the first artificially created colors ever made. Now, most paint is created artificially instead of by grinding up flowers and squid ink.

Context is important. Without knowing the context, yeah, it doesn't seem worthwhile. And you took my bait and insulted a significant piece of art history. You don't have to like it, but there's a reason stuff you don't like is considered worthy of a place in a museum.

Replying again. I'm just not the type of person who will ever like modern art. Here are two pictures of what I do and make. I sew (duffel bags and tote bags), and also make pretty cake/tea stands. I'm just not a modern art person.

https://imgur.com/2ex6Y85

https://imgur.com/iWlBn8a

Yeah, but you didn't

LOL! No, I didn't make it. I think it is ugly and wouldn't want to make it. But you know what I do make? These! These are pretty and I consider it art.

https://imgur.com/2ex6Y85

Those are cute!

Thanks! They are not very hard to make either. I made them without a pattern and I'm a beginner at sewing. Youtube is great. Lots of instructional videos showing you how to do things.

Wow - if you haven’t already, you need to be reading Miles Mathis - milesmathis.com

Modern art has been weaponized, there are numerous articles tying the CIA to modern art. Part of the plan... destroy the the people's art and culture. Make them feel stupid for not understanding it. Like you said, convince people that something ugly, is beautiful. It's all about the inversion.

The art that is promoted and exhibited in museums is usually ugly (like the ones you described), and it has to be by design. Not beautiful, unaesthetic... harms the soul, rather than feeding it.

Why, though?

I'm not totally sure, and haven't done much research on it. There are probably various motives... if I had to guess one of them is to get people to be content with ugliness (and see it as beautiful) as we move towards a society that increasingly destroys and devalues nature in favor of human built structures and technology.

Some response on quora to why modern art is so ugly, also talks about it being the reflection of society. This was just a quick search, I'd love to find more about the purpose of modern art.

Art is the mirror of the soul of the artist, the society, the culture which has produced it. A beautiful soul produces beautiful art, a harmonous soul produces harmonous art, a hideous soul produces hideous art, a broken soul produces broken art.

https://www.quora.com/Why-is-modern-art-so-ugly/answer/Susanna-Viljanen

Art forms that appeal to [leftists] tend to focus on ... defeat and despair ... as if there were no hope of accomplishing anything through rational calculation.

Want to cite art specifically to back up this bizarre claim? Do you have art that supports the opposite claim, that 'rightists' would like only positive art of some kind?

Yeah, OP could have done only a little digging and found this:

Modern art was CIA 'weapon' : https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/modern-art-was-cia-weapon-1578808.html

It wasn't a weapon.

The soviets were making art called "Socialist Realism" which is ugly propaganda. They thought by funding more avant-garde art forms they could win over the intellectuals, and it worked.

What scares me is that Socialist Realism looks a lot like what all these critics of contemporary art would want art to actually look like:

https://www.google.com/search?q=socialist+realism&rlz=1CAZZAF_enUS802&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwj5wuKIrpvcAhUSVN8KHXIIAc0Q_AUICigB&biw=2400&bih=1486

Think about the art in museums. They are often portraits the elites and of battles. If it weren't for Modern Art, we'd have the same people complaining about how the museum was filled with ugly paintings of Reagan, Bush, Thatcher, and the Clintons, along with battles of drone strikes in Afghanistan.

it was not weaponized, and that's a misunderstanding of what the CIA did with modern art. The CIA saw that Socialist Realism was a very dry, propaganda filled art form. They though that by promoting more expressive art (abstract expressionism, jazz, etc..) that they could win over the intellectuals, and it worked.

The CIA was basically funding art that helped show how banal and ugly the soviet's art was:

https://www.google.com/search?q=socialist+realism&rlz=1CAZZAF_enUS802&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwj5wuKIrpvcAhUSVN8KHXIIAc0Q_AUICigB&biw=2400&bih=1486

The funny thing is that these days, people seem to actually want that kind of art. What they don't see in the older realistic art is the propaganda messages of the church and nobility, they just see the pretty pictures.

Look into Socialist Realism though, and realize that had that form of art continued it would have contemporary propaganda messages today. You'd have your contemprary DaVinci and Rembrandts, and they would be paintings of drones striking the middle east and glorified images of the ugliest of the elite.

Really look at the painting in museums that people hold up as great, and think about how far away you are from the visual message of them.

Then imagine if instead you had a wing of the museum of pictures of the Bushes and Clintons as heroic warriors attacking the savage enemy. Along with some nude paintings of Pamela Anderson. ... that's basically all those old masters were .... they were bought and owned by the nobility and church and their artwork was propaganda glorifying them.

If someone has a pathological absence of talent, one has to destroy beauty. If beauty doesn’t exist, talent doesn’t either. But talent can’t exist, if everyone ought to be equal.

I feel like you are the old man in the Pepperidge Farm Remembers meme

I know a bunch of people who got their art degree doing fine paintings.

And there are thousands of artists who do "fine art" as you are looking for, if you'd make a weekend and go hit a bunch of the Soho and Chelsea art galleries, you'd see plenty of lovely paintings and really beautiful photographs.

What museums like the MOMA are for, is to highlight a type of art that's known as "modern art". Going to the MOMA and looking for art that isn't "modern art" is like going to a metal concert and being upset that it's not as good as the classical music you normally like. You should be visiting an orchestra performance instead.

The MOMA is a central location to try and get examples of modernist art from a wide variety of artists, mediums, etc. So it'd be insane to expect anyone to like all of it. Personally, I love Richard Serra's work but hate Kiki Smith's work. I understand the context of their work, and what they were making and what they were trying to create, but I still don't enjoy Smith's work and that's fine.

The issue is taking all modern and contemporary art from the last nearly 100 years and assuming art is dead. It's not, it's just that the art you're looking for isn't going to be at the MOMA.

Thank you for actually talking sensibly.

People also forget that a lot of those "beautiful images" are of glorifying the elites and their battles. Giving them what they want would end up being rooms of glorified portraits of the Reagan, Bush, Clinton, and Obama-era power figures. You wouldn't be seeing theses epic naval battles or Napoleon crossing the Alps, you'd have drones firing on the middle east.

Yeah, exactly. A lot of "fine art" is really just court painters making a king look great, or a scultor making a Roman Emperor look younger that he did.

It's actually pretty common knowledge that Roman busts of emperor's were likely all propaganda pieces, making these men look young and handsome like the Greek Gods, that's why Augustus looks the same as some Hellenistic Greek statue from hundreds of years earlier. Because he said, "Make me look like a classical statue"

But it's an amazing point you make. Modern art ALSO happened because artists finally had the freedom to make and sell art without being told what to make. The relative cheapness to love necessary in the 18 and early 1900s meant artists could experiment and sell art and still survive to keep making art without getting a huge commission from French Nobility, like Bernini had to do to survive.

Yes, which is in part why that art starts making fun of the royalty and eventually (what we are saying today) is making fun of the bourgeiosie that replaced them.

What museum and what exhibits did you see?

Perhaps it was this one?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Degenerate_Art_Exhibition

You don't get art degrees by painting in the way you are talking about, because you don't need one. The technique has been so formalized that there are industries -- China has a big one -- that can crank out these paintings very quickly and cheaply. You can basically buy something nearly identical to the Mona Lisa for $100. This has gone from art to formalized craft.

The other change is that there is now no longer patronage from royalty and the church. The reason all of those old paintings are of famous rich people or biblical seasons is because that's who was paying. You are actually being nostalgic for a time when the production of the art world was controlled by the elite.

Art these days has escaped this patronage system. It is now about expressing ideas through visual mediums. The appearance of art has changed because the artists are no longer forced to make art that glorifies kings and popes. In fact, a lot of art now is actually used to raise questions about the bourgeiosue and their corrupt values.

You are not seeing art being "corrupted" you are seeing art talking about the corruption of the world. It just so happens that the corruption nowadays is more complex than Kings and Popes.

Art doesn't even need to be beautiful, it can be, but it doesn't have to be. It is about expressing ideas in a visual medium. The problem is that most people are illiterate to visual language, take little time to try to understand it, and make straw men arguments of all art being blank canvases or splatters a child could do -- which is an argument that is more about art from 70 years ago than it is of the art of today.

I think the problem is more with your education about art, it's history, and it's purpose, and mainly that you're trying to use random non-existent (oh they were all Untitled) pieces of art to make a straw man argument about Cultural Marxism.

Hey, sorry for my late reply, but I was enjoying responding to you about art

Those are nice paintings, they're technically well executed, etc.

But the reason those sell for around 125 a print, and not more, is because they don't really say anything.

After the invention of the camera, painting changed drastically. It was no longer required for showing someone something that they can't see with their own eyes.

A fun aside, there was actually a ton of sub-par struggling artists who left Europe early after the British started colonizing America. They left because they weren't finding work BUT there was a need for landscape painters in America to paint the colonies and send the paintings back to England for sale. It was the only way to see America, without a multiple day potentially deadly ship journey across the Atlantic.

Anyway, after the camera, there was no need for representative art anymore, so the art world changed and adapted. Painters tried new styles, new methods, etc. Expressionism was what happened when painters said, "So how can I represent this landscape without just painting what I see?"

Instead, they painted the feeling of what they saw. Van Gogh painted the wind. Money painted the color.

From there, painters started abstracting the imagine further. Kandinsky painted motion with color and shape. Picasso painted emotion with color and shape.

Artists at this point, were breaking down what art was and reinventing it. They all had amazing technical skill. Picasso was a master far beyond what anyone should be able to accomplish in a lifetime of artwork and he was able to push the medium further and really challenge the way you can represent an imagine or a feeling.

I do not mean to say this as some attack or something on the artist you enjoy. His technical skill is good, his paintings and illustrations are high quality. But in terms of the larger world of art, he's not using the medium to say anything.

And that's okay. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder and if you see something that really ticks that rush of endorphins in your brain and makes you say, "Oh! I love this!" then you're not wrong, your body isn't lying. And no matter how pompus and shitty some art critic may make you feel about it... You're. Not. Wrong.

You can like what you like, I just ask that you keep an open mind, understand that behind all artwork is context, and context which explains why you're looking as a painting that looks like a blue square that belongs in the MOMA.