Delete comment from: Captain Capitalism
A agree with this article 95%. The remaining 5% has to do with putting all the blame on the public sector. While the wealthy maybe buying old impressionist paintings that would look at home in the Art Institute of Chicago , some of the worst art is due to the pleb ultra elites of today. Art collecting is often done as a form of money laundering, as the art business is not well regulated. So you have hedge fund managers who will buy any expensive piece of crap, putting in storage hoping the value will go up because of the name attached. Then this causes the wealthy to care about no-talent artist, often funding them and promoting them in the art world so their collections don't lose value. They have no sense of beauty or aesthetic. All they know is that the art dealer told them that "unmade bed" (which is just the artist literal unmade bed) is deep and meaningful, won a ton of awards, and can be theirs for 1.5 million. Really the reason the art world has degraded to the leftist mush point it is now, is the elites (who have always been the drivers of fine art) are willing to pay and celebrate it.
Art funded by local municipalities in my experience at least have some restraint. It could be that I grew up in a more working class area, but most of the public art was a bronze statue of children playing and soldier memorials. The most leftist it got was some "support diversity!" pieces. Yeah it is very bourgeois, but at least its not grotesque and has a sense of community to it.
Jan 17, 2014, 11:35:32 AM
Posted to Politics Isn't Art