#value of art

[lumi1055]

If we accept that art is mortal too, and that nothing is truly permanent, maybe we can see more clearly where the value of life and art is to be found: in experiencing them.

Julian Baggini, The Pig That Wants to be Eaten

[artfoold00k]

Significance of human-made art.

I had this art raffle posted on Artfol. Now, at its end, I can post what I want to say on the topic. ❔ This is what I requested from artists to submit for participation.

➤ Elaborate on your perspective regarding the significance of painted/digital art (artwork), its value, and its role. Why do we need human-made art to exist? - You don't need to craft an extensive thesis. Simply highlight the 3-4 aspects that hold the most importance for you. If you're inclined to share more, continue in the comments section below your initial response. - The angle you take in your answer is entirely your choice: individual, societal, economic, historical value. I won't impose restrictions on it. - It's best to keep your response between a few sentences and half a page in length.

⬇️ This is my answer to that question.

Art is a visual language that serves to express identity, culture, complex concepts, perceptions, feelings, political views, and more. It reflects significant events, transmits cultural heritage, preserves and shares knowledge. Art can be found in many cities, adorning beautiful landmarks and displayed in museums. It holds value, is traded and sold, thus playing a role in economics. Art is an emotional outlet for those gifted in this visual language. It allows us to express ourselves, explore our individuality, extend empathy, and promote personal growth. Whether as an escape from reality or a means to reflect upon it, art plays a significant role in our lives. Art is an impactful and profound language, on par with the power of words and music. It is an international, vibrant, and captivating form of expression. While human-made art is infused with culture, aesthetics, values, and profound thoughts, allowing it to convey meaningful messages, the same cannot be said for AI-generated pictures which are often fragmented, depreciated, distorted, and lack organic creativity. AI creatures are comparable to a jigsaw puzzle of stolen artistic achievements, a mishmash of outdated clichés that fail to resonate with authentic artistic substance.

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*I tend to have unpopular opinion and I'm okay with that.

[hellyeahheroes]

Capitalist Realism is Corrupting Art by Art Chad

[not-xpr-art]

Art Deep Dives #1 - The Value of Art ~

Hi everyone!

This is the start to another project I want to start on this account, a companion to my Art Advice tag, and each week or so I’ll be ‘deep diving’ into art history, arts & culture, society’s relationship to art, etc etc... (I basically want to make use of my history of art degree, and also because I genuinely love talking about this stuff... especially without the pressure of deadlines lol)

Side note: don’t worry about these being really ‘academic’ or ‘formal’, since neither of those things are in my vocabulary lol... this is a very casual, informal kind of ‘essay’ writing that I want to be accessible to everyone, regardless of how much you know about art! 

This first one is a kind of follow up of my Art Advice post talking about references, and I’ll be talking about the ideas of how we ‘value’ art.

(this is about 1600 words long by the way...)

The Value of Art

It’s no secret that art is highly subjective. Particularly when it comes to the question of ‘what is the most important type of art?’. It changes from person to person, country to country, and era to era. How we define ‘great art’ now is vastly different to how we defined it several hundred years ago. I mean, just look at the kinds of art in galleries in the modern era (Tracey Emin’s bed comes to mind) versus that of the 18th century (with the likes of Joshua Reynolds, JMW Turner and Thomas Gainsborough). Really, it’s clear to see that what we see as ‘the most important type of art’ is forever changing...

Or... is it?

In order to really answer whether the kinds of art we value now versus that of the past has changed, we need to first establish what ‘valued art’ even means. 

I think in today’s day and age, ‘value’ is often synonymous with ‘price’. So, a Banksy original chipped away from it’s original wall setting and having been sold at a Christies auction for £3.2million is, by this definition, what we as a society ‘value’ as art... Right? Or maybe ‘value’ is more to do with what kinds of works that are displayed in big galleries or public spaces? The Tate has an entire wing dedicated to the works of landscape/seascape painter JMW Turner, so surely that means that we today place a high ‘value’ on his work still? What about public sculpture? Architecture? Sculpture and architecture are often a lot more available for the general public, and even if most people wouldn’t be able to tell you who made the Statue of Liberty, they at least know about her and perhaps even enjoy to look at her? And surely the fame of buildings like the Eiffel Tower or the Taj Mahal mean that they, too, are ‘valued’ as pieces of art? And what of artworks from other countries and cultures? A Chinese man may find no ‘value’ in a painting by a so-called ‘Great Master’ of the Italian Renaissance, but instead will ‘value’ a piece of Imperial Ming Dynasty porcelain instead, does that mean his opinion is the ‘right’ one? Colonialism has played heavily into what arts are now called ‘valuable’ and what are not, so how do we quantify whether a work has ‘value’ without placing our own individual cultural bias on it?

Basically what I’m getting at is, what we value as art in this day and age is very complicated, in a big way because our society is complicated. But for the sake of arguments, and for my next few points, I will be defining an art’s ‘value’ predominantly by whether it has been featured in a big gallery... Which also means I’ll be focusing on painting and sculpture... And also focusing on the Western world of art, specifically Europe, which I want to clarify doesn’t mean I personally ‘value’ that art more, it’s just where I’m from and predominantly what I studied in my course... 

Art historians often declare the Renaissance (around the 14th to 16th centuries) the ‘beginning’ of what we know as art today. But for this essay, I want to instead start a little before this, in the Early Medieval period. People often know of this era as ‘the dark ages’, in Europe at least, because it was after Rome had fallen and taken all their so-called ‘genius’ with them. A particular note for why for years we’ve seen this period as ‘regressive’ is through their art. A quick Google search of ‘Medieval baby’ will come up with a plethora of results for a wide range of paintings depicting babies (usually the baby Christ) as scaled down versions of adults, complete with receding hairlines and strangely buff arms and chests. 

Now, is this because medieval babies actually looked like this? I think this is... highly unlikely... I know most things happened earlier in that era than nowadays (girls getting married and pregnant at age 14, for example), but I think it’s a bit of a stretch to think their babies had six packs... No, instead it’s more likely that rather than being direct representations of babies, these were purely symbolic. And particularly given how they often were of Christ, art historians often say that the weird adult-baby hybrids are to represent Christ’s divinity. 

Now... What’s all this got to do with art and value? Well, the thing about early medieval art is that the value was almost entirely placed upon the symbology and meaning of a piece. Later in the medieval period, paintings began to become more ‘realistic’ to some extent, but it still for the most part stayed true to this idea of symbolism over representation. 

That is, until we get to the Renaissance and all of that gets thrown out of the window because artists want to be able to paint babies that actually look like babies, thank you very much! And with the likes of Leonardo da Vinci championing for art to become a science, surely this means that the kinds of art that was valued in this era were highly accurate portraits or landscapes... Right?

Short answer? No. 

Long answer? Well, portraits and landscapes had their place in the hierarchies of art. Portraits were often commissioned by wealthy patrons, and were basically ways of the artist showing off how good their portrait skills are. And landscapes were less important, more seen as ‘nice backgrounds’ than anything else. But the art that was highly valued by most wealthy patrons and art connoisseurs of the time was... (imagine a drum roll here please) 

History painting! These are basically big biblical or mythological scenes, often with a lot of figures doing a variety of things (think Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel), often with some pretty landscape as the backdrop, and often featuring a couple of portraits in the mix (including one of the patron who commissioned it, probably being blessed by the Virgin Mary, and a cheeky one of the artist peeking out from behind a bush or something...). From the Renaissance era up until basically the mid 19th century, History paintings were seen as the most important works of art to be featured in galleries. 

And really, things only really began to change when we reached the end of the 19th century, with the development of photography. 

Photography, and film, both lead to a massive shift in not only the kinds of art that are produced in the 20th century, but also the kinds of art that are valued. For so long art had been the main form of representation of society, and the advent of photographs meant that art had almost lost that ‘purpose’. Not to mention the leading towards a more secular society which no longer had a need for symbolic or spiritual artworks. 

So, the only place art could really go was to become a form of expression instead. The likes of artists like Picasso and Braque pioneering cubism, being about new ways of representing the world. The Surrealists delving into ideas of the subconscious. Pop-Artists like Warhol looking into media and consumerist society, and the list goes on... 

Which brings us onto my most hated period in the history of art: Conceptual art. 

I’m not going to go big into this period, which is still around today (unfortunately), but all you need to know is this twat Marcel Duchamp flipped a urinal (which he didn’t even make himself) upside down and called it a ‘fountain’ and shoved it into a gallery and thus art that has no value beyond it being ‘concept based’ was born. And yes, yes I hate it a lot (I’m not even trying to be objective about this, I hate conceptual art with a burning passion... some guy put some sh*t in a box and put it in a gallery & called it art and I am SO mad about it lol...). And as much as I hate this period, what it does signify is how art began to be valued not through the craftsmanship of the work itself, but instead the ideas. 

And this idea remains today. Damien Hirst has forged his entire art identity on creating works that are based entirely on some ‘meaning’ that could be forced onto it, rather than the aesthetic or material value. And as mentioned before, Tracey Emin’s infamous bed isn’t about the work and effort gone into the piece itself, but instead about what the artists intends for the piece to ‘mean’. So, the ‘value’ of the work is what it says, and not what it is, essentially. 

(This is not to say that there are no artists who work today that get featured in galleries and are highly skilled at their craft. The one that springs to mind is Grayson Perry, who’s well known for his pottery and tapestries with some kind of social commentary bled into them.)

This ideology around art also bleeds into online spaces of art (which I see as distinctly separate from the world of art galleries and the Turner prize). I still see artists, and non-artists, talking about how much they enjoy work that is ‘original’, and oftentimes ridiculing and demoting ‘fanart’ as purely ‘derivative’ or ‘unoriginal’. 

And all this brings us back to history paintings. Because their ‘value’ wasn’t just in the immense amount of skill that went into them. A large part of their ‘value’ was that artists and non-artists alike saw them as feats of the artist’s ‘genius’ or ‘imagination’ at play. And in the same way that Early Medieval art was valued for the symbology of the piece rather than the representation, history paintings had the benefit of including both elements. In essence, they were both meaningful AND beautiful. 

In conclusion (just to remind you that this is technically an essay lol), a lot about art HAS definitely changed in the last few hundred years, particularly in what kinds of art is getting made now (and why we make art in the first place). However, what we as a collective society ‘value’ as art has remained surprisingly the same, often with a heavy preference for a work’s meaning and symbology, which can sometimes overshadow the craftsmanship of the work itself. 

I still hate that godforsaken Duchamp toilet though...

(images used:

unknown medieval painting (I just liked that he had his hand down mary’s dress lool)

mona lisa by da vinky 

detail of the creation of adam on the sistine chapel by michelangelo

a photograph by louis daguerre, often known as the father of photography

*clenches fist* ‘fountain’ by marcel duchamp

‘my bed’ by tracey emin )

I hope you enjoyed this informal essay about art, I will definitely be doing more of these in the future! If you have any thoughts on this, feel free to reply to this or message me, etc! I love having open and frank conversations about art! 

[don-simon]

The art world turns out to be like the stock market – a reflection of political trends and the persuasions of capitalism. Speculation and opinions drive not only the market but the products, the values of which are not hinged to the ineffable quality of art as a sacred human ritual – a value impossible to measure, anyway – but to what a bunch of rich assholes think would 'elevate' their portfolios and inspire jealousy and – delusional as they are – respect.

from My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018) by Otessa Moshfegh

[mckitterick]

No Place for Self-Pity, No Room for Fear

- Toni Morrison

Having trouble being creative during these trying - often horrifying - times? What's the point of art when the world feels like it's falling apart? You're not alone.

Toni Morrison - Toni Morrison! - once admitted how depressed and unable to work she was when her friend said:

“No! No, no, no! This is precisely the time when artists go to work - not when everything is fine, but in times of dread. That’s our job!”

That transformed her, and I hope it inspires you, too.

In his book, Artists in Times of War, the historian Howard Zinn outlined his notion of the relationship between artist and society. He emphasized the word transcendent: Artists transcend “the immediate,” “the here and now,” and “the madness of the world.”

Artists think, perform, write, and otherwise create outside societal frameworks, sometimes redecorating, but also often exposing rot in the fabric of society.

Artists are sometimes accused of doing little more than adding beauty, laughter, passion, surprise, or drama to life. But the artist needn’t apologize, because these delights help us escape the moments of horror that haunt us every day - some days more than others - by revealing possibilities of what the world could or should hold.

Sometimes art helps expand or change our minds, or instructs us in the ways of people or the world. Sometimes it warns against impending danger, offering nightmare visions that, once made tangible, compel us to action so we can work to avoid such outcomes.

Art is a much-needed human service, as trivial or worthless as the work can sometimes feel during the creative process. 

“There’s a lot to be said for making people laugh,” says Sullivan in Sullivan’s Travels. “Did you know that that’s all some people have? It isn’t much, but it’s better than nothing in this cockeyed caravan.”

Get out there and create!

Make your art, share your fanfic, knit colorful hats for your friends, weave horror scenarios you hope never come to pass, write about solarpunk heroes saving the world - whatever creative endeavors inspire, offer hope, elicit emotion, or whatever else drives your creative need to overtly express yourself and your enthusiasms!

The world needs your art more than ever.

[hurumi]

Week10_Poststructuralism

I think understanding post-structuralism is very helpful and relevant to understanding contemporary art. I think that the attitude of trying to distinguish between what is art and what is not art is an outdated value that I personally should avoid having as an artist. Marcel Duchamp's <Fountain> is an important work that can support this idea, as it was able to be recognized as art for its body of work. As Wendy Warhol, a representative artist of contemporary art and a pioneer of pop art, demonstrates in his <Brillobox>, the distinction between real and fake becomes irrelevant (='breaking down the boundaries of art'), and this thinking, together with the philosophy of post-structuralism, explains where to place the value of a work as art with the keyword of 'flexibility' in thinking.

And it is precisely this post-structuralism that gives rise to the "flexibility" that I consider to be the most important attitude to evaluate the value of art today. To see the combination of signifier and signified as accidental, the only way to connect them is to find the difference between them and to delay in this process. It is in this process that a work of art is endowed with symbolism on its own, and it is all done through 'flexibility'.

It is my position to think that this process should be applied to all processes in which an artist perceives and decides something.