hey so i'm gonna be pissed for a minute, feel free to scroll if you're not prepared to handle that right now
so apparently skill, composition, and effort have absolutely fucking nothing to do with how much people would be willing to pay for artwork.
i am currently in college planning to major in art. one of my classes is having us watch a video about what makes art valuable, and it started with a guy walking around in some showroom looking at artwork and saying their estimated value that's on little tags next to the art on the walls.
he's looking at a bunch of classical paintings, and i wasn't too surprised by the multi-million dollar price tags on them because they were made by artists i had at least heard of.
but then he stops in front of this painting:
(id: two rough-edges rectangles on a yellow background. the one on the top is shorter and a desaturated pink. the one on the bottom is taller and a desaturated red. both have visible brushstrokes around the edges and have some spots within them where the red or pink paint did not fully cover the yellow paint of the background. end id.)
this painting looks like it could have done in maybe four hours, purely based on size (it's about the height of an adult male), although i will say that i don't know a lot about painting so the time might be different, and i am not including drying time in my estimate. i personally feel that i created more expressive, interesting, and vaguely thought about art as a four year old with a pack of crayons and a sheet of printer paper.
this painting is simply called "Untitled number 17," like a hastily saved Microsoft Paint file.
it's valued at about twenty two million dollars.
having never heard of the painter before, i tried to give that insane price tag the benefit of the doubt. "maybe the artist has some other, better work, and people want this painting because it was made by a good artist?"
spoiler alert: this was not the case.
the artist was a man named Mark Rothko, and all of his art is like this. and most (if not all) of his other paintings are called Untitled as well.
(somewhat less complete id: various paintings that follow a similar formula to the first image. most are composed of two rectangles of different heights and saturations, often different shades of the same color, on a solid color background. most of the rectangles are also painted roughly, with visible brushstrokes. two of the paintings alter the formula slightly, with three or four rectangles of different colors. end id.)
the insane value that rich people place upon these paintings is made even more infuriating to me because the amount these people are willing to pay for just one of these paintings is several times the value of a house. it's many times more than my parents could make, combined, in a decade if they didn't have to pay for anything.
additionally, i regularly see artists both here and on other social media advertising their commissions, sometimes because they have some spare time and want to make some extra money, sometimes because they worry they can't make rent next month. most people's commissions range from $10 to $50 for a completely custom piece of artwork. even going by the definitions given to me by art textbooks and art teachers throughout the years, these artists create objectively better art than those paintings. they evoke emotion. they capture an idea. they show skill, they show effort, they have actual thought put into them. and yet the incredibly rich would rather dump millions and millions of dollars on a piece of canvas with two rectangles hurriedly smeared onto it.
