this post was submitted on 16 Jul 2023
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"Expensive abstract paintings are just money laundering" is intellectually lazy and conspiratorial. The entire art world and the IRS aren't working together to let some people get away with money laundering, but only as long as they use art to do it.
A lot of contemporary art is not for mass consumption the way that high fashion is not for street wear. Everything does not have to have mass appeal, and that doesn't make it unimportant or simple to do. I guarantee if you go to an art museum's daily tour they will be able to tell you a lot about how these 'simple' paintings were made that shows how they weren't simple at all, and what movement they are in response to/part of that adds much more significance to them.
If you're going to nitpick about whether they're really worth $x million, what makes any painting worth more than the canvas it's on and the paint that makes it up? History? Mass appeal? Appeal to other artists? Appeal to rich people? Artistic self expression? Effort/length of time to make it? Originality?
Call it lazy or conspiratorial if you want, I don't particularly care. This is not one of those cases where you can convince me. Selling art for millions is for tax evasion or money laundering and that's what I'll probably always believe because it's the only thing that makes sense to me. And making a fable about how the random splashes actually mean anything else than that you can't really paint is IMO stupid. You wanted to tell something with your painting? How about you told it with the painting instead of some commentary that's needed for anyone to actually see anything there?
"I do not care what reality is, I simply assume that there is a vast conspiracy of people lying to me about contemporary art" is the kind of anti-intellectual bullshit that drove me off reddit. Thank god there's not much of it here, present company excluded. You have so much disdain for something your AI "art" literally can't exist without, and will cease to exist without real artists continuing to make new art for the talentless shit machine to chew up and spit out.
Yeah, I think we're done here, I thought I was here for a conversation. Seems I was mistaken. Maybe you're the problem you were running from?