[im3w1l]

Nobody would give two shits about me or my painting if I drew colored squares first.

Actually let me propose an experiment: Take two people: One a famous artist, and one an unknown complete amateur. Someone who hasn't held a brush since primary school. Have them both paint 6 pieces each in a unique but low technical skill style. Then randomize which artist signs which piece.

The success of the artworks will be strongly correlated with who is claimed to have drawn it, and uncorrelated with who actually did.

[corobo]

Well yeah, appreciating art and owning art are different things. Owning art is an investment, you want the possibility of selling it to someone else with interest later. Can't do that if it's not famous

How do you measure the success of art? I'd go with eyeballs per year, you've picked sales figures, someone else would probably say a third thing

[im3w1l]

Sorry for the ninja edit there, I kinda went back and forth, settled on a more neutral success.

[Jugurtha]

Yes. There was that anecdote of someone bringing a painting and being told it was clearly a fake after examination because the real one was exposed in a museum. TL;DR: the one exposed in the museum was the fake, the real one was stolen, and that's the one the person brought.

Double-blind wine experiments where people talk about earthy-mushroomy-fruity tones, then have the label revealed are fun.

[im3w1l]

Wine's are a little bit different imo, because there is a definitely legit basis there just the border with bullshit and marketing is fuzzy.

My take away from those double-blind experiments isn't that it's all made up, but rather that people need to practice more rigor.