[photochemsyn]

Buying and selling modern art in today's market seems to be more related to tax avoidance and money laundering schemes than anything else. If you think of the artist's job as creating the vehicle, then it should be pretty lucrative.

> "Consider that when the Mexican government passed a law in the early 2010s to require more information about buyers, and how much cash could be spent on a single piece of art, the market cratered, as sales dipped 70 percent in less than a year. Many believed that was because Mexican cartel rings had previously been the biggest buyers in the market."

https://www.artandobject.com/news/how-money-laundering-works...

[egypturnash]

It's a nice gig if you can get it, but competition for the gallery scene is pretty fierce. Plus a lot of the required skillset is "convincing assholes with way too much money that this ugly thing you caused to exist is worth a lot".

NFTs have somewhat democratized this, by providing a new avenue for assholes with too much crypto to pay absurd prices for art, with the bonus wrinkle of "artist gets a cut if someone uses their piece to launder ill-gotten gains" though there's already marketplaces that ignore that part of the smart contracts designed to make that happen. And a different sort of deliberate ugliness.