[krisoft]

The problem here is that I don’t trust the author on being able to tell who is the “best artist”. Clearly he has opinions. But for example in point 3, he says he can predict which exhibition will be great based on how easy it is to work with the artist. He predicts that some exhibition will be crap and he is right! Which sounds impressive until you notice that he is not measuring his judgement against something objective, but just against his judgement. He decides something will be crap and then he feels crap about it once he sees it. Did others, who did not know that the artist was slow to email back also feel that those exhibitions were mediocre and the others not? Who knows? All we have is this one man’s opinion. Maybe others thought differently.

Even more so in his point 6. He writes “What you see in the biographies of great artists, great writers, great anything is that they are good at figuring out where the vectors align.” Which is just plainly and absolutely not true. There were plenty of people who we now recognise as “great artist” who absolutely could not figure out where the “incentive vectors align”. Thus they lived in abject poverty, or needed to support themselves from something other than their art. But if your definition of “great art” is that it is commercially succesfull then of course what you will find that the “great artist” are all like good businesman. But that doesn’t tell you about what it take to be an artist, just only what you value.

[ValentinA23]

https://www.zmescience.com/science/physicist-shows-that-to-b...

Albert-László Barabás, a physicist, created a network map that can predict an artist's future success based on their early network connections. His work outlines two key "laws of success":

- Performance drives success, but when performance can’t be measured, networks drive success. This highlights the importance of networks when objective measures of quality are difficult to establish.

- Performance is bounded, but success is unbounded. This indicates that small differences in quality can lead to large disparities in success due to the amplifying power of social networks

Barabási's model can predict an artist's career success with surprising accuracy based on the venues of their first five exhibitions. This model underscores the importance of early connections and the venues where an artist exhibits their work, which can significantly influence their long-term success4.

[blitzar]

I guess this is why a sucessful genius can tape a banana to a wall while a run of the mill worker can only restore Notre Dame to its original state.

[ValentinA23]

This is a reflexion I made to a friend yesterday: the banana doesn't improve the state of art over Duchamp's Fountain. The real artist, in this case, is the guy who paid 6 millions to eat the banana !

[burkaman]

The guy that bought it is not an artist, he was just trying to distract from some good-old-fashioned corruption: https://popular.info/p/a-chinese-national-charged-with-fraud

Based on the coverage of his purchase it seems like he succeeded.

[kazinator]

A con artist is a kind of artist, right?

[red-iron-pine]

arguably, the only art that matters in 2024

[blitzar]

They are artists all the way down.

[deadbabe]

Now someone must eat the artist who ate the banana, for several million dollars.

[blitzar]

An artist has to tape them to a wall first.

[zcw100]

Money laundering is probably what makes a banana taped to a wall successful.

[m0llusk]

Workers are required to follow the orders they are given which are typically specified such that it is the people paying them that get to exercise aesthetic judgement. That is why Notre Dame was restored to a modernized design that is visibly different from its original state.

[albumen]

Interesting...the several articles I've read note how closely it has remained to the original design. What aspects are modernised?

[plagiarist]

The world is pretty disappointing in that way.

All my life I have been thinking I should develop good skills in my career. But actually I should have been learning how to make connections and talk to people.

There's no chance of me selling a single banana for that much. But I could be making a multiple what I do now.

[cpach]

Why not do both?

[llamaimperative]

No that is more about money laundering

[Aunche]

Whenever an absurdly priced work of art makes it to the news, laypeople immediately jump to the explanation of money laundering, but any artist, art purchaser, or even money launderer would know that this is ridiculous. You'd be an idiot to launder their money in the most publicized auction in the year. If you wanted to launder money, it would most likely be through low-profile private sales.

[llamaimperative]

I agree that any individual piece is not guaranteed to be laundering, but the market as a whole is definitely pushed upwards by more factors than people's desire for historical artifacts or decoration.

In any case, in the true upper end of the market, most of these auctions are publicized but the buyers are behind many layers of indirection.

[neaden]

In this specific case we know who bought it Justin Sun. He's a Hong Kong based cyrptocurrency investor who ate it. So it seems like in this case it was more about getting some press, and probably a bit of distraction against some of the allegations against him.

[orochimaaru]

Nope he didn’t eat it. He got a digital token with instructions on how to tape his own banana to the wall.

Before someone thinks I’m not serious - I am. That was out in the news today.

[talldayo]

"Ahh, you were at my side all along... my true mentor, my guiding moonlight..." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_fool_theory

[lancesells]

It's more about people with a lot of money hoping to sell it for a greater return, while maybe also having shit taste in art. In five years it'll be at an auction and sell to some other person with too much money in hopes of making a profit on it later on.

[llamaimperative]

Nah, it has to do with money laundering, tax evasion, and easy international money transmission. There are tons of interesting tricks you can pull once you have your hands on a small object "worth" hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars whose very illiquid + inefficiently priced sales also affects an entire market of similar objects.

[neaden]

The guy who bought it, Justin Sun, ate it. So unless it's going to get really meta (and stinky) he's not going to resell it.

[detaro]

The thing being bought by him was not a specific physical banana, so he can resell what was sold just fine if he wants to.

[lancesells]

Net worth $1.6B. So eating a $6M banana is a PR stunt.

Edit: Also doesn't mean it can't be resold as that banana gets replaced x number of days.

[blitzar]

That would be a piece of art.

[numpad0]

let's buy that argument for discussion's sake, that doesn't contradict with the notion that networking is important.

[llamaimperative]

I wasn't trying to contradict that

[niceice]

How does that work exactly?

[llamaimperative]

Have you ever tried to move $10MM between jurisdictions before? It's much easier when you can put it in a box that looks like, weighs as much as, and actually is a piece of cloth inside of a box, and then open the box up wherever you want it.

(To be clear, the banana piece specifically is probably a bad artwork to use for financial engineering purposes, but for the art market as a whole these dynamics add a lot to the prices near the top end)

[trgn]

that isn't money laundering though.

I wonder that too fwiw, what's the exact mechanism with this banana NFT-purchase by which elicit money (from who (?)) is now being laundered as legal income (of who (?)). How does the process work?

[therealcamino]

It seems to me like a more valid way to describe that work is that, you can predict an artist's long-term success based on their early success.

The first five venues where an artist exhibits isn't wholly based on their social networks, but also tells you how excited the art world is about their work. Since attitudes about the work or the artist are key factors in establishing what their early network is, I don't see how you can conclude that the work and the artist are irrelevant, but the network is relevant.

[llamaimperative]

> It turns out, however, that you can make it by starting from the outside. It’s not easy, but it can work. You have to go around and show your art as much as possible to as many people as possible.

I.e. some portion of “network success strategy” is actually downstream of talent success.

[julianeon]

Hold up. This is very intriguing.

When you say it can "predict an artist's career success", to a 1st approximation, that means it can predict which artists' work will sell for over 10x its current price in a dozen years.

Is it really that easy to make money in the art market?

[jonnycomputer]

This is great to think about. Glad I ran across this comment.

[niceice]

Or is it that performance creates a network?

[trhway]

sounds like startups founding and software engineers career

[irjustin]

> But if your definition of “great art” is that it is commercially succesfull then of course what you will find that the “great artist” are all like good businesman.

While the author doesn't explicitly define what is "great", I 100% believed that what it is defined as. That "great" is being commercially successful.

The article is premised around running a non-profit art gallery in a struggling municipality. That he did a good job by "helping grow the revenues"[0]. He needed money for his new baby and couldn't afford to lose a job[1]

It is a modern day art gallery. These things are businesses first - to support their own operations and then to help artist support themselves and their work.

So yes, "great" art IS art that sells.

Now, what sells is highly highly subjective, and a very large part of that sales process is making the customer _feel good_ about their purchase. And I think this is where you disagree - that there is a higher, objective reality around good vs great art. And for so much art, there really isn't.

[0] "I started was the inflection point when the revenue, which had been shrinking or muddling for 5 years, began growing again"

[1] "since I knew I couldn’t afford to quit anytime soon with the baby and all"

[krisoft]

> While the author doesn't explicitly define what is "great", I 100% believed that what it is defined as.

I understand that is his definition, but then talk about that. Instead of saying that the exhibition ended up "mediocre" say that "ticket sales were lower than expected" or "sold less paintings than we hoped for", or "didn't bring in anybody".

Because as is he just writes "after weeks of this you end up with something mediocre" and "predict which exhibitions would end up great". That is very vibes based. Did he just not enjoy those exhibitions? Or is it tied to something objective outside of his head? (such as revenue, or crowd size, or critical acclaim) The first is not interesting, the second is.

> That he did a good job by "helping grow the revenues"[0].

Or did not do a good job. Base on the very sentence you quote which starts "It helped that the year I started ...". Doesn't give me the impression that even the author believes it is all their doing. Very easily someone could write the same story from a differed perspective "we hired a guy to run the café, but he was way too distracted to keep consistently at it. First he ruffled some feathers with the board then he mellowed out so we kept him around. He pooh-poohed artist who was not as responsive in electronic communication as he would have liked, but we told him softly that is not his decision and to shut it. At the end he was only showing up sporadically and then left to write or something." We only have his world on it and even based on that his track record is less than stelar.

[jonnycomputer]

Yes, this is the situation we are left in. I don't really know of course (and presumably nor do you) whether he was a good employee or made substantive improvements or whatever. It would have helped if he was more specific and concrete in his descriptions.

The biggest failing here is a failing of clear and compelling writing.

[krisoft]

> I don't really know of course (and presumably nor do you) whether he was a good employee or made substantive improvements or whatever.

Yes, absolutely. I don't know anything about him outside of this article. I assume he is a good employee, or they were mostly happy with him (for the simple reason that they kept employing him). Just wrote that part to illustrate that the same facts from his own pen can be also interpreted in a negative light.

> It would have helped if he was more specific and concrete in his descriptions.

I totally agree with that.

[atoav]

On which timeframe tho? Many great artists did not sell well during their lifetime, Van Gogh being the most famous example.

Was Van Gogh a great artist because at some point in the future his works are among the most expensive ones ever sold sold? Or was he a bad artist, that turned great after his death when the market favored him more?

If it is the former, every artist could potentially sell well in the remaining time of human civilization — how far in the future do you draw the line?

If it is the latter then we get the paradoxical situation, that the same work can be both great and bad depending on the observers time reference. So the same painting is bad, until someone "discovers" it and manages ro produce economic hype around it.

As someone with a MA of art who has probably seen more exhibitions than most people on this site (including the last 5 Biennales and the last 3 Documentas) my guess is: great art is great even before it is commercially successful.

Whether it then turns out to be economically successful as well (and when) hinges on many different factors, like the Zeitgeist, pure chance, where it was exhibited or next to what it was exhibited, how the galerist treats the work, how much the artist puts on the market, how the market feels at the time when it is shown etc.

The "greatness" of the work is only a very small factor in the economic success it has, some would even argue it doesn't matter as much as one would think.

But all of that matters on how we define "great". If you are a rich collector that sees art as an investment it is just about the numbers, then great art is only art that you have and that sells for more than you bought it. You'd define it differently depending on who you are: artist, art historian, galerist, lay person, crafts person, journalist, copyright lawyer, restaurator, ..

[TheOtherHobbes]

By your definition, super-successful kitsch-meisters like Thomas Kinkade are great artists.

That's quite a niche view.

In fact art is an overlap of many different kinds of markets selling to many different kinds of customers - from people buying phone wallpapers online, to tourists buying souvenirs on holiday, to oligarchs laundering money through prestige purchases.

And many others.

A community gallery is going to intersect with a couple of those, but not all of them. Sustainable funding is a goal, but maximising income isn't.

Financial success doesn't sane wash narcissistic entitlement, of which there is plenty outside of the arts.

[krisoft]

> By your definition, super-successful kitsch-meisters like Thomas Kinkade are great artists.

And Vincent van Gogh is not. Or was not a great artist, then he died and become a great artist somehow suddenly after his death. (at least by that definition, which just to make it clear, I don't agree with.)

[specialist]

I'm fine with "remembered somehow" as another useful definition for "a great artist".

More cynically: van Gogh was only successfully monetized posthumously.

[bradley13]

I have worked a little bit with "artists". Too many of them are caught up in their vision, and apparently incapable of dealing with reality. Too many of them believe that their vision is so, so unique that everyone else should sort out any problems.

There's one guy where I live, whom I tried to help out several times. I would invest lots of effort handling the practical stuff: flyers, text, web site, etc. Little thanks, because it was his due. Then he would have a new idea, change direction, and it was all for nothing.

[specialist]

True.

Part of Gage Art Academy's mission is to create working artists. Students learn about (and struggle with) how to get paid. Stuff like how to price their works, balancing one's own artistic expression with making stuff that sells, how to pull off an exhibit, etc.

https://gageacademy.org/

[fenomas]

> in point 3, he says he can predict which exhibition will be great based on how easy it is to work with the artist

I strongly assumed that bit was about him predicting whether each exhibition would be "great" from the gallery's perspective - in terms of attendance or revenue or whatever metrics they used. It's not spelled out, but since the whole piece is about him focusing on the business and ops side of things, that bit probably was as well.

[Aunche]

> There were plenty of people who we now recognise as “great artist” who absolutely could not figure out where the “incentive vectors align”. Thus they lived in abject poverty, or needed to support themselves from something other than their art.

I don't think this is particularly true anymore. Most of the canonical artists of the past century were successful during their lifetimes. The ones who weren't either died tragically young (e.g. Basquiat), or didn't care for exposure much at all (e.g. Hilma af Kint).

[archagon]

Perhaps they are “canonical” because they were successful. Perhaps the canon will look a lot different a century from now when the less commercially successful, obscure greats are finally dusted off.

[robenkleene]

I agree with this. I'd be curious if you have any hypothesis about why exactly that is? Personally, I can think of three possible reasons but I'm not convinced by any of them:

1. It's became harder to distinguish quality. Artist training has been streamlined, so technical excellence (which is easier to evaluate) isn't novel anymore. So that means determining quality of art now depends on more difficult to evaluate criteria.

2. Art moves faster now, so it's harder to have an influence on the art world (one of the ways an artist becomes famous) posthumously, because by then the art world has probably moved on from the state where the art would have impact.

3. We're just better at discovering artists. E.g., low-barrier to entry for digital distribution means it's easier for artists to find an audience.

Any thoughts?

[Aunche]

I think #2 and #3 are definitely factors.

As for #1, I think basic art education may be streamlined, but art education in general not necessarily as developed as it was in the past. Sfumato, for example, is a technique that would be difficult to learn in an art school due to how long it takes oil to dry, but straightforward in a master apprentice relationship. Bernini grew up as the son of a marble sculptor when and where that was considered the highest form of art, so it's unlikely that anyone born today could be raised breathing marble dust like how he was.

I think that photography and digital technology killed the importance of technique more than anything else. Even with realist painting, having photographic references allows you to "cheat" your way into good enough results with unrefined skills to the extent that only painting nerds care about the difference, it makes more sense to focus on other things, which like you said are more difficult to evaluate.

[magicalhippo]

> He writes “What you see in the biographies of great artists, great writers, great anything is that they are good at figuring out where the vectors align.” Which is just plainly and absolutely not true

I take it the author means "great" as in "successful".

[llamaimperative]

It is not true in that case either, or at least “successful” is still poorly defined.

It’s defined implicitly in this blog as commercially successful within the timeframe I had to sell their art. Which is a perfectly defensible definition, but should be explicit so people know what argument they’re hearing.

[munificent]

It was clear to me from the article. The very next section is about how being economically sustainable is important if your goal is to maximize the amount of art you can present to a community.

[magicalhippo]

> commercially successful within the timeframe I had to sell their art

That's what I meant with successful. Not sure what other variations there would be, though I'm not a native speaker.

[llamaimperative]

For example, to receive prestigious awards would also fit under "successful," regardless of monetary components. To be recognized after death as one of the Masters would be successful.

[magicalhippo]

The author is talking about the artistry being aligned with market forces in the paragraph preceding the quote.

I don't really see how either of those definitions fit in that context.

[llamaimperative]

Sure, but now you're just circularly defining it back to what was initially pointed out: this is implicitly a very specific definition of greatness, ergo yeah, you replace the word with "successful" and it's implicitly a very specific definition of successful.

[dfxm12]

I think the author's definition of "best artist" is "artist who made my job easiest". I have no reason to distrust the author about this, but, on the other hand, this information is simply not useful.

[westondeboer]

I have worked for an artist for about 20 years. He releases a print every week, I could not tell you which one is going to sell well or not.

[l5870uoo9y]

> The problem here is that I don’t trust the author on being able to tell who is the “best artist”.

A prerequisite to be considered a great artist is that the artist master a "craft" to perfection be it painting, drawing, sculpting, or something complete different like Burial who created one of the most important electronic album using the basic audio-editing software Sound Forge.

[djtango]

Is art really about craft anymore?

There's certainly an element of it but it's gotten very meta and abstract these days.

What is the craft in a dirty bath tub or a robot endlessly sweeping liquid?

Better yet what's the craft in a white canvas: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_invisible_artworks

I'm actually not denying there's art here, sometimes I "get it" but the art of today has gotten very conceptual and meta.

I see similar issues with music - where the need to be accessible vs original are pit against each other. Da Vinci, Monet, Turner, Picasso - the art is fairly accessible. Mozart, Beethoven, Debussy, Holst ditto.

But who will be remembered as being accessible and "serious" from our generation in music? Probably John Williams - a film composer primarily. I'm not dissing composers, one of my favourites of all time is Nobuo Uematsu but I am not sure what is art anymore. I wonder if art can only emerge with hindsight. What did it feel like to be in the present when people like Chopin and Liszt were in their heyday while Delacroix and Moreau were painting. Or when Ravel and Debussy were writing impressionistic music alongside Monet and Manet painting

[Arkhaine_kupo]

> Is art really about craft anymore?

It never was, but it is still important as it always has been.

> There's certainly an element of it but it's gotten very meta and abstract these days.

Art is about many things. I agree that a lot of art can be esoteric nowadays, mostly because its in conversation with specific things, so it can feel like an inside joke, or a private conversation you are not privy to. If I make an art piece critiquing an article from The Economist and you never read business news then my piece will be unparseable for you, regardless of quality.

Many art pieces are in response to other art movements, or to niche communities, or to conversations happening in the art world etc. If you jump into a modern art gallery and someone is replying to the art that was in Art Basel Miami, which was a repsonse to internet art, which in itself was a response to figurative early .... and then you go to this art gallery and you cant get a painting because its talking to someone that is not you.

> where the need to be accessible vs original are pit against each other.

I dont think thats true. There are certainly artists that manage to break new ground while being accesible, while other prime originality over mainstream appeal. That is an artistic choice to be made, in the same way retreading comfortable ground or releasing a Christman Carol album is.

> Da Vinci, Monet, Turner, Picasso - the art is fairly accessible.

Trying to understand the last supper without knowledge of Christianity would make Da Vinci fairly hard. Monet was a counter culture leader against The Salon in France which prized craft, and execution over more ground breaking attempts like impressionism, so hardly accesible when his entire life was a fight against the culture of the time. Picasso can be called many things, but accesible is not one that comes to mind. Gernika can be considered striking, but cubism, his portraits of women (and their significance), his pottery... there is plenty of his work that needs analysis and is plain ugly on first watch.

> But who will be remembered as being accessible and "serious" from our generation in music?

There will be plenty. Kendrick Lamar won a Pulitzer for his lyrics, to give a simple example his song Swimming Pools about the many faces of alcoholism and its raveging effects on the black community is both a popular song as well as really well written narratively. From the 90s you could easily pull Nirvana for offering grunge as an alternative to the hyper corporate, pro capitalism, runaway train that american political and social life was engaged in, while having incredibly catchy songs. If you wanna go further back Bob Dylan and The Beatles are absolute masters of catchy tunes and powerful lyrics.

You said what felt to be in the present with List? Well you had Lisztomania, an absolute uproar of women turning up to see him. This was mocked/replicated by the beatles with Beatlemania. You could argue the Boy band, Justin Bieber phenomenom was that same effect although the musicality, and the corporate interference shows a darker more manufactured side to the art.

And in terms of art you have incredible art of every type right now, never has art been more accesible or easy to produce. What we are missing is search tools, surfacing interesting works and specially people curating what stuff is good from the muck. But if a tree falls in a forest, it still makes sound and rn there are countless artists dropping trees you just need to perk your ears up

[djtango]

Thanks for the thoughtful reply. I think you've addressed to some degree what I was trying to think around. That art may be difficult to evaluate in its time. Monet may have been a counter culture artist in his time but today he has a somewhat universal appeal. Is that cultural? Are we now primed to like Monet because people have told us to like Monet?

No doubt in his time there were factions, those who pandered to the institution and those who fawned over innovation and originality. I'm sure these cycles occur in every present.

So then what will be remembered from our time? As you say a lot of today's art is esoteric and holding a conversation not all of us are privy to.

I also agree that to some extent we do now have the most art we ever could have. The internet and the creator economy has unlocked creativity in many ways. I recall some discussion the other day about the "hollowing out of the middle" in musical instrument proficiency, and more widely a lot of other skills. Technology and convenience has eradicated a need for many skills at a "mediocre" level but we also have more access to information and learning than ever before.

[Arkhaine_kupo]

> Monet may have been a counter culture artist in his time but today he has a somewhat universal appeal. Is that cultural? Are we now primed to like Monet because people have told us to like Monet?

The counter culture of his time was only because France had tried to make art be controlled from the top down. Part of the enlightenment was related to the idea that you could find "truth" in all forms through discovery like in science. So Aesthetics and language also became Prescriptive, where a central authority says what is right (just like science academy says what is right in science).

English for example is a non prescriptive language and there is no central authority, so english dictionaries describe how english is used not how english should be. France still has an academy of writers who says how French SHOULD be.

In the arts however the Salon failed, because art is not prescriptive and there is no right way to do art. Some people might work tirelessly to make a 200ft tall painting of virgin mary, and some might make a tiny postcard of a boat in their hometown and you cannot tell which one will move you from that description alone.

> So then what will be remembered from our time?

One of the main drivers of quality is influence. Its hard to tell what is good art when seeing it, but in 10 years when everything either looks like that or rejects that or responds to it in some way then that was good art. Bad art is forgotten.

So what will be remembered from our time is easy to know because things like the internet have accelarated cycles. People now get tired and move on to the next thing much faster.

So when people come back to hyper-pop, early, internet aesthetics almost 14 years later you know that it was good art (see 100 gecs, charli xcx, sophie). When more bands start being mysterious, adding lore through internet channels, adding metal and noise influences into hiphop you can tell Death Grips was good art.

In more traditional art you have an entire wave of artists now who are hyper sensible, honest and earnest. This is a rejection of artist like Koons or Hockney with their hyper capitalist "it sells" attitude that dominated post Warhol. That means those were good artist if everyone know wants to not be like them.

What wont be rememebred would be the awful graffitis facebook paid to have in their offices, or the Beeple NFT art that sold for millions at auction. Because it moved no one, it means nothing and it largely for headlines to move stock prices and nothing else. No one even hates that art, its just completely ignored as irrelevant.