[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.

[dghlsakjg]

I'll do it. But not for less than $12mm

[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.

[BobbyTables2]

Yeah, not sure what is worse.

- that buyer didn’t get a real banana. Should have a lifetime supply for that price!

or

- Robert Ryman was exhibited in the Orangerie Museum and compared to Monet (in the equivalent sense).

The bulk of Ryman’s art is a plain white canvas. Not a single dot. Not even a frame. Textured drywall painted with bargain white paint is far more interesting…

My drywall contractor should be a billionaire…

[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?

[llamaimperative]

Again, I have no clue whether this banana falls into this category, but generically and hyper-simplified: you have dirty money in a high-scrutiny jurisdiction, you buy a piece of art for $10MM, you move that piece of art to a more permissive jurisdiction and sell it for $8MM. That buyer gets a good deal and you just mostly cleaned $10MM for 20% in one transaction, which you can then layer into its now-local (permissive) economy for further cleaning before pulling it back out, apparently legitimately, to whatever jurisdiction you want.

You've avoided an international (currency) transaction of $10MM which would be flagged by pretty much every authority with oversight. Just two high-value domestic art sales, which happen all the time.

[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