I want to see more high-street art!

I'm sure this has all been thought out before and I may even be completely mistaken, naive, consciously overlooking status quo's or just delusional. I will probably cringe when I read this over in a few years, but it's all a little new to me, so I write it down to clear it up in my head and see what you all think. Anyway, its for you guys.. all friends and family, so what the heck.

Trying to make a career with something as high-brow as art seems to force us to make a choice between idealistic values and market values. You might make that statement for any industry really, (I used to say working with consulting was corrupting my morals!) but it seems to be more of a big deal in art.

In the afternoons, we have lectures by artists, gallery owners and workers, auction-house people and collectors. These all seem to fall into two distinct groups: those working towards an ideal of Art (note the capital A! Or art for arts sake) and those, more realistic, making a living out of it, while keeping it a luxury product. They’ll sometimes mix up just to make things interesting: a commercial gallery completely devoted to the ideal of art, not at all interested in money (yeah right!) but selling pieces of graffitied walls for 200 thousand pounds. But they would still care for and pay the artists even if they didn't sell. I wanted to ask the lecturer… “But this is a business, right?”

The way they lecture sometimes implies that we’re should make our choice right away and of course, one is somewhat critical and prejudiced of the other, despite one side being completely dependant on the other. So you might have a gallery owner or artist who believes that: all art should be cheap/doesn’t care if money is made/ makes art for the sake of it/follows art movements because of the evolution of art. And you have the money-makers who consider art (specially today) a commodity, influenced by laws of demand and supply, creating secondary markets, indexes and even futures and Hedge-funds!

I'm slowly understanding that the term “secondary market” (i.e. the auction houses) might be a dirty word to a huge part of this industry. Certain galleries will refuse to sell to an investor if his last purchase was turned around on the secondary market too fast. On the one hand, yes, it may affect the value of the work of that artist, who the gallery usually tries to protect. What if it values on the secondary market? Well you don’t get too many people complaining. But the idealists don’t like the idea that the art is subject to market forces to the extent that it is, one way or the other. There’s a really fine balance to maintain an artist’s value, something which seems to take a long time to learn, according to a Christie’s director. Everyone is supposedly against predatory investments of course, but it will always exist, specially when products value so much in so short a time. And, come now... who's complaining?

Anyway, so you have these absurdly idealistic artists and dealers creating and investing in extremely high-brow and conceptual art. And yes, the contemporary art that sells these days is the stuff to which the majority of the population goes “huh?”. It’s the stuff that your 2-year-old could do, or is really gross, or makes no sense, or seems to be more architecture/industry/porn/garbage than art. This art is not for Joe Shmoe. You have to be highly educated and have lots of time to even begin to think about what it all means as well as the time to study it. This art needs studying. Anything past Cubism and to 'get it' you need to 'get' philosophy, pyschology, socio-politics and Nietzsche knows what else.

So by investing in this type of art and so determining that this is the type of art which is worth investment, they're limiting those who would have access to contemporary 'good' art in general. Hmmm, isn’t that at least as, if not more, elitist than say, being able to resell a painting for a few thousand dollars?

Art this elitist seems contradictory to their ideal of art for all & for the sake of art. Take a look at this cool research by Komar and Melamid, which constructed an art-work based on several general features and elements of paintings. The characteristics or elements of a painting most wanted by the average person (in several countries) are completely opposite of what thrills the art world. On the left is the painting that contains all the features most wanted by the public in the US.

Yeah. Ugh. BUT! The cool thing is to see the least wanted painting. This one here:

Looks like something you did in Kindergarten? People want stuff they can understand. Art they don't have to think about too much. They want to be entertained. Could there be any doubt after Hollywood and Nirvana?

That’s why I've been saying: LET it become a consumer product. That’s the world we live in. Someone asked me if I think then that everyone should have a Louis Vuitton handbag. No. There will always be true LV handbags for those who can buy them, and dozens of copies and rip-offs for less. The reason there’s a market for the copies and rip-offs is that Joanna Shmoe sees some celebrity’s handbag and wants one just like it. How do we do the same thing with art? We already have celebrities buying the stuff. Angelina Jolie just spent 1 million dollars or so on a Banksy (street graffiti artist). Now we need the easily accessible copies, rip-offs, or less expensive versions. We need Rock-n-Roll art... well, you could argue that Pop Art is Rock-n-Roll art. Well, we need more of it.. at better prices, on High Street.

And so it seems to be... a return to Pop-art, Art-nouveau, neo-realism... all the stuff you don't need to think about too much to enjoy. There's nothing wrong with that, right? Then, general public buys art, art values as a whole, it gets taught again in schools, artists make more money... snowball effect! Too far? Ok.

I know one of me professors would kick me out of class if I told him this stuff! hehehe The others might give me a wink.