5 ideas
In November 1987 the Australian financier Alan Bond bought Van Gogh's 'Irises' at Sotheby's for $53.9 million, then a world record for a painting. This record was then used as a benchmark to value other pictures, which makes the sale a concrete case of an art price being manufactured rather than discovered.
Once art becomes an investment asset, its price becomes the main fact the public knows about it and the main proof of its importance. Collectors buy trophies and signals of status, and museums and the press amplify auction records. As a result, the question of whether a work is actually good gets pushed out by the question of what it is worth.
In the 1980s boom, dealers, collectors and magazines turned young painters into stars before any critical consensus had formed, and sold their work on waiting lists. Early celebrity locks an artist into repeating a marketable manner and removes the slow period of failure and growth that real ability needs. The market therefore consumes talent rather than nurturing it.
Criticism is worth something only if it is willing to say that one work is better than another and why. It must refuse the relativism that treats every new trend as equally valid and the promotional role the market wants critics to play. A critic who cannot say no gives readers no information.
A strong painting carries physical evidence of prolonged, effortful looking: revisions, resistance, and the time spent on each decision. This is why a painting can hold a viewer in a way that fast, mass-produced media images cannot. Skill and craft matter not as virtuosity but as proof that attention was actually paid.