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An artwork by Banksy shredded itself after selling for $1.3M at Sotheby’s

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Re: An artwork by Banksy shredded itself after selling for $1.3M at Sotheby’s

#91

Post by tomatocracy »

hueving wrote: post #61
throw0101011 wrote: post #25

Not referring to this specific exhibit but other pieces by a similar artist. Thousands of people can create this kind of paintings for cheap. That it still sells for more than what many people can make in a decade or a career means a stratospheric concentration of wealth in society or a bubble in the commercial art world. If there is real scarcity because of climate change or other widespread disaster, how much can a…

>If there is real scarcity because of climate change or other widespread disaster, how much can a piece of this ‘quality’ be sold for? A loaf of bread, or less? First, if it's just from climate change, it will be gradual increase in scarcity and all kinds of methods of growing food become viable as the price of bread increases. So unless climate change actually makes Banksy undesirable, it will still be worth more lo…

Money is not really a scarce resource though - we can always print more of it. A million dollars spent on an artwork doesn't mean there are a million fewer $1 tins of beans made. That's not how the economy works.

Re: An artwork by Banksy shredded itself after selling for $1.3M at Sotheby’s

#92

Post by mch82 »

throw0101011 wrote: post #25

Not referring to this specific exhibit but other pieces by a similar artist. Thousands of people can create this kind of paintings for cheap. That it still sells for more than what many people can make in a decade or a career means a stratospheric concentration of wealth in society or a bubble in the commercial art world. If there is real scarcity because of climate change or other widespread disaster, how much can a…

Joy also has value and part of being an artist is building an audience

Re: An artwork by Banksy shredded itself after selling for $1.3M at Sotheby’s

#93

Post by throw0101011 »

tomatocracy wrote: post #91
hueving wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>If there is real scarcity because of climate change or other widespread disaster, how much can a piece of this ‘quality’ be sold for? A loaf of bread, or less? First, if it's just from climate change, it will be gradual increase in scarcity and all kinds of methods of growing food become viable as the price of bread increases. So unless climate change actually makes Banksy undesirable, it will still be worth more lo…

Money is not really a scarce resource though - we can always print more of it. A million dollars spent on an artwork doesn't mean there are a million fewer $1 tins of beans made. That's not how the economy works.

An extra million dollar on the piece get spent by many organizations and people involved and increases the production of the resources they want and decreases the allocation of resources to produce things other people want.

Unless they store most of it in a bank somewhere and don’t use it, it has effects on the real economy.

Re: An artwork by Banksy shredded itself after selling for $1.3M at Sotheby’s

#94

Post by TomMarius »

throw0101011 wrote: post #31
emteycz wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is not artifact of any financial system, this would happen even if we had full communism, just illegally and with barter/favor payments. It is artifact of human nature.

With a different kind of accounting, people behaviors may change. The wealthy art consumers want status, prestige, and acceptance as one of the ‘cool’ crowd. Or when buying for investment, they expect some will buy from them for those effects. If we make it much more prestigious and ‘cool’ for people to show off their equivalent donations to starving children, fewer will bid for the drawings and more will donate.

Definitely, but that has nothing to do with the financial system. Actually the current financial system is the only known system able to create fortunes big enough that someone is able to donate anything; and the system enables it, contrary to others that are designed only with citizens in mind. Another problem is that other systems are designed, the one we have now is more or less natural - people will always trade unless they can get everything for free, which is not possible at the moment and probably won't be for the next 50 years at least. A lot of value would be lost if people didn't use money; this value might seem low per transaction, but it's a lot on a country/global scale.

Re: An artwork by Banksy shredded itself after selling for $1.3M at Sotheby’s

#95

Post by smhost »

emteycz wrote: post #83
smhost wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you're actually not making any sense. you're saying that no matter what financial system we have, nothing would change, so there's no point in changing it, and there's no point in not changing it. and if courts and police exist in the way that they exist in our society, then that wouldn't be a stateless society by definition.

I'm saying that changing the financial system will change nothing and there is no point in changing it, yes. Part of the world tried other systems and failed miserably, thus we should focus on education and other social factors instead of trying to fix something that isn't broken (what is broken is the current regulation, not the system itself). Ad communism: That's not true. Have you read anything from the communist…

have you read marx? he didn't have any actual conception of a communist society. and anyway, that's a bit like trying to understand capitalism by only reading adam smith, which would be incoherent.

and it sounds like you're really describing the 20th century model of essentially replacing boards of directors with government officials and calling that communism. and that's the most basic and universal criticism of 20th century communism that marxists have today, which is that that model preserved the internal logic of capitalism by preserving the structures which concentrated (capital) power within a handful of people in the same way that capitalism does, or something like that. and if you're being faithful to marx, none of those are communist societies, it's more like stage zero socialism.

i'm not trying to start a flame war, i was just confused about what you were saying, but i think i understand now.

Re: An artwork by Banksy shredded itself after selling for $1.3M at Sotheby’s

#96

Post by jexah »

Sharlin wrote: post #77
darawk wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Not referring to this specific exhibit but other pieces by a similar artist. Thousands of people can create this kind of paintings for cheap. That it still sells for more than what many people can make in a decade or a career means a stratospheric concentration of wealth in society or a bubble in the commercial art world. Not really. The level of wealth required to reasonably make a purchase like this is what? 20 m…

Two orders of magnitude above something that’s already a ridiculous amount of money globally speaking. That’s not exactly reasonable , the fact that it’s not that much money compared to the real super-rich people is just a reminder of the unfortunate reality of long-tail economy.

You are free to spend your "ridiculous amount of money" however you please. If you don't donate most of what you earn to help starving children, maybe doing that and living just above the poverty line is a good place to start, before advocating that others give up their QoL.

Re: An artwork by Banksy shredded itself after selling for $1.3M at Sotheby’s

#98

Post by anonymfus »

mattbierner wrote: post #71
rapnie wrote: post #18

Big art has been hijacked by big money. Art as an investment vehicle, something to preen yourself with, show others you are elite. This shows the hypocrisy. Unfortunately it will not change anything. The piece has just become more valuable, I predict. Go Banksy. Art for the masses.

This piece was excellently executed but shredding may not have been the best way to make that point (even if it is a good laugh). A few quick thoughts on how this idea could be modified if the goal is to poke at the art market: - Destroy the original completely. This would be difficult as even ashes from burning could be resold and exhibited. I’m also not sure destruction captures the right point. - Reverse the shred…

I think that the more democratic statement would be to not create anything special at all.

Create your art in digital form only. Release it on DeviantArt or on some similar website under CC0. Then say that you would sell "first author's printout" of it or something. As soon as somebody buys it on an auction, you go on the scene with old laptop and cheap printer. You demonstratively go to DuckDuckGo, search for your artwork, open worst quality result from the first page, select "Print..." in Firefox's menu, select worst quality (saying loudly that you want to conserve ink) and press "Start".

Re: An artwork by Banksy shredded itself after selling for $1.3M at Sotheby’s

#99

Post by Novashi »

rapnie wrote: post #18

Big art has been hijacked by big money. Art as an investment vehicle, something to preen yourself with, show others you are elite. This shows the hypocrisy. Unfortunately it will not change anything. The piece has just become more valuable, I predict. Go Banksy. Art for the masses.

>Art as an investment vehicle, something to preen yourself with, show others you are elite.

And something to launder money with.

Re: An artwork by Banksy shredded itself after selling for $1.3M at Sotheby’s

#100

Post by coldtea »

throw0101011 wrote: post #25

Not referring to this specific exhibit but other pieces by a similar artist. Thousands of people can create this kind of paintings for cheap. That it still sells for more than what many people can make in a decade or a career means a stratospheric concentration of wealth in society or a bubble in the commercial art world. If there is real scarcity because of climate change or other widespread disaster, how much can a…

>Not referring to this specific exhibit but other pieces by a similar artist. Thousands of people can create this kind of paintings for cheap.

Art was never about difficulty of reproduction. Once an artwork has been done any hack with 2-3 years of art school can create a great imitation, and with some more talent, even do a Rembrandt or whatever. There are entire cities in China who live by making copies of famous oil paintings.

>That millions of children still starve but a piece of simplistic art is worth more than the value of food a whole village consumes in a decade is a sorry effect of the financial system we use or the way our society assigns ‘coolness’ score to people and activity.

It's the same when a company buys some BS social app like Instagram (mainly an avenue for vanity and time-wasting) for several billion, which could just be used to save millions of lives.

Society was never about goodness or helping the most (and especially not for helping people elsewhere).

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