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The $2M Urinal: Why Hard Work Doesn’t Cut It (2018)

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Re: The $2M Urinal: Why Hard Work Doesn’t Cut It (2018)

#81

Post by nkurz »

duado wrote: post #57
drcode wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you provide documentation for these supposed tax benefits? (I'm genuinely curious) AFAIK there are no tax benefits at the point of buying the art, and cap gains benefits are no different than stocks, real estate, etc.

The end goal is that everything gets donated and written off. Here's the basic scheme: * 10 rich guys buy 100 paint splotch canvases from a dude who wears black and smokes cigarettes * they keep 90 canvases in their basement and sell 10 of them back and forth to each other for increasing sums of money, paying taxes along the way * when the prices are at $20 million per painting, they donate all of them, including the…

It's an interesting theory, but I'm not sure the details work. If the goal is making lots of money, and one is able to pump up the price of an artists works by 1000%, wouldn't one come out farther ahead by selling (at least a few) of the paintings to outsiders, rather than donating all of them?

While it seems possible that flooding the market with all 100 paintings at once might crash the price down more than the tax writeoff is worth, it seems unlikely that this would happen on the first sale. The counterargument would have to be that there doesn't actually exist any outsider who would pay anything close to the claimed value for the work.

Another odd aspect of this is that once individuals own a substantial numbers of works by an artist, it's in their interest to keep the price high for that artist's works. So if a new painting comes up for auction, they would benefit by never allowing it to be sold for a low price --- even if that means "overpaying" for the new painting. So maybe the end game is that the minority owners start to sell, knowing that the majority owners have to buy, and only after all the works have single ownership (with a record of high sales prices) sales does the donation scheme happen.

Interesting. I presume others have analyzed these strategies in depth?

Re: The $2M Urinal: Why Hard Work Doesn’t Cut It (2018)

#82

Post by duado »

tomp wrote: post #58
duado wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The end goal is that everything gets donated and written off. Here's the basic scheme: * 10 rich guys buy 100 paint splotch canvases from a dude who wears black and smokes cigarettes * they keep 90 canvases in their basement and sell 10 of them back and forth to each other for increasing sums of money, paying taxes along the way * when the prices are at $20 million per painting, they donate all of them, including the…

This implies that donated art basically has an arbitrary valuation (set by "experts" based on some not really free or transparent "market"). Is this true? How is this handled for other assets?

If Pierre's paintings are being exchanged regularly by a bunch of hedge fund guys for $20 million each, isn't $20 million the market price of a different, arbitrary, painting from Pierre?

It isn't really a problem for other assets because they don't have the museum donation market that's key to the scheme working. You can't find a charity who is looking for superyacht donations.

Re: The $2M Urinal: Why Hard Work Doesn’t Cut It (2018)

#83

Post by rhombocombus »

umvi wrote: post #74
paganel wrote: post #67

Whenever people discuss about contemporary art I get reminded of these incredibly poignant Soviet war paintings [1] which manage to partially describe what the atrocities on the Eastern Front meant for the people involved, but which are nevertheless a lot less well-known compared to contemporary art "darlings" like Jackson Pollock whose works don't tell me absolutely anything and who had his career propped up by the…

Obviously very subjective, but modern art seems like a case of emperor's new clothes to me, a humble engineer. When I was in college I would see art around campus take the form of random metal shapes welded together, concrete blobs, or Pollock-esque splatters and shake my head. How can you judge a category of art for which there are no rules? I can look at Michelangelo's "The David" and be awed to the core at how he…

Anybody could do it, but they didn't and you didn't either. It's really easy to bag on any art with that line of reasoning, but the fact of the matter is that art lives in time and space, and at the time that piece was made nobody else did it, and readymade had a colossal influence on every other aspect of modern art (and even design) that came after that. It's easy to dismiss it as a urinal with marker when you ignore the context in which it was created and presented and the influence it had on other art, much of which is universally regarded as beautiful.

Re: The $2M Urinal: Why Hard Work Doesn’t Cut It (2018)

#84

Post by omnimus »

umvi wrote: post #74
paganel wrote: post #67

Whenever people discuss about contemporary art I get reminded of these incredibly poignant Soviet war paintings [1] which manage to partially describe what the atrocities on the Eastern Front meant for the people involved, but which are nevertheless a lot less well-known compared to contemporary art "darlings" like Jackson Pollock whose works don't tell me absolutely anything and who had his career propped up by the…

Obviously very subjective, but modern art seems like a case of emperor's new clothes to me, a humble engineer. When I was in college I would see art around campus take the form of random metal shapes welded together, concrete blobs, or Pollock-esque splatters and shake my head. How can you judge a category of art for which there are no rules? I can look at Michelangelo's "The David" and be awed to the core at how he…

With invention of photography artists realized that there is no reason to depict reality anymore. But they also realized that there is much more happening than watching image. It is whole experience of contexts, mood of place and the way how the art is shown and all kinds of subtle things.

It is not about what anyone can physically do nor if it's easy or hard. It is about the ideas and navigating culture and finding interesting connections. It is opposite of random.

It's like saying "But this textfile with some wierd file extension? Anyone with no skill can write random characters on keyboard and call it programming"

Don't get me wrong i hate contemporary art but there are many interesting and important ideas coming out of it.

It's just not made for general public anymore. And people in that bubble don't care. That type of art was replaced by tattoos, illustrators, photographers and even popular movies/games etc.

Re: The $2M Urinal: Why Hard Work Doesn’t Cut It (2018)

#85

Post by elif »

umvi wrote: post #74
paganel wrote: post #67

Whenever people discuss about contemporary art I get reminded of these incredibly poignant Soviet war paintings [1] which manage to partially describe what the atrocities on the Eastern Front meant for the people involved, but which are nevertheless a lot less well-known compared to contemporary art "darlings" like Jackson Pollock whose works don't tell me absolutely anything and who had his career propped up by the…

Obviously very subjective, but modern art seems like a case of emperor's new clothes to me, a humble engineer. When I was in college I would see art around campus take the form of random metal shapes welded together, concrete blobs, or Pollock-esque splatters and shake my head. How can you judge a category of art for which there are no rules? I can look at Michelangelo's "The David" and be awed to the core at how he…

I too find myself in constant awe when in the presence of renaissance masters. I can't stop returning because italy is dripping with it every where you turn, constantly full of awe-inspiring surprises. In terms of workmanship, there is nothing since which compares to even the 10th-best basilica in rome.

But I don't appreciate those nearly as much as I do no-named postmodern pieces, even procedurally-generated ones. There are so many curious layers of questions that arise when staring into the abstract and being left to your own perception to pull out appreciable components. So much to wonder about the artist, his intentions, and his chaotic vision or process. It is far deeper than masterful material work.

Considering how absolutely we are able to control materials these days, particularly now that atomic-level artificial composition is within our power, I find the questions of what? why? why not? or even lol wtf? far more appetizing to modern curiosity.

Re: The $2M Urinal: Why Hard Work Doesn’t Cut It (2018)

#86

Post by omnimus »

wazoox wrote: post #32

Contemporary art is a sophisticated form of money laundering for the very rich. As it almost completely exempt from taxation, it's an ideal vehicle, relatively fungible and open to crazy speculation. The crazy financiarisation of our world made many collectible objects prices skyrocket (see old cars, art, etc). But Contemporary art is the best of all, because, contrary to ancient art or old ferraris, its supply is un…

You are not wrong. But people making / selling art are not doing it for that purpose. People buying it? Not all but probably many.

Re: The $2M Urinal: Why Hard Work Doesn’t Cut It (2018)

#88

Post by ddebernardy »

wazoox wrote: post #32

Contemporary art is a sophisticated form of money laundering for the very rich. As it almost completely exempt from taxation, it's an ideal vehicle, relatively fungible and open to crazy speculation. The crazy financiarisation of our world made many collectible objects prices skyrocket (see old cars, art, etc). But Contemporary art is the best of all, because, contrary to ancient art or old ferraris, its supply is un…

To those might be thinking that demand probably isn't unlimited, it's true. But art is a business where demand doesn't quite work as one would normally understand it.

(Anecdotal.) I once was sitting next to a professional art dealer on a Eurostar. He gave me a hilarious primer on how his business worked as we made our way to Paris. In short, art demand is to a very large extent driven only by what's on display at the art dealers' places during their exclusive parties. A good way to think about this is that art dealers are opinion leaders and create new art trends as they see fit à la Devil Wears Prada.

Re: The $2M Urinal: Why Hard Work Doesn’t Cut It (2018)

#89

Post by kd0amg »

nkurz wrote: post #81
duado wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The end goal is that everything gets donated and written off. Here's the basic scheme: * 10 rich guys buy 100 paint splotch canvases from a dude who wears black and smokes cigarettes * they keep 90 canvases in their basement and sell 10 of them back and forth to each other for increasing sums of money, paying taxes along the way * when the prices are at $20 million per painting, they donate all of them, including the…

It's an interesting theory, but I'm not sure the details work. If the goal is making lots of money, and one is able to pump up the price of an artists works by 1000%, wouldn't one come out farther ahead by selling (at least a few) of the paintings to outsiders, rather than donating all of them? While it seems possible that flooding the market with all 100 paintings at once might crash the price down more than the tax…

wouldn't one come out farther ahead by selling (at least a few) of the paintings to outsiders, rather than donating all of them?

GP's suggestion seems to be that non-conspirators would not actually be willing to pay that much -- a bit like a pump-and-dump scheme, but only the IRS gets duped.

Re: The $2M Urinal: Why Hard Work Doesn’t Cut It (2018)

#90

Post by InitialLastName »

umvi wrote: post #74
paganel wrote: post #67

Whenever people discuss about contemporary art I get reminded of these incredibly poignant Soviet war paintings [1] which manage to partially describe what the atrocities on the Eastern Front meant for the people involved, but which are nevertheless a lot less well-known compared to contemporary art "darlings" like Jackson Pollock whose works don't tell me absolutely anything and who had his career propped up by the…

Obviously very subjective, but modern art seems like a case of emperor's new clothes to me, a humble engineer. When I was in college I would see art around campus take the form of random metal shapes welded together, concrete blobs, or Pollock-esque splatters and shake my head. How can you judge a category of art for which there are no rules? I can look at Michelangelo's "The David" and be awed to the core at how he…

Modernism in the arts has a bit of a path-dependency problem that tends to intentionally obscure the "artistic value" of the bleeding edge from the uninitiated, but which can make the art more meaningful to those who are familiar with the context.

I'll use jazz as an example, since I'm most familiar with that history. You can start with something as approachable, if disorganized as "Jelly Roll Blues"[0], and polish the genre into "Take the A Train" [1] as it became more generally popular. After that, though, the bleeding edge of the genre self-protects itself away from the common ear by growing increasingly obscure, with bop [2], modal jazz [3], free jazz [4??] becoming progressively less approachable to the uninitiated ear, to the point that the the unfamiliar ear can hear the latter and find itself unable to recognize even as "music", while someone familiar with the genre can see the path and appreciate the work in context.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zt203us6TME

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cb2w2m1JmCY

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z2tvlp7RnlM

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hwmRQ0PBtXU

[4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ll3CMgiUPuU

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