[Serious] The pants that is free-verse

[Belacqua]

much rubbish is attention-seeking, and the best way to propagate it is to be lazy and/or shocking.

I think the trouble with contemporary art, as with so much else, is capitalism. Although the decline in religion hasn't helped things any.

As Marx taught, value in capitalism can be evaluated in two ways: through use value or through exchange value. Use value is just obviously the amount of use you can get out of a thing, and once upon a time prices were determined largely by this. A useful item had value. A well-made hammer gave more use over time, so it cost more. 

Now, though, use value is largely divorced from exchange value, which is basically just price. So the price of things is no longer pegged to the use we get from them, but simply to what people are willing to pay. And clever capitalists know how to get us to pay a lot. 

So for example a 5-cent plastic bag from the supermarket will carry as much as a $5000 purse, but people are willing to pay the $5000 for status. The use value is the same for both items, but the exchange value is wildly different. 

And the ideal for a capitalist is to sell a product that cost nothing to manufacture but has the highest possible exchange value. And that's where art comes in. It can cost zero in labor costs and material, but sell for millions. And artists know this. In olden times, an artist's medium was paint on canvas or marble -- that's what they manipulated to make an object valuable. But today the most famous artists just manipulate exchange value itself. Exchange value is their medium. If there is genius involved, it is in figuring out how to make a little bit of nothing worth as much money as possible. That's why Banksy, for example, is a kind of genius. Because he makes banal worthless stenciled pictures, but makes them sell for zillions. 

The infamous bed you mentioned is a good example. That artist, and the guy who pickled the shark, got famous because Europe's biggest advertising man got a lot of attention for buying them. He made sure everybody noticed that he was buying. And just this attention made the prices of those artists go up. And then after the prices went up he sold everything and made a fortune. It wasn't even subtle. The works are worthless in any conventional sense, but they serve sort of like stock certificates that you keep in a safe deposit box. They are tokens of exchange value. 

This is the kind of age we live in, so this is the sort of art we deserve. Exchange value is the only way we have of assigning value to something. And everything has to be quantified, but the only way to quantify art is according to what it sold for. We're stuck with it.