A close friend of mine recently posed a question regarding the high price of fine art. As most of us have, at one point or another, he had perused some art galleries and gone into sticker shock. Why, he wondered aloud, does art cost so much? Is it worth it or is it a scam?
Well, here’s my opinion:
No. That piece of “Fine Art” you’re looking at is not worth the sticker price…
…but supporting the Fine Art world is worth every penny.
What isn’t clear to many people is that the art world functions under a completely different set of rules than the rest of society. There are many of us who consider ourselves artists. We make our living doing graphic design, concept art, game development, or whatever else. The art that we make is commercial – i.e. it is meant to be sold; ideally at a high price and many times. Nearly every decision we make in its creation is governed by money. From the very moment we come up with an idea, we ask ourselves, “Can I sell this?” That doesn’t mean that the art we make is of any less value or that we invest ourselves into it any less – all it means is that what we finally make at the end of the day is influenced primarily by what other people want. That’s why it’s called popular art.
It’s a pragmatic issue. It makes no sense to us to devote years of our lives slaving over a piece of art, however lovely and meaningful, that will not support us financially at the end of the day. We see the tradeoff as worthwhile – we may work under constraints mandated by those who fund us or those who consume our art, but we make very good money and, at the end of the day, we get to be creative instead of bagging groceries.
Being a fine artist is very, very different.
In my career, like most other AAA game developers, I count my successes in the millions of sales. My most crushing, abject failure sold 130,000 copies. These sorts of numbers stand in stark contrast to those of fine artists.
Many fine artists sell very few pieces over the course of a year. They may sell only one piece a month, often fewer. But that doesn’t mean that they only MAKE one piece per month. No, they may make dozens of pieces. They can burn through supplies and media, generating hundreds of pieces that go unsold. Van Gogh was regularly borrowing money from his brother for paint.
Now, the conventional wisdom among those of us who work in the commercial world (read: the real world) is that these artists are stupid for making stuff that people won’t buy. They should be doing their market research and determining how they can leverage their talent and resources to create something marketable.
This is not the point of the fine art world.
When I was young, my mother gave me a book called Frederick. It was a gorgeously illustrated paperback about a field-mouse who appears to be doing nothing while all the other mice are busily preparing for winter.
When winter comes, they all huddle down in their burrow, pressed together for warmth. As the winter wears on, and the food supplies run low, they become despondent. When they are at their lowest, able to think of nothing but cold and dark and hunger, Frederick speaks up. He tells them to close their eyes as he describes, in vivid detail, the warmth, beauty, and color of a summer afternoon. He regales them with stories of the summer to come and the passing of winter. He recites poetry that he has been composing all summer long. He occupies their minds and fills their souls, while their bodies suffer.
The point of being a fine artist is to be completely unfettered by the constraints and expectations of society; to be free to make what you want, to explore the boundaries of artistic expression, unworried about what others might think. The point of fine art is to show people things that they never would have thought of on their own — things that they don’t have the time or energy or perspective to consider because they are so focused on their daily struggle for survival. Fine art pulls us out of our mental loops. It holds up a mirror to society and shows what it looks like from the outside. By its very nature, fine art must exist outside our expectations. It has to come from what is, essentially, a parallel universe where marketability, profit, and demographics don’t exist. Pop art or, as some call it, kitsch, is about working within constraints; fine art is about having none.
If Frederick had been focused on survival — forced to spend time gathering food all summer like the other mice, he would not have had the time or the will to observe the world around them. We need artists to remind us why life is worth living.
Now, there’s a lot of bad fine art out there which gives the institution a bad name. There are a lot of untalented, egotistical, decadent auteurs. Deliberately separating yourself from society at large and working on your own, singular vision inherently contains a danger of extreme narcissism. Those egotistical divas who crank out worthless drivel are what I would consider “acceptable losses.” There will always be noise in the system – people taking advantage of a loophole that allows them to feel superior and important without proving themselves in any meaningful way. These people are often the most visible, unfortunately, but they are not the point of the fine art world.
The point of the fine art world is to foster an environment where, once in a blue moon, a supremely talented artist can rise to the top and create a great piece of sublime art which, upon contemplation, alters our notions about the human condition.
Hundreds, thousands, TENS of thousands of artists and art pieces must be created in order to generate those precious few that advance humanity as a whole. It’s a massive, distributed system. By buying art at high prices, you’re essentially funding this microcosm — this alternate reality that has no real right to exist in a money-driven society. You’re allowing this great, swirling mass of unconstrained creativity to churn away until an epiphany is reached. You’re subsidizing all of those pieces that don’t sell and allowing fine artists to continue to live that unique way of life. It’s not that the individual piece of art itself is worth that much, it’s that you believe that it’s worth it to humanity for there to be some people out there who are free to spend their life devoted to creating — free of society’s constraints.
Some contemporaries of Van Gogh’s felt that he was wasteful and decadent for using so much paint — sometimes squeezing it directly onto the canvas from the tube.
Have you seen how much oil paints cost? A single tube of a single color costs between $3 and $20. When you realize how thick the paint is on a Van Gogh, the mind reels at the raw cost of the materials. Van Gogh started painting late in life. His first painting was made in 1881, at the age of 28. He subsequently made 864 paintings in the 9 years before he killed himself. His earlier works use paint conservatively; later ones use enormous volumes of paint but few total numbers of pigments. I’m fudging the numbers pretty hard here, but let’s assume a career average of 5 unique tubes of paint per completed painting, fully consumed. At a median price of $9 per tube in today’s dollars, that comes to nearly $40,000 in paint alone over his strikingly short career. That’s almost $4,500 per year, not including brushes, canvas, stretcher bars, easels, palettes, turpentine, pencils or charcoal, sketchbooks, jaunty berets, etc. Even if you take issue with my math, you get the point — these supplies cost a lot. The most well-off among us would balk at that sort of annual expenditure, and Van Gogh could hardly be called that.
He only sold one, single painting before he died.
He was told by some that he should manage his supplies better and develop an art style that was more budget-conscious. Of course, that would have completely destroyed the texture of his art. Instead, he literally starved himself and spent every cent he had on art supplies. One need only look at his later self-portraits to see how emaciated he was; how much he suffered for his art. It is only because his brother subsidized him that Van Gogh was able to break free of the artistic norms at the time and develop a completely new, beautifully energetic method of painting.
When I buy art, I do it as a statement — I want people who do this sort of thing to exist, so I consider it a charitable contribution to an imagined foundation that supports the existence of art and the artist lifestyle. What a horrifying world it would be if everyone was like me and let their artistic expression be dictated by the desires of the masses and our corporate overlords.
So the next time you see a painting selling for $5,000 –- remember that it may be the only painting the artist successfully sells at that show. An artist can sell a piece at that price and still live in poverty. If you like it and you buy it, remember that you’re paying for all those pieces that never got a gallery showing; or that showed but never sold. You’re paying for all those other artists who shared a run-down loft with this artist on skid-row; who may never become successful but who contributed to the existence of a world that the artist whose work you enjoy could inhabit. You’re paying not for the art itself but to support the artist continuing to live that bohemian life. If they sell several pieces at high prices, then good for them! If, by some miracle, the art world decides within their lifetime that they produce desirable art, even better; that pot of gold at the end of the rainbow will encourage more people to take a chance on a challenging and unconventional lifestyle.
A single painting may not really be worth five grand, but that’s not what you’re buying. You’re buying the very existence of a support system for genuinely free expression.
In my opinion, that’s a bargain.
