"Con" - temporary Art It seems that every year new art fairs and nee biennales are launched and pose as the new big thing, but givent that, it is apt to ask the following question. Do you think contemporary art has aesthetic longevity?
Owning art, living with art and taking part in the art world by being a collector are always inspiring and enrich our lives, but how do we know that we are buying the right kind of art? Have you ever thought that some of the players in the art world are deceptive? Or if deceptive sounds too strong, I would say that they are focusing too much on the wrong point? If the shelf life of artworks that we are collecting is very short, are we, as collectors are "temporarily conned" by them? Exchange value and the use value (aesthetic value) Karl Marx’s famous division of value shows that there are exchange value and use value of commodities. In the case of art, the use value can be synonymous with aesthetic value. How many collectors are there who confuse the exchange value with the aesthetic value? Be careful with con artists who are more talented in manipulating the exchange value of artworks than creating aesthetically interesting artworks. I have seen artists that spend more time on the phone and the internet than dealing with beauty of lines, forms and colours, trying to express their ideas and emotions through their craft. My experience with those who are good at marketing and promoting themselves instead of being true artists made me think about why I started painting in the first place. The exchange value of art can easily be disguised as the aesthetic value. We often think, "this piece of art is very expensive so it must be an excellent work of art." "I do not understand how good this piece is, but people say it's good and it has an expensive price tag attached and being shown in a prestigious gallery, so it must be good." There is an arbitrary relationship between the exchange value and use value. The exchange value is determined more within the relationship between supply and demand than in relation to the use value of objects. In other words, if a seller can create a high volume of demands for the objects (commodities), it can successfully increase the exchange value, while being absolutely independent of the use value (the aesthetic value) of the commodities. Furthermore, it rather appears to be that at the moment there is almost no connection between the exchange value and the aesthetic value, and only eagerness to increase the exchange value of artworks without any consideration to the aesthetic value has been heavily exercised in the contemporary art world. We all know by now that the expansion of mass consumerism and the development of mass production were interrelated and mutually dependent upon each other. The emergence of the powerful advertisement industry, for example, typifies its function as an intensive to create further demands for mass consumption. The more commodities are mass-produced, which necessitated the manipulation of consumers' minds and fuelling their desires for consumption through crafty and highly creative advertisement, the stronger the demand for those products becomes. The disillusionments planted by the promotions and the advertisements in the minds of consumers results in the loss of their subjectivity, but gained instead, the collective subjectivity that only desires further consumption. While this type of tend has been revised and more heed has been paid to the quality of products and services, the old regime has been employed in the world of contemporary art. Once consumers (collectors like us) understand this mechanism, they will focus more to aesthetically sustainable works of art. In light of this arbitrary process of determining the exchange value in relation to the aesthetic value, we need a set of criteria that allows us to quickly assess the sustainability of artworks. How to assess the aesthetic value “It must be good, because people say it’s good, or it is expensive.” It is a very common trap that people fall into. A simple assessment of the aesthetic value of artworks is to examine: whether an artwork is authentic or not, in other words, whether it's done by the artist or his assistants; if you can see an interesting technique or skill in it, moreover if you can see artist's craft, mastery and artistry being present; if you find interesting ideas in it that are thought provoking. These are the simplest and quickest assessment of how good an artwork is and prevent people from running into con artists. The role of art is to make people think about things, emotionally provoke and help people have a glimpse of the definition of their being. We do not want to buy art that do not serve those functions in the realm of aesthetics and ethics. Artists provide apparatuses to counter the tendency to lack those two in the global capitalism so that our society becomes more balanced and healthier. The permeation of the global capitalism in our lives is inevitable, just like a drop of red ink in clear water. We have witnessed the failures of Marxist predictions after seeing: severe poverty in the limited countries that adopted the idealistic ideology, and the emergence of trade unions and non-profit organisations. The art market is still premature and utterly unregulated. As much as the inherent quality and the sustainability of businesses are crucial to the long-term investment, the intrinsic quality of artworks needs far more attention to be paid. Sustainability Do let those “con-temporary” deceive you, because you won't notice that you have been conned unless you have a set of criteria to assess the quality of the pieces. I never liked Rubens' late works because they are mostly done by his assistants, not the artist himself. He became the con artist who put his paintbrush down and picked up a calculator. Paintings by Vermeer, on the other hand, fulfil the aforementioned criteria. He only painted scenes of commoners’ everyday life, often called genre painting, disavowing painters’ duty of that time to paint grandios biblical scenes. Hence, the question is, which type of art would you like to own, pieces by those who are aiming at the short-term gain and focusing profoundly on only the temporary values of artworks, or those who endeavours to narrow a disparity between the exchange value and the aesthetic value? What is at stake here is not the critique of the contemporary art market being commercially driven, but the condemnation of short-sighted collectors and artists whose artworks are prone to a loss in their values in the near future. Even if collectors see artworks as investments, greater heed should be paid to the longevity of the equities as much as in the stock markets. Why not it applies to art? If one strives to see works' intrinsic aesthetic values, it is likely to maintain the exchange values in the long run as well. A common trait between prominent artists, such as Leonard, Picasso and Gerhard Richer is that their work has longevity of both the economic values and the aesthetic values equally. It is precisely due to the fact that their work is authentic (done by artists), showing culmination of a marriage between the technical mastery and thought-provoking ideas. Reproducibility, a lack of authenticity, the absence of techniques are catalysts for the rapid deterioration of both values. "Temporal con", the culprit of the deception is a force driven by short-sightedness to conceal a lack and the absence of aesthetic value. Indeed, nowadays we see emergence of young artists, perhaps still in their 20s in the art market, who are more keen on matters outside creating art and aesthetic innovations. To cultivate a capacity to be able to produce art at the highest level, it is undoubtedly a time-consuming process. Nonetheless, artists cannot not skip the apprenticeship as it's a vital component of their maturing process. We have to also be aware of how committed the artists are and his track record of the commitment. This is the key to the sustainability in the values of the economic, as well as the aesthetic values. Emanuel Kant argues in the crest of his philosophical enquiries, "Critique of Judgement", particularly in the first chapter, "Critique of aesthetic judgement", when one experiences an aesthetic pleasure, the intensity in details of the objects reveals itself, which activates a faculty in the beholder to feel a delight and a pleasure. It also ushers the beholder to a feeling of being alive, allowing her to have a glimpse of her being. When the intensity that Kant refers to reveals itself to you, it's probably time to consider owning the piece.
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