You see, art is an ambiguous thing. Just because you make some art, it doesn't mean that you're an artist... but also it does mean you're an artist. But does it mean that art is good art ? Is art good just because the right people say it's good ? Yes. Yes, that's how it works.

Post modernism wad funded by feds but that doesn't make it wrong or bad it just made it a less dangerous outlet for left leaning people during the time. Warhol was a crap person but his art was essential in mainstreaming ideas about art. He was like a Wes Anderson level guy so you get what you get. I'm not like..a fan but also have to admit he's a huge inspiration to my own artwork through others. Like post modernism in general I've got a weird relationship that I'm working on adequately explaining but that's like, a whole project.

After my giant argument, thst was the thing I needed to see most.

This should be the photo image on Wikipedia for post modern art. It literally is

Warhol actually just fucking sucked and was a fed.

Is me asking that the point

yes

so that rich people and art snobs can look down on the people asking

not really

Warhol's stuff was "controversial" (and eventually famous and stuff) because of this sort of thumbing-your-nose aspect. I mean the original Brillo box is art - an artist designed it to look appealing to consumers, tell you what's in it, make you feel a certain way, etc etc. The Warhol Brillo box is a silkscreened wooden crate. Is that art? Is it Art? Warhol is the champion of pop art, which (if you're being charitable) is one angle to look at lowbrow functional art that's everywhere in our society. To approach from a different angle: I like socialist realism, it's good for schmucks like me who like a simple story: Lenin or the People or whatever are great because they're 9 heads tall and depicted in a cool dynamic pose, and it's pretty, but it is usually not "great" art that makes you think. I see pop art as trying to make us think about whatever intrinsic, lowbrow appeal might be found in consumer art.

Of course Warhol was super good at the art market. Part of the thumbing-your-nose part is that he was making a whole run of these things, they didn't take that much effort. Everything is silkscreened. Critic and buyer alike were aware that these were not that much more special than the version in stores, and yet somehow rich people were (and still are) paying through the nose for a Brillo box. I have a kind of grudging respect for that at least. I think that at some point, the art market is rich buyers paying to be let into the club - by becoming the butt of the joke they are let in on the joke.

Or as Roger Ebert put it,

Andy Warhol comes along with a genuinely new way of looking at things: pop art. He also has a sense of humor and a certain feel for the mood of our times. He was right. We were ready for pop art.

Then a lot of people, mostly from New York, invest large sums of money in Warhol. Once they've done that, they have a vested interest in keeping his stock up. Their interest is all the more frantic since most of them, I suspect, secretly believe Warhol's soup cans are worthless. They lack the wit to see that Warhol's art really is amusing and pertinent.

So they overpromote Andy, who overextends himself

Yeah I'm confused, how are they art? What is the message or feeling or whatever they're trying to convey? I don't really feel anything when I look at a box of cleaning supplies. If I were in this house I would walk past them, maybe accidentally kick the "millions of dollars worth of art" because they would register to me as less than even worth noticing.

But according to some very hot takes from a not-a-fan in this thread, literally every piece of art ever made after Andy Warhol's day directly owes him for existing.

There are a bunch of artists who were doing amazing things, got involved with Warhol and then shit just went bad. Basqiuat is the most egregious though.

Please enlighten me

Jean Baudrillard has some thoughts about private art

It may seem strange to be analyzing the ideological process somewhere other than in the traditional, political or cultural sanctuaries. But the point is precisely that the market for paintings and the auction sale of the work of art permit us to decipher the articulation, and thus the process, of ideological labor because they are situated in the contexts of economic power and the cultural field. The auction, this crucible of the interchange of values, where economic value, sign value and symbolic value transfuse according to the rules of the game, can be considered as an ideological matrix — one of the shrines of the political economy of the sign.

It is a question of decoding the birth of the sign form in the same way that Marx was able to uncover the birth of the commodity form in the Critique of Political Economy. In consumption generally, economic exchange value (money) is converted into sign exchange value (prestige, etc.); but this operation is still sustained by the alibi of use value. By contrast, the auction of the work of art has this notable characteristic: that economic exchange value, in the pure form of its general equivalent, money, is exchanged there for a pure sign, the painting. So it is an experimental terrain, simultaneously collective and institutional, for separating out the operation of this sign value.

The decisive action is one of a simultaneous double reduction — that of exchange value (money) and of symbolic value (the painting as an oeuvre) — and of their transmutation into sign value (the signed, appraised painting as a luxury value and rare object) by expenditure and agonistic competition.

In expenditure, money changes meaning. This fact, established in the auction, can be transferred as a hypothesis to the whole sphere of consumption. The act of consumption is never simply a purchase (reconversion of exchange value into use value); it is also an expenditure (an aspect as radically neglected by political economy as by Marx); that is to say, it is wealth manifested, and a manifest destruction of wealth. It is that value, deployed beyond exchange value and founded upon the latter’s destruction, that invests the object purchased, acquired, appropriated, with its differential sign value. It is not the quantity of money that takes on value, as in the economic logic of equivalence, but rather money spent, sacrificed, eaten up according to a logic of difference and challenge. Every act of purchase is thus simultaneously an economic act and a transeconomic act of the production of differential sign value.

Certainly in everyday consumption the specific (and fundamental) aspects of the auction are largely effaced: the direct experience of competition, the challenge, the agonistic community of peers, etc., which make it such a fascinating moment, the equivalent of poker or the fête. But behind the purchase (or individual reappropriation of use value) there always remains the moment of expenditure, which even in its banality presupposes something of a competition, a wager, a challenge, a sacrifice and thus a potential community of peers and an aristocratic measure of value. Let us not be mistaken: it is this, and not the satisfaction of needs, that occasionally turns consumption into a passion, a fascinating game, something other than functional economic behavior: it becomes the competitive field of the destruction of economic value for the sake of another type of value.

The Art Auction

They treat them like money laundering and tax dodging vehicles.

It makes me feel the same way I do when I compare the designs on the name brand boxes of cereal to the off brand ones. There’s always a weird implication that poor people deserve bad design.

They collect the weirdest shit, too: the personal letters of celebrities, Gutenberg bibles, stolen Egyptian art.

So, so much nazi shit

The absolute conviction with which you are wrong is really something. Like, fuck Warhol as a person. Fuck the art he made too if you don't like it. That's all fine. But it is art. Effort does not enter into it.

Art does not have to take effort lol wtf

Art isn't when technically skilled