This week I saw a film of a Chinese family who make endless copies of van Gogh paintings for the likes of Wall Mart. In one scene an order for 800 copies of one of his flower paintings was being met and the discussion was about quality of brush work. What van Gogh might have had to say is anyone’s guess. Then again, there is nothing new about making copies nor of people who mistake the hanging of a copy on their wall as culture. Even in van Gogh’s time there was a copyist industry of old masters although no one was copying Vincent.

I well remember the prints sold in pharmacies and department stores during my youth and the pride owners took in having a piece of ‘art’ hanging over the fireplace such as the much- loved Haywain by Constable the English painter of nostalgic landscapes.  There was also a portrait by Vladimir Tretchikoff Miss Wong, an exotic Chinese woman which seemed to be everywhere. For the people who bought such prints there was a sincere recognition and appropriation of ‘culture’, although few would have ventured into an art gallery or listened to music that wasn’t churned out as pop using the same structure, chord patterns and cheesy lyrics but still quoted Beethoven as the greatest composer ever.  This was culture at second hand and just close enough not to be threatening. However, there was general agreement that the basis for culture was recognisable and determined as much by precedent and history as anything else. A definition of culture could be as follows

  …the quality in society a or person that arises from a concern for what is regarded as excellent in arts, letters, manners, scholarly pursuits….

Of course, the meaning of the term ‘excellence’ depends upon context. Something else I recall from my youth was a debate as to whether Eric Clapton or Segovia was the better guitarist. Opinion was divided but at least there was debate about value however dubious the criteria for judgement might have been.

Seventy years down the track and the idea of measuring critical and aesthetic value has been replaced by financial and investment value through sale prices at auction houses.  Given the ever-shifting clay of financial markets, such value judgements have no basis in reality.

Understanding how value is generated in the world of art is complicated. There is a dichotomy at work. Aesthetic value is seen as different than use value, making art a different kind of commodity. The value of a painting in aesthetic terms can be completely divorced from the value placed upon it by the market forces. In more ‘traditional’ times, although working out just when that time existed has become increasingly fraught with difficulties, the monetary value assigned to an artwork derived from a consensus of curators, artists, collectors, critics, art historians, and museum directors. Whether they were right or wrong to have agreed that one artist was superior to another [only to contradict themselves a generation later] at least there were critical benchmarks to organize value around.

This system has its flaws – a self-appointed elite for one – but in spite of these flaws, there has always been an understanding that aesthetic value and financial value go hand in hand.

Enter the 21st century and we see a new mode of value-making.  Aesthetics and criticality are replaced by the accumulation of data used to identify trends in the market for the sole purpose of financial gain. Value-making in art now derives from notions of profit by art-world influencers whose raison d’etre is not based on training or decades of experience, but rather on the number of their followers in a fan-based economy. The once much-loved prints of my youth whose popularity depended on ‘keeping up with the jones’ and ensuring that everyone had a similar piece of culture hanging over the fireplace, were sold by Boots the Chemist.  Boots himself was an abstraction but whoever he was, he was the original influencer of the 60s in the same largely anonymous way the record label sages who ran the music industry of the sixties and beyond dictated taste, and the brigade of ‘middle aged white males’ who oversaw the art industry until recent times and decided who was worth promoting.

The distinction between mass culture and Culture still remains but Art collecting may well devolve into day trading and gambling. The NFT is an indicator. What changed hands in the primary market for 70 million has netted its creator Beeple at least 50 million subsequently and speculators are looking warily at trends that may devalue it to the point of pointlessness. It isn’t even art so much as 5000 appropriated images and yet the philosophy behind the sale, that the market and the aesthetic are separate, potentially influences the careers of all artists. There is only the immediate in trading terms and while Boots the Chemist stretched the idea of ‘now’ with endless reprintings of Miss Wong, even today a print in pristine condition sells on Ebay for a matter of a few hundred dollars and no one is seriously claiming it as culture let alone an investment and yet a lot of people may still have one stashed away in a loft or basement.

Depending what you read, this era could be seen as the terminal point of a cycle of humanity that will end in climate-induced cataclysm, just as so many others have done previously. Measuring the value of culture as simply a product and function of induced economic forces driven by prediction data is something else – perhaps the beginning of the end of artists having any control over their destinies unless they employ an influencer whose primary research tool is Tik Tok.