The Importance of Being Unimportant

The Importance of Being Unimportant - The Brooklyn Rail: "From a commercial perspective, for the most part, there are two groups of people in the world: those who buy art for investment and those who buy art because they like it. I’ve met many collectors who bastardize this statement, claiming they “like to invest in good art.” Speculating on art is fine—it’s a free country—but treating art exclusively as a commodity hurts the market in innumerable ways, which I won’t go into except to say that it has been instrumental in raising prices to a point at which 2000 people in the world support the careers of 200 artists. Most critics believe that it isn’t their duty to follow the money in the system, only to maintain critical vigilance and to separate the good art from the bad art. The only problem is, over the course of the last 20 years we’ve watched “bad” work somehow turn into “sensational” work, “sensational” turn to “provocative,” “provocative” into “important,” and “important” back into “good.” It’s a collecting world’s semantic shell game."