High-end art is one of the most manipulated markets (2013)
qz.com
qz.com
[1] https://mobile.nytimes.com/2013/05/13/arts/design/art-proves...
BTW, for those implying artists benefit the most: galleries often make the bigger share of any sale they're involved in, with commissions ranging anyhere from 50-70% or more. Plus, auction house premiums are often at least 20%, leaving less of profit for seller (after subtracting original purchase price).
Art sales are taxable.
It's a vehicle for tax write offs and laundering.
When $X is $REAL_LIVE_MONEYDOLLARS, yes.
When $X is $ARTWORK_THAT_I_CLAIM_IS_WORTH_10M, which I bought for not 10M but 1M, but got "appraised" at 10M, what did I just do? Pay $1M for $10M of tax writeoffs.
Even better, the charity is run by some politician's friends or relatives, and you pay $X indeed, but you're basically buying several favors (plus special cuts and treatment that's worth more than 10 * X).
“You have to know what you’re looking for” is both correct and misleading. The thing you’re looking is predominantly a record of aristocratic relations. This was not always the case, but it is very much is now.
The way to view it is as a bubble. It’s a bubble based on the notion that common people cannot be trusted to evaluate art. This claim does hold water, but it was historically based on cultural intelligence which is no longer synonymous with capital wealth.
The average art history knowledge an art investor has is fairly superficial, which is probably best, because the market could care less about theory and critique.
Art can still be valuable without such gatekeeping and often fraud-inducing secrecy. Art is intrinsically valuable in the eye of the beholder (based on whatever reasons attracts them to it).
One shouldn't have to know what one is looking for beforehand, as long as one recognizes it on sight and decides to acquire it. The serendipitous journey to discovering your taste or buying on impulse shouldn't be marred by anxiety over accessing the right gatekeeper. And contrary to popular opinion, art need not be expensive to be good or valuable.
I always joke that artists are the most extreme capitalist you will ever find. This is a world where a dinner table can easily be sold for 1$mio because it's owned by some famous person. Pretty fascinating world.
On a slightly different note. This is also the reason why I think cryptocurrencies/tokens are going to be doing just fine. Humans very rarely exchange and value based on utilitarianism alone.
Crypto can provide them with precisely that. The volatility of crypto is immaterial, what matters is that it's still around. The resilience of Bitcoin means that rich people can park wealth there. They can trust the protocol more than they can trust their nation's banks, their political institutions, and their social order.
Techies can make a nice side income arbitraging the scrambling of the global elite for a safe haven. It's the new Cayman Islands bank account, only now it's math keeping the filthy government's hands off your money, not the flimsy sham of sovereignty.
You may eventually be able to make this claim, but to make it now is lunacy.
When one speaks of assets in which one parks their wealth, an asset that loses 50% of its purchasing power overnight is not one of them.
The perspective of wealthy people is not ours. They have to weigh risk differently than we do. To them, if a bank fails or if the state seizes their wealth, it's the same thing as Bitcoin falling. Only it's not, because Bitcoin can climb back, while the people that stole their wealth are never going to give it back.
Bitcoin being a market entity that can remain outside government regulation and enforcement reach makes it the ultimate asset store. Nothing else in the world offers that.
Some assets do not come back up.
But unless a governing entity can figure out how to completely shut global money out of a market, then that asset price might not be being held up by God Himself, but by a force almost as strong.
That's a big if.
I would rather bet on that, than the US government in the long run.
Something like 90% of U.S. dollars are held digitally. Most American stock and bonds are held digitally. Cryptocurrencies aren't novel in being digital. They're novel in being de-centralised. They're pitched in being de-centralised away from the very system the global elite have built and profited from.
If the blockchain proves resilient, it will be adopted by central banks. There is no good reason for those banks adopting Bitcoin over something they design.
Bitcoin is not just decentralized and thus isn't subject to any political opinion, it's non-inflatory and it's built in a way that both the current elite plus those with less political power can access it furthermore it's actually tracable and not possible to launder.
Those are all things that anyone from government to elite to the working class can get behind.
Whether blockchain is adopted by banks does not have any bearing on the value of bitcoin and how it can be used. If anything it will only improve cryptos value and thus be a good investment target for the elite.
Only if blockchain proves to have no backing and no utility will this trend be inversed. My bet is that it does have backing and does have plenty of utility which will just take some time to manifest itself to everyone.
Any major world government could muster up the resources to do a 51% attack on Bitcoin. China could go after the major miners, the US could shut down Coinbase, etc. Many ways for them to stagger the currency, potentially shaking confidence enough on it for people to cash out.
That's not even counting the non-governmental shenanigans of things like Tether that are going on that could do that on their own.
If governments had to resort to using muscle to crush Bitcoin, the next cryptocurrency won't be so easy to target.
Force goes a long way.
> If governments had to resort to using muscle to crush Bitcoin, the next cryptocurrency won't be so easy to target.
That's pretty handwavey. "We will jail/execute you if we find out you're using cryptocurrencies" is an option readily available to nation states, and I seriously question the willingness of the "global elite" to risk that sort of penalty.
It really doesn't. It only goes as far as your resources. Once they run out, then you can literally no longer enforce your will. When dealing with an amorphous entity with an order of magnitude more resources than you do, then deploying force is a game of whack-a-mole that you can't win. Your only option is to fight a rearguard action trying to stay on top while the new world order emerges.
> "We will jail/execute you if we find out you're using cryptocurrencies" is an option readily available to nation states, and I seriously question the willingness of the "global elite" to risk that sort of penalty.
That is already the operative environment under which much of this wealth was created.
The principles of sovereignty have been around for a millennia. They aren't going anywhere. Debt is the financial innovation that has ignited centuries of growth, not few forms of cash... people were getting rich even when they needed to hump wagons of silver and gold around. Cryptocurrency is just a new form of scrip.
If you can't move your money due to capital controls, you use bitcoin to bypass those controls, and get your money into somewhere more stable, preferably something that does not have volatility of 20% per day.
Maybe in the far future, but not even remotely now.
The whole point is that if you get in now you both gain the upside of the value plus the increasing stability.
If you have enough money you can make that bet, hell even if you have less money you can still make that bet.
I am not against bitcoin. I have a bunch of Bitcoin. But buying bitcoin is strictly a speculative play. It is. It is not an investment: it is not a store of value. Nobody knows know what will happen ten years from.
But whatever happens ten years from now, odds are that it will be very different than what is here now, and odds are that t-bills will be pretty much the same.
Hence, why for long term stability you buy t-bills. If you want more risk, you buy the S&P 500.
For an amount of money that you can afford to lose, and you’re willing to put it into a highly speculative position, that goes into bitcoin.
Point is that Bitcoin is as solid an investment as many other things that are backed by governments.
I am willing to be that crypto will be around much longer than many states and so I am keeping that in mind when I invest.
I only invest long term and crypto like the US stock market is for me long-term winners. I could be wrong but today bitcoin isn't more fragile than many other currencies out there.
If your personal investment outlook is dependent on the major world currencies defaulting, you have a problem. Play with bitcoin, but don't bet your fortunes on it.
All investments come with a risk the longer your perspective the less the risk depending on which asset we are talking about. Bitcoin/blochain is one of those that will be less risky over time unless the world moves in an anti-technology direction and I don't see that happening.
I'm willing to bet that the majority of Bitcoins out there are somehow involved in money laundering for good ol' fashioned (organized) crime.
If I can't move $100K of my money due to capital controls, then I also can't move those $100K to buy the bitcoin I need to bypass those controls.
If you have a bank account and an Internet connection, you can buy yourself a Treasury [1].
What? Nobody sane is putting their long-term savings in crypto. The resilience of bitcoin has absolutely not been proven.
For long term assets, you want your money in some stable, solid, not volatile, and preferably backed by a global superpower, hence US Government bonds and Euro bonds are pretty much the safest assets you can buy. They won't go up much in value, but they won't go down much either.
One thing that many people forget is that most bitcoin is owned by very few people who go in very very early. They will not need to sell even if it was cut on half from now and they do not have to worry about inflation. If you can do that in the long run bitcoin will gain trust and thus be less volatile or even live with the volatility (as we used to do with normal fiat currencies)
Can't you see how wrong that claim is?
20% of all bitcoins have been irretrievably lost [0] and 7% have been stolen [1]. If I was the global rich, I'd rather hide gold bars in my mattress rather than put it in Bitcoin if my goal was just security.
[0] http://fortune.com/2017/11/25/lost-bitcoins/ [1] http://www.businessinsider.com/how-many-bitcoins-have-been-s...
Peoples money gets stolen all the time.
Edit: for large institutional investors in a trust fund
This is only the case for this particular trust fund. You can secure your coins for free on your own.
edit: downvoted for stating a fact? really?
So many coins have been lost because people were careless or uninformed, not because the system is fundamentally broken.
Edit: You're free to downvote, but if you can't make a reasonable argument against me it just shows the emotional response you are leaning on. I would be happy to post a wallet address with $10,000 in bitcoin on there, if I am wrong about what I said, surely you'd be able to take the money from me?
I agree with you that downvoting without offering counter-arguments is a sign of emotional rather than intellectual responses... but so is using straw man arguments like the one you put up.
Proper techniques to store bitcoin (local keys on a secure machine or a hardware wallet) make bitcoin mathematically impossible to steal. "Stolen" bitcoin is synonymous with "insecure" bitcoin. Properly securing bitcoin would be significantly cheaper than storing gold bars in a mattress.
Edit: Just in case it's not clear, my point is not that specifically bitcoin is more vulnerable to violence/coercion than other forms of value storage (although I'm pretty sure it is, as there are fewer safeguards/redress mechanisms). My point is that the regardless of the security of the mathematical element, cryptocurrency also has the real-world to contend with, which contains bugs, hardware failure, extortion, phishing, memory loss, theft, etc.
perhaps a bit more accurately, they're interested in growth and value, but they've got enough of both that they've become interested in eliminating risk. which requires finding assets which are decorrelated from one another. the various electronic currencies are a new sort of asset class which appear to be decorrelated from everything (except NVDA?).
> The volatility of crypto is immaterial...
eh, the volatility isn't great, but so long as it is very different from everything else's volatility, it can be useful.
Careful - before you know it you'll have a long and tedious conversation about the true nature and scope of 'utility'.
While museums may get a discount for being important "taste-makers", I can't believe that that makes up for the crazy overvaluation.
This alone should make the case for better regulation as difficult as it must be across international borders.
So while it is nice for the public to be able to see a certain original, I can think of millions of better ways to spend that money and then just see a replica.
But I am torn, because the more privately funded museums seem to be more prone to skewing history. I could be wrong.
I'm also not outraged about few artists making a living from all this money flying around. Artists aren't entitled to rich people's money, it's a side effect of the game.
The only thing I'm outraged about is when the elite starts foisting ugly art on the poor, by putting it in public squares and government museums and textbooks. No matter how advanced your taste is, it's a brute fact that the poor don't enjoy ugly art. So these actions amount to taxing the poor in favor of the elite, which is immoral.
What if they're throwing money at each other so that down the line they have the plausible deniability when they, um, "donate" $10m pieces because they need a tax write-off?
What if its manipulated to inflate costs for a very hilarious game of tax evasion? Is that worth any outrage?
If you buy something for $10m you're out $10m. Yes, when you donate it you can write off those $10m, or present value at the day of the donation.
But you're only saving the taxes on those $10m of income, so you're still down $5m (assuming a 50% tax rate). And you could just as easily donate those $10m directly, and get the same tax write-off.
Yep. Art was always a plaything for the rich. The Romanovs bought thousands and thousands of paintings to show how cultured they were. Every succesful Dutch merchant had to have a portrait done by Hals or Rembrandt. Italian bankers spent their entire fortunes on statues. Chinese emperors had enough porcelain made to host Beijing for a tea party.
It seems more like an "acquired taste" thing that cultured individuals just must enjoy. Like atonal music or rhymeless poetry.
I personally know quite a few people who have little income, but enjoy life by engaging with the kind of art you seem to dislike. Some have consciously made the decision to forgo a career, earning just enough for their minimalistic lifestyle, and spending lots of time on experiences. Others are poor against their will, yet still interested in art.
So, no: it's not a "brute fact". Art isn't even measured on a scale of beauty vs. ugliness–that's "design" maybe. Good art almost always upsets some people.
The art you may think of as universally appreciated was almost certainly deeply divisive when it was created. Those dutch still-lives, for example, are full of sexual innuendo, including prostitution, incest, or homosexuality. Picasso was the target of Nazi sabotage because they considered abstract art elitist. Andy Warhol was shot and almost died because his art had become some woman's paranoid obsession etc.
In that sphere, i. e. politics (broadly), there are no crazy new inventions that make everyone happy. Science can find a cure for AIDS and nobody will complain. But politics is to some degree a zero-sum game, where a finite amount of "power" can only redistributed.
Almost any change will therefore have opponents: the sexual revolution frustrated catholics, #metoo unearthed buried guilt etc.
"Ugliness" really doesn't play into it. Every city has places far uglier than any piece of publicly displayed art I can think of. More often, it's the actual idea that freaks people out: The holy Mother Maria spanking the infant Jesus[0] is not too bad on the eye, but it's a really strange idea[0] (From the 1920, by the way–shock value isn't a new idea).
The Nazis hated Picasso not (just) for his Guernica, but because they abhorred uncertainty, subjectivity, and doubt. That's why they rejected his (and most other) abstract art. It's also why they really didn't like relativity and quantum physics: it's possible that they missed their chance to get the atom bomb first because they had aesthetic objections to this "strange new relativism".
[0]: https://i.pinimg.com/originals/2e/8b/96/2e8b9610aca3535a8d6b...
The artists that speak to me most (like Pushkin, Orwell, Hunter Thompson, Andrew Hussie, davesecretary...) are keen observers of their time and have strong opinions, but they play fair in a sense. They make their points of view aesthetically compelling and stop there. What they can't say with beauty, they don't say at all. Anything more forceful is closer to a Fox News editorial than to art.
> Orwell, Hunter Thompson
Orwell looks ugly to someone. Hunter Thompson looks ugly to someone
Remember Room 101 in 1984? Have you read "Hells Angels"? These aren't uncontroversial works of "beauty".
You are mistaking your personal aesthetic judgement for objective standards.
My original comment said public art that looks ugly to many people is harming them, so elites should stop pushing it.
Then Matt said art shouldn't be concerned with beauty. I disagreed, and argued that artists should try to express their ideas with beauty. That standard (whether the artist tried to achieve subjective beauty) is actually objective. For example, we know that Hunter Thompson tried to create something beautiful according to him. After all, many other people found his work beautiful, and that can't happen by accident. Another example of such attitude in modern art is Rothko. I'm not a fan of his paintings, but he clearly went to extreme lengths in pursuit of beauty, and I can easily imagine how someone could fall in love with them.
Compare that to many artists today who don't try to express their ideas with beauty. They explicitly say as much. Read Matt's comments: beauty is merely "design", winning power games is what matters... That trend is causing the current wave of public art that looks ugly to almost everyone.
And I'm not talking about extreme serialism, avant-garde noise sculptures or anything too tricky. I'm talking about stuff I'd be happy to defend on it's intrinsic merits and stuff that genuinely gives me the same emotional response as a lot of the more mainstream music I like.
So - moving back to art - I don't know what your tastes are. Maybe you only like pretty paintings of flowers. But assuming you are moderately eclectic in your tastes I would almost guarantee that a lot of the art you regard as non-ugly was regarded as heretical when it was first produced.
Don't forget that romanticism in music and the visual arts was once regarded as a provocative and dangerously subversive trend.
(Back to music because I know more about it than painting) Handel would have Beethoven incomprehensible. In fact the Große Fuge was regarded as incomprehensible for quite some time after Beethoven's death.
There truly is no such thing as "ugliness" in any reasonably objective sense. Context, culture and time change everything.
EDIT - I've got no particular love of modern high-end art but that's largely because it seems like an elitist, vacuous, cultural backwater than because of anything to do with the supposed "ugliness" of modern art.
High-end art prices aren't "manipulated" in some kind of nefarious way, they're just highly illiquid and complicated. The article makes it sound like there's collusion or price-fixing between galleries, but there's no evidence of that.
The author makes the argument that more transparency would lead to lower prices... yet simultaneously implies prices are lower than they ought to be: "One of the worst things a dealer can do is over-price a work because they can’t lower the price when it doesn’t sell."
And anyways, I find myself sympathizing far more with artists than with the rich buyers here -- making a living as an artist is already hard enough! Why would we want to lower what they can make? And for buyers who want less expensive art, there's tons -- just don't shop at Gagosian!
Finally, the article seems to imply that art is subjectively bad now ("rape of dismembered corpses"), but that lowering prices would help fix that. That doesn't follow at all, and modern art on the vanguard is always considered "bad" by the majority at its time -- whether Monet or Pollock.
For anyone interested in details of how the art world really works and why, I highly recommend "Seven Days in the Art World" by Sarah Thornton.
I would say that a gallery bidding on an auction because they have an interest in increasing the transaction price of pieces being sold by an art dealer connected to them is a textbook example of collusion (as opposed to bidding because they want to own the piece).
As usual free market fundamentalists will disagree that this is wrong in any way.
Why should it be simpler? Why should anyone be able to "create" whatever he wants and decide that it be valuable for other people?
Laundering Drug Money With Art (https://www.forbes.com/2003/04/08/cx_0408hot.html#1da16d3e66...)
Valuable as Art, but Priceless as a Tool to Launder Money (http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/13/arts/design/art-proves-att...)
Chinese snap up fine art for use in laundering schemes (http://money.cnn.com/2014/02/20/news/economy/china-art-laund...)
https://www.amazon.com/Million-Stuffed-Shark-Economics-Conte...
As for the rest, the market isn't exactly manipulated, as the article implies, but if you bother to ask any collector they'll complain that prices are high. And this happens for two reasons. One is that there is very low supply of available art of non-contemporary era since museums are popping everywhere and they buy pretty much everything available. The other is that art has become an investment which leads a lot of rich people buying art pieces at great volumes.
We live in an era where you pay $5k to buy a giclee Murakami painting printed in a high-end printer and that if you're lucky enough because a limited edition of 50 copies could sell out in a couple of days.
Oh boy.
Imagine, if you will, a kind of mega-rich suckers list being worked by a pyramid of scammers: auction houses, super-dealers, agents, professional intermediaries, "experts" with no credentials etc etc...The bait is always the same: high society connections. Usually you will find that the scammers are charming, well connected persons who exist in a kind of demi-monde - friends in high and low places.
"desirable collectors are well educated consumers and won’t blatantly overpay."
What are collectors educated in, exactly? Is it reading the collective market and understanding the pricing signals it generates? Is it marking new art to this market?
If the latter, how does that work if the art has no intrinsic value?
I.e. someone who had credibility among the art crowd and whos purchase of a work will function as social proof of the gallerists' brand.
The "high-end" art collectors tend to be extremely wealthy, and - with of course some exceptions - wealthy people are wealthy also because they care about money.
So, imagine that you are a wealthy art collector and you have just paid - let's say - 100,000 US$ for a painting by an "emerging" artist.
It is only human to show off your new painting, and the people you frequent are likely to be also wealthy and art collectors.
So, if you have a name as an art collector, that painting soon becomes in your elite a "set point" for the value of the new artist work.
The year later, a gallerist that is selling at 115,000 US$ another similar painting of the same artists can well say "Last year TheOtherHobbes bought a similar one for US$ 100,000, and you know him, he wouldn't pay that kind of money if it hadn't this value".
And this sets a second precedent, and it goes on.
BTW it is all in your interest to "defend" and "promote" the artist (because you defend your investment into it) even if the painting is awful.
In a couple of years this way you will be able to re-sell the painting for - still say - US$ 200,000 while having - besides the profit - reinforced your fame as good investor and educated art expert, capable to see the potentiality of the artist ahead of all others...
At the core there's still someone or some group of people making some kind of fundamental aesthetic valuation. It's really more the severe lack of liquidity and impossibility of commoditizing of the market that creates the effect you're seeing.
It becomes highly popular and the rulers of the underground art world (I think it included a still living Michelangelo or DiVinci) kidnap him and tell him to cut it out.
The author of the article is somehow either confused or offended by this.
if you donate a piece of art to a museum, in the US you can deduct its "fair market value" from your taxes. so if there's a way to drive "fair market value" up higher than what was paid, say if a few comparable artworks sell for an inflated price, everyone can donate to museums and effectively realize some profits without crashing the market by actually selling their art.
"You’d think the value of art would depend on its aesthetic value; a picture you enjoy looking at on your wall. How could a dismembered corpse artist be remotely successful? Yet these paintings were classified as desirable by the art market."
aesthetic value != "a picture you enjoy looking at on your wall"
and further, a corpse can't be enjoyable to look at?? (Picasso's Guernica, Caravaggio's Death of a Virgin...)
That'd be like saying the movie market is clearly manipulated because Blair Witch Project is the most successful indie of all time.
What you want to be doing at that point in time is move up the value chain so you can capture a healthy percentage of the entire market. Artists that make a killing open galleries and provide for emerging artists to make their mark, of course while you take your cut. You see it in every creative arena. Musicians open record labels, actors open acting schools and talent agencies. Career trajectories differ, but the principle remains the same. You move up the value chain.
Once you've mastered selling shovels to the prospectors, then you have to learn how to control value itself. There is no intrinsic value to products of human creation, so that value has to get created somehow. The making of the value sausage is often really, really dirty. But as long as humans want it, then there needs to be a price attached. And that price has to be arrived at somehow.
This is not generally the case in art. While there exist informal "artist run spaces" set up by struggling young artists, it is unknown for an artist to become a prestigious commercial gallerist. It doesn't happen. Setting up a gallery primarily requires capital, and only secondarily involves artistic judgement.
Damien Hirst is the only partial exception I can think of, and he was also involved in coordinating group shows in temporary industrial spaces early in his career, so he has always had an interest in staging exhibitions. His London gallery is definitely not about making sales or supporting emerging artists, though. It's a status symbol.
There are a few ways of looking at the art world that explain why artists don't become gallerists. One thing is that gallerists/curators are "cultural intermediaries" rather than creators. It's a different talent. Artists are sometimes asked to curate but they don't get involved in setting up galleries or publishers. It would be like an actor setting up a chain of cinemas.
I guess the phenomenon you perhaps have in mind of movie stars becoming producers differs because producing is still a creative activity.
There's a book called "Art World Prestige" that does a sociological analysis of what goes on -- all the things that are specific to the art world.
Considering a lot of the art collectors buy is immediately whisked away to temperature-controlled, pitch dark warehouses where it can be kept safely until it's put back on the market a decade later, I really wouldn't expect the value to be related to what the art looks like at all.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portrait_of_Adele_Bloch-Baue...
FWIW I love Klimt, Lady in Gold isn't my favourite but she's grown on me.
Same goes for things like some watch brands and a few other things.
This is just plain wrong. Not only does the author not understand art at all, but he also doesn't understand basic collecting.
Following that judgment, people collecting post stamps are just morons, cause a stamp that's been used can't be used again and so has 0 value - except perhaps its aesthetic one, which is not huge...
[0] https://www.amazon.com/Talking-Prices-Contemporary-Princeton...
> If an owner sells a gallery's art, then the gallery will often cut her off from future purchases
Is this a political statement? It just appears childish to me and makes the article look less professional.
I use "they" and "them" as gender-neutral singular pronouns. There is disagreement on this choice of style. Alternating between gendered pronouns seems to be the preferred alternative to the last decade's (s)he he/she garbage.
It's not about the gender itself, but whether a gender pronoun has been chosen conciously, which likely is the case here.
> She may have owned the painting, but reselling it at a profit without the gallery’s permission would blackball her from the art industry.
And in any case, most of the "anonymous protagonists" in articles are men so why not change it from time to time?
And now I've noticed the author uses "he or she" at some point, so I guess the neutral "they" is indeed disliked by some writers.
Cannot the author imagine a person who would find a dismembered corpse to be aesthetically pleasing and relaxing? If so, I don't think that person with such low empathy should be a journalist.
Art is (self) expression.
The sentiment can be appreciated, but as a general statement I believe this is false. As an example: when new hotels are built, they are commonly outfitted with a collection of original art consisting of pictures and sculptures. This is certainly done to a large degree due to the utility of the art, which serves to make the hotel more interesting and aesthetically pleasing. Would you argue that decoration for such a purpose does not constitute art?
I'm not a seller but I believe is way easier to sell something with a clear function than the opposite.
Would you also accept the corollary that any object specifically made to be hung on wall to maximise good feelings cannot be art?
Maximisation of good feelings when hung on a wall is just as valid as a "+n attention" modifier as scandal, backstory (this is where "(self) expression" has its place) or innovation. The scraps of exclusivity that can be attained from craftsmanship or materials are utterly dwarfed by exclusivity derived from the artist being dead and famous.
Works that are nice to look at tend to fall short in exclusivity, because design is abundant. But in the eyes of someone who rejects the idea of "ugly art", exclusive reliance of nonaesthetic attention drivers is almost a form of cheating.
That's just a low trick to make common people buy it. Only, it isn't always. A lot of common people are buying stuff to make their home prettier - not everyone will hang disturbing pictures on the wall because folks would rather stare at something less disturbing on a daily basis. Some is positive, some makes a statement, and so on.
Art is (self) expression. Except when it isn't. I can't imagine every animator at disney (back when a lot was watercolor) was expressing themselves, just like a lot of commissions aren't self-expression. Some folks just do things they think will sell or others will like. Sometimes it is just something the person thinks looks neat (no more expressive than a webpage layout or product design, honestly).
But relaxing? That would .. require more explanation.