Hacker News Reader

Comment by falcolas | Hacker News Reader

I saw a great commentary from an art gallery owner on Tiktok about the "inherent value" of art. The inherent value of art is zero.

That is, the art itself has no inherent value. The actual value of a piece of art is whatever you can convince someone to pay for it.

One thing that can help is having receipts of what you've sold an artists work for in the past, since you can use that to inflate that amount a current piece will sell for.

To put it another way, how good of an artist you are is secondary to how good of a salesman you are (or how good of one you hire on your behalf) when it comes to making a living.

View on HN

> That is, the art itself has no inherit value. The actual value of a piece of art is whatever you can convince someone to pay for it.

This goes for any good or service. Usually when people talk about the "value of something" they mean "the price that people are willing to pay for it".

Sure, in a sense, but I think the point of where exactly it occupies on the hierarchy of needs is worthwhile to keep in mind.

I don't think that argument holds up. A VR headset, say, is astronomically high up the hierarchy of needs, but I know very few people who'd say the inherent value of a piece of modern technology is zero.

It really seems to be art specifically which people are often keen to describe as worthless, not any particular category of good that artwork might fall into.

> A VR headset, say, is astronomically high up the hierarchy of needs

Debatable. One of the most popular uses of VR is pornography, which is targeted at one of the needs on the very bottom layer. Other uses are probably mostly serving mid-level needs like social belonging or esteem needs.

Value and market value are two different things.

I agree but that's basically the case for literally everything: the value of everything is determined by how much someone else will pay for it. Art isn't notable for conforming to that universal law of capital valuation. Nothing, not even the most technically nutritious food or the hardest of metals, has a value beyond the demands of others.

It does become a bit circular. Just saying "the value of art is what other people judge it to be" just begs the question "how do those other people judge it?" ad infinitum. When I hear "inherent value", I usually think of a non-monetary value, a value that exists outside a system of multi-party transactions, some utility that is possible even if no one ends up using it.

For art, I believe the inherent value is what it makes you feel. If a piece of art doesn't make you feel anything, it's pointless and useless as art.

That's a post-modern/materialist/rationalist philosophical take, but I don't think that is the major historical view. Does Beauty have intrinsic value? I suspect that many people go to art museums to see Beauty, but they certainly don't go there to find out how good of a salesman the artists were [a) the original prices are rarely displayed, b) the museum did not usually buy directly from the artist]. Some people might go to see what historical people thought was art-worthy (filtered through the museum's view of what is worth buying/displaying); an art-historian approach. Others in the field might go to explore the craftsmanship. But I think Beauty is a large draw. And the exchange of Beauty for (often) artificial meaning in modern art is why it remains controversial for museum-goers today.

> The inherent value of art is zero.

So is the inherent value of gold, sans its use in electronics and dentistry.

That "sans" is doing a lot of work, especially with regards to electronics. Gold's traits - high conductivity, low reactivity - provide a lot of inherent value because we build electronics in a highly reactive atmosphere.

But then the question becomes: what is the inherent value of electronics? If I buy a TV with gold conductors in it, I'm not buying it for the sake of just having a TV; in large part I'm buying it to display art (movies and TV shows). So then we're back to the gold only being valuable in the process of providing me access to art, whose inherent value is...?

This is a capitalist view of value, but it has flaws in relation to art. The problem is that art does not exist in a vacuum.

To get at the real value of art, something that is not a necessity, you would need to somehow query every individual in a way where they had all their needs met and enough expendable income to use on art so that they would seriously consider buying it. But it can't be too much wealth or the situation is trivialized. The context puts a lot of restrictions on when someone is willing to buy an aesthetic good that doesn't provide other functions.

Yet, as a society we can recognize that art benefits us on a social and intellectual level. So a society as a whole may want to patron some artists, regardless of what they make. This is an inert value for art, a recognition from society that there is value there, even if they don't know it exactly and wouldn't buy it for themselves.

> So a society as a whole may want to patron some artists, regardless of what they make.

But do we? As in, are there artists who receive money regardless of their production?

Even on Patreon, most artists are paid because they're regularly putting out art, not because they exist as an artist. They're being paid to churn out art on a regular basis for their patrons, not for society as a whole.

Not trying to be a dick, but it's "inherent".

I was totally reading "Inherit value" as meaning the value of a piece of art that's not based on any quality, but only because it got enough public traction to let you hope your kids will be able to resell it at a profit...

Naw, you're right. Typos are evil.

Not terribly insightful. You could say the same for dog haircuts.

True. I enjoy documentaries about art forgers, who have followed this logic to its inevitable conclusion. They combine enormous technical ability with an antiquarian's exactitude and a dramatist's understanding of social dynamics to create the illusion of discovery for a market in which perverse incentives abound.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com