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Comment by lucozade | Hacker News Reader

> The free market only cares about your present performance, not about your past.

That's blatantly not true in art, if it's true at all. If the art market agrees that some random sketch was by Da Vinci, it's not valued on merit.

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People aren't judging (or pricing) random Da Vinci sketches as art, but as investments and historic artefacts. In fact I'd go as far as saying that anybody paying more than ~$300k-$500k for a piece of 'art' isn't paying for the art any more, but are investing in a financial asset (that may or may not look nice displayed in their living room)

I'd say the treshold is much lower, and depends on the area and wealth of the person. But I doubt even a billionaire would pay $200k for a piece of an unknown artists just because he loves it. Maybe he'd pay $50k. For regular people, it's more like $5k.

5k is a lot of money.

I think for actually regular people threshold is in hundreds or tens. Art isn't very expensive on the low end. Paintings by no name authors don't cost much at all.

Free market assumes that goods from different producers are substitutable. Da Vinci has, clearly, a monopoly on original items from Da Vinci.

So if you're an artist and people value your name, regardless of the product it's written on, you don't have the OP's problem. The problem described only applies if the consumer can get some other art that gives them equivalent satisfaction.

> Free market assumes that goods from different producers are substitutable

No it doesn't. A free market assumes that there are no constraining influences on trade except supply and demand. With the possible exception of a working contract law system.

Free markets happily allow for people to make buying and selling decisions for any reason they choose. If it happens to be for a non-fungible asset, no matter how pointless it may be to other parties, so be it.

Efficient markets imply restricting assumptions on fungibility, so that there can be a meaningful fair price, but it's not required in general.

OK, let's call it efficient market pressure in my original post, then.

I'm interested in your comment about copyright being proposed for stability. Can you direct me to a source please? If you have a reference or a hint for further research, I'd like to read into it more.

You're probably reading too much into that comment. In the U.S., the copyright was justified "to promote progress of science and useful arts", which I interpret in a way that it provides certain stability of income needed to promote learning and experimentation (and also allows for a failure). It was understood even then that it is an anti-free market policy.

And that seems to be what OP was complaining about, the lack of this security for artists. Unfortunately, the copyright (like most other property) today has been mostly captured by rentier class, so it no longer provides these protections for most artists, if it ever really did.

So I was really just pointing out this connection between OP's woes and copyright.

thanks

A lot of that value is in the aspect of the sketch as a historical artifact. There's little present performance to speak of when it comes to Da Vinci.

That's simply not true. Almost all the value will be because it's attributed to da Vinci. You simply won't get the same valuation if it's attributed to a lesser known contemporary.

And you don't need to go historical. I just picked da Vinci as an example. If you or I made a balloon dog sculpture, it won't be valued the same as a Jeff Koons one [0]. Even if it's essentially identical.

There's a whole subset of the art market that is valuing on provenance not the physical object.

[0] I'm assuming you're not Jeff Koons. The problem with HN is that, sometimes, you are actually chatting to a celebrity in the field without knowing.

Well, the balloon dog example simply boils down to the fact that your work will only be seen as a rip-off.

> There's a whole subset of the art market that is valuing on provenance not the physical object.

Subset? I believe provenance is almost everything that matters in art, because it's what equips an artifact with meaning. Duchamp's urinal neatly exemplifies this.

The vast majority of art sold is for decorative purposes and is valued as such. There is a subset though that's sold primarily based on provenance.

Or to put it another way, most art sold isn't in urinal form.

> I believe provenance is almost everything that matters in art, because it's what equips an artifact with meaning.

I've never "understood art", but when you phrased it like that it makes perfect sense. To me, provenance just isn't interesting. So I judge the pieces as they stand in front of me.

There are essentially 3 ways to judge 'art'.

- Do I find this aesthetic

- Do I find this historically/culturally interesting or significant

- Do I find this a good investment

The problem is that people don't always make it clear which one they are judging by and end up talking past each other.

This is a good point for Da Vinci, one of the most famous artists of all time. But how do things work for the rest of all the millions of not-very-famous artists? A few select pieces are valued by name, and then there’s the vast ocean of work that isn’t.

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