Tobias Meyer, who was forced to resign from Sotheby's two months ago, summed up in 2006 that the best art was the most expensive thus proving that the art market has become the realm of those who had huge sums of money at their disposal.
As a result, aesthetic considerations mean nothing on the art market now dominated by people who collect art works just for their trumping values, especially those made by contemporay artists whose talents are questionable, notwithstanding the fact that critics are now useless up to the point that they cannot formulate their views any longer.
Normally, people should be moved by the art works they see. This was the case for centuries until Andy Warhol went on to change the face of art with his annexation of iconic images of our society transformed into so-called masterpieces up to the point that the representation of film stars and characters from comic books were then regarded as much worthy as the works of Leonardo Da Vinci, Michelangelo or Rembrandt.
In the end, what would be considered as nothing has found a meaning in the minds of our contemporaries who have lost their capacity to truly understand art, a mode of thinking that seems highly pernicious.
The American critic Jed Perl has pointed out such fact in his new book, "Magicians & Charlatans: Essays on Art and Culture" to lash out at what he tems the "laissez-faire aesthetics" in his analysis of the strange achievements of those charlatans who helped transform the art market. Perl has notably shown his contempt of the German artist Gerhard Richter whom he has described as a "bullshit artist masquerading as a painter" adding that "Everything in Richter's work is muffled, distanced, impassively ironic, as if seen through a thick, murky sheet of glass".
He added: " I do not simply dislike Gerhard Richter's work. I reject it on fundamental grounds, as a matter of principle. I do not accept the premise on which his entire career is based, that in the past half century painting has become essentially and irreversibly problematical, a medium in perpetual crisis. This is a counterfeit crisis, as far as I am concerned"
Perl went on to state that in his view "Art represents the triumph of private feeling over public pressures and that it is not a mirror of society but an essential part of the fabric of society, with a unique role to play, which more than anything else has to do with affirming the stubborn particularity of a person's experience".
Perl has claimed that such experiences may suggest that what we call art involves an isolation, or a heightening, of experiences that we know from daily life supposing this is true, up to a point. But it is also utterly false, a complete misunderstanding of the nature of art. Because although we bring a great deal of our experience of life to our experience of art, art finally holds us because it eludes mere sensibility, mere sensation.
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