patrick.net

I was recently in a Modern "art" museum and achieved enlightenment about the origin and purpose of such "art".

Let's say you're a very rich merchant with long experience in manipulating the public, which is the very essence of selling. Or say you a sociopath like Jeffrey Epstein. You feel contempt for the public because they seem stupid to you, and you enjoy manipulating them. What kind of entertainment might the "art" world offer you?

One way to entertain yourself is to see what you can get away with, in this case, just how far you can go in promoting crap as art. Modern "art" is ideal for this kind of fun. It's essentially a case of The Emperor's New Clothes, because the upper classes care most of all what their peers think of them, so they never challenge modern art, no matter how transparently bad it is. Fooling and mocking the other members of the upper class is a way you can distinguish yourself and feel superior to them. And you can charge them for admission into your exhibitions, which is all the sweeter, if you're of that Epstein personality type.

To make it even more fun and to absolve yourself from guilt, you tell the audience exactly what you're up to, by stating outright in your exhibition that you're "challenging notions of originality and preciousness." That is literally how the display I was viewing was labeled.

I've heard it put like this: if you sell poison apples but do not label them as poison, then it's your fault when someone buys one from you and gets poisoned. But if you label your product truthfully as poisoned apples, then it's not your fault anymore. If someone buys and eats one, well, the apples were labeled as what they really are, so it's his fault.

One sweet irony is that it's the upper classes (motivated by peer pressure) and the "educated" (motivated by their status as intellectuals) who are most easily fooled by modern "art", while the lower classes and the uneducated see right through it. The lower classes can tell the truth all they like, but it's no risk to you, because the threat to status makes it impossible for the educated to see the scam which is right before their eyes. It would be too much of a reduction in status to admit they were fooled. The threat to being excluded by their peers makes the rich also blind to the fact that they are viewing and perhaps buying worthless crap.

If you're Joe Blow and could convince members of the educated upper class that they have been scammed, then they would mad at you and not at the person who scammed them. Just like with the "vaccine"!

So say you're Epstein and you put the ugliest most worthless art you can think of in front of the public. Now the public is your canvas, and you are the artist! You can display a painting of a Campbell's Soup can. The critics love it. Hilarious! The ultimate piece of audience-mocking art would be literally be shit. I wonder whether some modern artist has thought of this yet and put on an exhibition of literal shit.

In addition to the sheer fun of mocking the modern-art-viewing public, consider the profit potential! First, you can charge fools to view the "art", but you can also use the "art" to launder money like Hunter Biden launders bribes by selling his "art".

And It just keeps getting better. You can also use modern "art" to evade taxes! Say you have a million dollar profit from your business that you want to avoid paying taxes on. You have an "artist" friend create some crap which you have appraised as worth that million dollars. You then donate that "art" to a modern "art" museum and voila, you have a million dollar income deduction so you pay no tax on the million dollars of profit from your business.