Re: Young Artists Rode a $712 Million Boom. Then Came the Bust.

Oct 12, 2024 art interest rates speculation NFTs modernism bubble

The following is a rejected letter to the editor to the New York Times. It has been edited since the original submission was made. The article I'm replying to can be found here:

New York Times: Young Artists Rode a $712 Million Boom. Then Came the Bust.

Amidst a speculative bubble such as the one described in this article, one of the most dangerous questions is: what does the asset actually do?

For so much contemporary art, the answer is not a lot. Many have argued, as Morley Safer famously did on 60 Minutes in 1993, that there really is nothing to the smudges, the autographed toilets, and the sometimes-blank canvases promoted by art institutions as cutting edge.

Under the current regime, subjectivity is privileged over the traditional values that were once taken for granted, such as beauty, creativity, and form. As these values fade, so do the more profound effects of art, while what emerges aims merely to shock, or to provoke, or to project some eccentric personality.

Young artists emerge into this environment after paying inflated tuition costs, so that they start their careers indebted and confused. Add to this a lengthy period of artificially low interest rates, and the public is left with high-class speculative objects no more substantive than the pixelated apes and dog-themed coins offered by the world of crypto.

While it might not make anyone rich, art that seeks the higher purposes abandoned by the current regime will have an intrinsic value that laughs at fair-weather speculators and cares not what is the prevailing rate of interest.