What is good art worth?

What is good art worth?

Art is a precious commodity, like oil or gold. It has its own value, whether it be on sale in a gallery, magazine, or comic book. Its price is raised when it goes appreciated, and lowers its price when it is depreciated. Investing in art is like investing in the stock market. If you pick an artist or stock that becomes highly successful, you get the difference in profit. If you pick an artist or stock that depreciates quite a bit, and falls in market value, you pay the difference in losses.

But art is more than money. It is worth more than gold or oil, but that is most the point I’m trying to make when I say it is worth more than money. I mean worth more than money can pay for. Even if you pay top price for an art piece, you’ve acquired something more valuable than that price, in the work of art itself.  That type of value is called artistic value, and using that term means more things than simply monetary value, although that is an included attribute of artistic value. 

There is value to art in attributive goodness, or goodness or badness of an artwork being an artwork, in the nature or semblance of its being an artwork.

Philosophically, there are moral, political, and aesthetic dimensions, also. But I’m interested in the attributive goodness for my purposes.

Artistic goodness is something that different can appreciate in different amounts, in different ways, and in different settings, or times and places. Different cultures also appreciate this goodness in various ways differently to each other, as well as individuals also varying in all these ways and more. It is arguable that the amount of sunlight a work of art receives will vary the way the same person values its goodness even on the same day, in the same hour.

So because these variances exist, not only in the ways people perceive and evaluate art, but also in the meanings given to art by the artist, and by the spectators who view it, there is no way to measure this quantity of appreciative goodness. It’s left open to suggestion, of course. Most critics discuss what makes that artwork good or bad, and most people would incline their views of artwork in a similar fashion if they sat down to write about it. But it seems that even criticisms fall short of being the goodness of the criticism of the art. There almost always almost certainly needs to exist the artwork for the criticism to remain valid for long. So the goodness of art is rather an existential quality, a sort of preoccupation with our existence and its meaning. It could even be argued that there is religious meaning to specific cultures and people in those cultures regarding at least some pictures. I think it goes without saying that we all are known to participate in the process of culture, and it is hard not to contaminate one’s dealings with the processes of beauty, regardless of whether one considers something art, one still probably regards something as beautiful, or at least not ugly.

If existence is beautiful, and it is not merely a category of living, or of dying, then we are approaching the transcendent and ineffable when we discuss art. It cannot yet be called the meaning of life. So we stop short of that, in favor of something else. In favor of some type of moment in time, a moment in which something emerges in our existence due to it being part of our artistic reveries, or perhaps someone’s recorded journey of artistry in a work of art, that is similar to the feelings one has on a spring day, perhaps. Or perhaps what one remembers feeling when in love. Or what one knows about the universe from seeing it up close and personal on a night trip under a cloudless sky in a remote location. We have an opinion about what constitutes art’s value in attributive goodness, based on those types of feelings. It is those subjective impressions that provides art’s meaning and purpose in our lives. 

It forms a part of our consciousness that represents the best of our imagination, the best of our emotions, and ideas. It conjures for us all that we hope and aspire to be or to have become in living and in dying, and it exalts us to that level, by affirming our desires to be synonymous with those aspirations that are more spiritual and existential than they are tangible. It makes us feel one with the universe, or God, or the universe beyond our present conception. And in this way, it provides not the meaning of life, but maybe something to take with us wherever life’s journeys lead us. Beyond imitation in the goodness of the human spirit, art takes away all and gives even more back. Art, the immaculate odyssey home to where life came from and is going to return to, is one of the central preoccupations of humankind. And the goodness attributable to that, is hard to put into monetary terms. It just isn’t a fair trade.