I was at an art show in London earlier this year which was also an art sale. The art was decent, mostly unmemorable. At one point I overheard a family of four discussing which painting they would each get. They seemed "jolly nice" people but I couldn't help but feel disgusted realising (as if it wasn't staring my in the face) the sort of people who alone could afford to spend several grand on a painting, quite casually.
And that set me thinking about how art is inherently corrupted from the top down, because you have to produce nothing that really disturbs the values of the rich to make a living, let alone be successful.
This should have caused me to convert to Marxism, I suppose?
"[Stephen A. Cohen] owns one of the world's most valuable private art collections, worth over $1 billion, which includes notable artworks such as Koons's Rabbit, Picasso's Le Rêve, and Hirst's The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living."
"In 2013, the Cohen-founded S.A.C. Capital Advisors pleaded guilty to insider trading and agreed to pay $1.8bn in fines (900M in forfeiture and 900M in fines) in one of the biggest criminal cases against a hedge fund. Cohen was prohibited from managing outside money for 2 years as part of the settlement reached in the civil case over his accountability for the scandal. The hedge fund agreed to plead guilty to wire fraud and four counts of securities fraud and to close to outside investors.[1]"