Art-Is-Always-Messy Edition: Five Highlights From This Week’s ArtsJournal 04.10.16

What business success in theatre looks like, our over-obsession with creativity as a catch-all answer to success, how the art markets really work, how taste gets confused with pretension, and machines’ inroads to art.

Theatre is a big gamble but when it hits it REALLY hits: We’re used to being dazzled by the huge budgets and box office of movies. Theatre not so much. Mostly, theatre is a risky business. But when a Broadway show becomes a runaway hit, it really hits. Enter “Hamilton”, which is poised to make enormous amounts of money and will be big business. Here’s an insightful look into the business of a Broadway success.
Why “creativity” and “innovation” WON’T make you successful: It’s sexy. It’s interesting. But our obsession with creating and innovating and imagining that these are the only keys to success could be a problem. It’s a mindset that can skew who wins and who loses.
How the art markets really function: Everyone complains about the runaway commercialism of the art market. Art as commodity determines how you look at it. As art has become a go-to investment for the super-rich, perhaps we need to think about how the market is regulated. An essay in the Chronicle of Higher Education suggests that “art has become an instrument for generating wealth and political influence in the interests of an audacious plutocracy. In this sense, we are indeed being ruled by art in a way we have not been before, and its price now comes at a direct social cost. Its commodification has ceased to be a matter merely of cultural debate, as it was for Fry, and should now be subject to political scrutiny in the name of the public interest.” Meanwhile, the Panama Papers reveal how a super-rich collector revolutionized the art market: “The files may finally lay to rest rumours about how Christie’s snatched the Ganz commission from under the noses of rival auction houses. It is also a masterclass in the art of hedging by one of the world’s most successful financial speculators.”
How we confuse pretentiousness with aspirations to know/do/be better: “A discomfort with the radical, or the confusing, or the challenging—with artworks, and lives, that insist on being otherwise—is very often what lies beneath the charge of pretentiousness. As much as it’s a way of deflating some apparently empty cultural gesture, calling something (or someone) pretentious is also a way of defending yourself against the uncomfortable feeling of not getting something, or—worse still—the uncomfortable suspicion that you’re being had.”
Will artificial intelligence redefine how we think about art? If art is a distillation of experience, a way of interpreting, an inspired observation, a skilled expression, a unique insight, then how are we going to regard artificial intelligence when it starts creating? Already, it’s difficult to distinguish between music produced by machines and music made by humans. And then there’s this from Smithsonian magazine: Scientists had a computer create a painting “using data from more than 168,000 fragments of Rembrandt’s work. Over the course of 18 months, a group of engineers, Rembrandt experts and data scientists analyzed 346 of Rembrandt’s works, then trained a deep learning engine to ‘paint’ in the master’s signature style.”