Blake Gopnik might be a very good art critic (I freely admit that I don't read enough of his work to know for myself). But he evidently hates art fairs; however, he perked up when he took some Monopoly money along to Art Basel and picked himself up ten million dollars worth of goodies (you can see what he 'bought' here).
In a follow-up article, Gopnik attempts to explain 'why art is so damned expensive'. The tl;dr - art pricing is entirely unreasonable, in that there's no logic to it. I have an extremely intelligent friend who, every so often, asks me to explain how people decide how much an artwork is 'worth'. He can't wrap his head around it because there's no pattern, no rules, no reasoning - it's utterly opaque unless you're all the way on the inside, and even then, if you look at the subject in the right light, all the sense rushes out the door again.
Of course, that's the top of the market. I love buying art. I love thinking about how a piece will fit in with what is already at home. I like to think of the money going back to the artist who made the piece. I have a ceiling (which, as the years go by, slowly goes upwards) which means that each piece is carefully considered, but often also bought with a sense of joyful recklessness. I don't understand how people who love art can't want to come home to it every night. It might be senseless over all, but on the personal level, it makes a lot of sense to me.
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