In praise of … art without the hype

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/oct/15/in-praise-of-art-hype-banksy-value-editorial

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As if working from the same script, the street artist Banksy illustrated a point that fellow Brit Grayson Perry made in the first of his Reith lectures, Democracy Has Bad Taste. Banksy put his original, signed canvases up for sale at a stall in New York's Central Park for $60 each. Total takings for the day came to $420. Worth of each piece? Up to $20,000. On the other side of the pond, Perry challenged how we judge quality in art and who validates it. Strip art of its cast of validators like markets, critics, galleries and curators, Perry said, and how do people judge its worth? With difficulty. There are many reasons for this. A lack of tools with which to make independent judgments is one. But another might be that artistic worth has become inseparable from the hype around it, the creation of which is an art in itself. Would any artist deflate the value of the rest of his work, once he found out what the unaided public really thought of it? You must be joking.

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