The Price of Everything
Today, art is spectacle, big bucks and front-page news. Paintings by Basquiat and Gerhard Richter sell for millions of dollars; a giant inflatable ballerina by Jeff Koons dwarfs visitors at Rockefeller Center; a solid gold toilet by Maurizio Cattelan is installed in the Guggenheim Museum for all to see and use. As a society, we have become less concerned with the aesthetic and social values of art, and more concerned with brand names and the business of it all. Can the value of art really be measured in dollars and euros? How are these values assigned and who assigns them? “The Price of Everything” asks some hard questions as it systematically demystifies the rarefied world of contemporary art and has a ton of fun in the process!