<p>Woodwinds </p>
<p>“timkerdes, I don’t think of Damien Hirst as an artist.”</p>
<p>I almost want to say “no comment”. Look, regardless of what either of us think of him, the fact is that he participates in and earns money through the same system that people you do consider artists earn money in. I’m only talking about Hirst’ finances and that’s all that matters as far as his name in this subject is concerned. I don’t really care for him myself, quite honestly.</p>
<p>“There are the university, degree-based arts schools, which teach modern art.”</p>
<p>That’s simply untrue. There’s no art school in the U.S that teaches you “modern art”. Art schools don’t teach styles. No one goes to art school to learn how to make a cubist painting. Art schools in the U.S are pluralist, meaning they don’t take hard stance on a single style of art but welcome all styles.</p>
<p>“but I was responding to timkerdes, who was comparing gallery sales of modern vs. realistic art. My point is that gallery sales only represent a small piece of overall art sales.”</p>
<p>I never made a comparison. I just supplied various bits of information from some of the largest visual art venues to support my statement that representational painting occupies a very small niche in the art world both financially and critically. I suppose when you supplied a list of galleries of representational painters a comparison could be inferred, but I never on my own supplied data for representational painting venues to make a comparison. More or less I was showing how (lame pun again) unrepresented representational painters are in the contemporary art world.</p>
<p>Now, I don’t see how you can either say or prove that most transactions that occur between artists and collectors occur outside of galleries or auctions. That’s really hard to back up, you know? It’s hard to talk about this objectively, and without discussing our own experiences. Essentially, your talking about completely off the record sales. As far as I have tried to find, there is no data set available on the subject of private - off the record - art purchases.</p>
<p>“I’m looking at this issue from the point of view of ‘what are most art students doing with their degree?’”</p>
<p>I suppose that’s fair, but I am looking at this issue purely from painting as a discipline, meaning in response to the question of how to innovate or advance that discipline. You might say that’s too idealistic, but I’d be quick to point out that hardly anyone who majors in art does so because of the earning potential</p>
<p>I suppose what it comes down to is the difference I see between my understanding of art education and music education. From what I understand, (and it is likely presumptuous on my part) music education values the classics - what came before. In Art education, what is valued is not the classics - not what came before - but what the new generation contributes. The difference between primarily valuing the classics vs valuing innovation is (if my observation on music education is true) a fundamental difference. It’s true that the structure of music education and art education are very similar, but in actuality art education is much closer to architectural education in that the latter two value innovation over the attempt to reproduce classics.</p>
<p>"…rather than how much money a couple of people at the top are making with their art, or creations."</p>
<p>Perhaps those 15 artists are a couple of people, but surely all those folks from the Whitney Biennial, Documenta, and the armory show are proportionally a more substantial group? The artists listed from those links comprise a significant portion of the contemporary art world.</p>