The Mona Lisa Curse

The Mona Lisa Curse was a documentary film by Robert Hughes and it brought up some very interesting questions. It proposes the idea that contemporary art is now worth way too much money. Hughes' says how the art is now valued more about the amount of money it is sold for rather than the comments of an art critic. So technically if an art piece is to sell for millions of dollars that is just supposed to be classified as a great painting, whereas Hughes completely disagrees with that idea. Hughes talks about how some art collectors would buy pieces for a very minimum amount and hold on to the paintings and then eventually sell them for great sums of money. Hughes strongly dislikes such contemporary artists as Damien Hirst and Andy Warhol because their pieces are made with one intention and that is to make money. It is kind of funny because he has bashed a lot of the artists that we have covered throughout the course but these are the leading contemporary artists. Now this piece was probably the most intriguing thing to me that we have gone over, for the simple fact that it had a lot to do with money and art and I happen to be a prospective finance major. In one manor I can see how a renown art critic would be agitated, but from a business standpoint you are seeing some incredible feats. These art collectors have found a way to make tons of money off of this art that they didn't even happen to create. I admire their intuition to be entrepreneurs in the art world even though much of what they did seemed to be unethical. The whole movie I couldn't stop wondering how amazing it was that these so called “artists" were making millions of dollars off of things that took no art skill at all such as the shark in the shark tank.