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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6734295" data-attributes="member: 4937">That 'purpose' of the work is inextricably linked to audience.  To the average person, a painting is a luxury item.  A typical one produced for the fine art market will sell at around $30,000.  Those by more famous artists will command 3 or 4 times as much.   Museum ordained art will fetch 3 or 4 times as much again.   Even a hobby artists painting will fetch $300-$400 dollars just to recoup the cost of paint and canvas.  For the intended market of wealthy art investors, these prices are affordable and reasonable investments, because future collectors are pretty much guaranteed to see them as ways of storing value.  Also, publically funded museums and large private endowments ensure that by and large the value of the investment stays stable.  So 'fine art' is pretty much inextricable from, "Art produced for an upper class audience."   It's notable that even in reproduction, much of this art doesn't end up on the walls of your average middle class home owner.   The populist appreciation of paintings stalled sometime before WW1.  There are a few exceptions - Thomas Kinkaide, for example - that produce mass produced affordable art explicitly for a middle class audience, but this art is sneered at by the fine art scene for reasons that I feel are inextricably linked to economics and classist hubris.   But by and large, the mass appreciation of painting as fine art stalled sometime around impressionism.  Your average person couldn't tell you who was a hot and important modern painter.   This is a very different situation than even 50 years ago.On the other hand, that doesn't mean that society as a whole has stopped consuming visual media or art.  Pixar makes a ton of money.  Skyrim was enormously successful.  Mad Max: Thunder Road was visually arresting and popular.   Your average video game or movie contains thousands of digital paints produced by dozens or even hundreds of artists.   The posters, art prints, and so forth associated with the art that the larger body of the public is actually consuming is on their walls and what they regularly view for pleasure.  All of this popular entertainment is produced primarily for aesthetic purposes, but rather than being sold to a single wealthy individual seeking some sort of status statement, it's consumed in smaller affordable lots by a very large number of people.  That doesn't make the art less intended solely for the enjoyment of the viewer, that it appeals to a large number of people rather than to a person that prizes primarily distinctiveness.</blockquote>

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