The Cost of Meaning: Rethinking Value in the Contemporary Art World
Recently, a close friend of mine, someone deeply involved in the tech world and not at all unfamiliar with big purchases approached me about buying a $10,000 painting he found on Instagram.
The artist, based in the UK, creates fluid acrylic works that emphasize gesture, gravity, and surface drama. It’s a style I could best describe as reminiscent to me of a 1990s Trapper Keeper or the airbrushed spray-paint planets once sold around Times Square.
My friend, candidly, admitted that the appeal was nostalgic. The piece reminded him of doodles he made in high school; a memory that made the painting fun, relatable, and oddly personal.
He came to me not just as a friend, but as someone he trusted as an authority in the arts. And while I felt conflicted, I knew what he was really asking for was my honest opinion. I didn’t tell him outright that I found the work lacking depth or seriousness. Instead, I gently suggested he consult his wife before making such a major financial decision. A nudge toward reconsideration.
But that exchange stayed with me, not because of the painting in question, but because of what it revealed: how people today are finding, valuing, and purchasing art in profoundly different ways than they did even a decade ago. The platforms have changed. The motivations have shifted. And so too has the perceived role of the artist.
A Market Optimized for Image, Not Meaning
In 2023, over 70% of art buyers under 35 purchased art online, with Instagram remaining the leading platform for art discovery. This trend has flattened the distinctions between aesthetic appreciation and consumer impulse. On platforms built for scrolling, visual punch often trumps conceptual depth.
The online art market reached $11.2 billion in 2022, according to the Hiscox Online Art Trade Report, but this growth came with concerns: collectors expressed doubts about authenticity, artistic intent, and long-term value. Increasingly, the transaction is the experience what sociologist Sarah Thornton might call “performative collecting.”
In many ways, the art world has optimized its pipeline through mercantilism: art made to sell, circulated via algorithms, and presented in ways that cater to momentary delight over sustained engagement. This inversion — bringing money to art rather than art to the public exacerbates the idea that art is only for the wealthy or educated. That idea is not only false, it’s antithetical to the artist’s intention.
Gatekeepers, Ghost Patrons, and the Illusion of Access
The problem with the art world is that it remains governed by a handful of mercantile tastemakers figures like Larry Gagosian and Jeffrey Deitch whose decisions shape the trajectory of entire careers. Their curatorial choices often prioritize what sells, not what challenges or elevates. Artistic merit becomes secondary to market viability.
In a city like New York, where the cost of living is astronomical, the very idea of pursuing art as a career has become nearly impossible without substantial backing either from family wealth or institutional grants.
According to a 2022 survey by Artist Relief, over 60% of professional artists in the U.S. reported earning less than $30,000 a year, and more than a third rely on secondary jobs unrelated to their creative work. The stereotype of the “starving artist” persists — not as myth but as a structural reality.
Even when an artist breaks into the gallery system, the economics are deeply skewed. Standard gallery commissions are 50%, meaning that the artist receives only half of the sale price of their own labor. Moreover, many galleries intentionally obscure the identities of collectors, keeping artists at arm’s length from those who acquire their work. This opacity ensures control, but it severs one of the most meaningful connections in the art world: the relationship between artist and patron.
Performing the Artist: A New Burden of Visibility
If the art market is unfair, the new burden placed on artists by digital culture makes it worse. Today’s artist is expected not only to create work, but also to serve as their own documentarian, marketer, videographer, brand consultant, and social media strategist.
The website must be up-to-date. The Instagram feed must be curated. The behind-the-scenes content must be frequent and emotionally engaging. “Like and subscribe Fam…”
This pressure doesn’t just distract from the work; it distorts it. Many artists now produce not only for the canvas, but for the feed shaping practices that will photograph well, fit an algorithm, or tell a compelling story in 15 seconds. The lines between authenticity, performance, and branding have become dangerously blurred.
Worse still, the platforms that promised greater access between artist and audience have become hostile terrain. Comments come quickly, often without context, and rarely with the kind of civil discourse or critical rigor that an artist deserves.
As art theorist Hito Steyerl once remarked, “visibility is a trap.” The breakdown of institutional gatekeeping has opened the floodgates of attention but not necessarily understanding.
It is also an inherent truth of our reality that the things we recognize as having value tend to be things we have seen before. That things we do not recognize or have no way of referencing or describing become curious puzzles for our time that might remain unsolved or unburdened by solutions in the mind of the audience.
So in the algorithmic atmosphere of social media, what succeeds most is what people already know. This has given way to the resurgent popularity of Pop in art world characters like Alec Monopoly or Takashi Murakami.
Interestingly the outliers and bad boys of the art world like Banksy have falsely attributed museum and galleries popping up selling knock off merchandise of their works without much if any recourse or comprehension from the audience.
The Art Fair Mirage: Pay-to-Play and the Illusion of Exposure
At the heart of the contemporary art world’s inequity is a system that actively discourages long-term engagement from both artists and audiences.
What was once a network of communal, intellectual, and cultural exchanges has hardened into a machinery of profit that few benefit from, and the toll is visible: we see fewer people attending art shows, and fewer still engaging in the kinds of sustained, open-ended dialogues that great art can inspire.
Art fairs, once designed to democratize access to diverse works and create space for discovery, have become emblematic of this broken model. Events like Frieze, NADA, and the Armory Show in New York have come under increasing scrutiny, not because of the quality of art, but because of the cost of participation.
Booth fees for small galleries can range from $5,000 to $50,000 depending on location and fair prestige. Artists themselves often bear part of that cost, either directly or through commissions to their galleries.
On the visitor side, tickets can cost upwards of $75 for a single-day pass, often under the illusion that this supports the exhibiting artists. But in most cases, none of that admission revenue trickles down to the creators themselves.
Meanwhile, some fairs take a cut of the sales reportedly up to 30% in certain cases on top of the gallery’s existing 50% commission. This means that in some situations, artists may take home less than 20% of their final sale price.
What results is a system fuelled by optics: artists post photos of packed booths and tagged walls, perform success through Instagram Stories, and feign celebration at simply having participated. But many leave knowing neither who purchased their work nor where it now resides.
As sociologist Hannah Wohl notes in her ethnographic study Bound by Creativity (2021), “aesthetic innovation is constrained by market pressures and gatekeeper dynamics.” The fairs, while appearing democratic, have become more like elite flea markets designed not for discovery, but for speculation and social signalling.
Contracts, Control, and the Precarity of Representation
Even for artists “fortunate” enough to be represented by a gallery, the agreements can be predatory. It’s not uncommon for galleries to require exclusivity clauses that prevent artists from selling work directly even when approached privately.
Artists are thus disallowed from making sales through their personal websites, studios, or social interactions. To violate this is to risk losing the only institutional platform available to them.
These conditions are often presented as the cost of credibility. And many artists comply, afraid that rejecting such terms would mean invisibility. In return for exposure, they forfeit autonomy. But exposure, in this economy, does not equal sustainability.
Over time, these imbalances have become not just industry norms, but glaring realities that even casual art-goers have started to recognize. The curious visitors wandering through overpriced art fairs are no longer seeking meaning; they’re scanning for content, profile aesthetics, and Instagrammable moments. In the process, they become complicit in a system that privileges spectacle over substance, and transaction over transformation.
Reclaiming Value: A Return to Meaning
This is where I return to my conversation with my programmer friend, the one who reached out in genuine curiosity, perhaps confusion, about buying a $10,000 painting from an artist he discovered on Instagram.
As a man of reason and calculation, he was drawn to the vibrant performance of the artist’s profile: fluid acrylics, sweeping gestures, gradients that caught the light just right, and a seductive polish that Instagram does so well.
The work reminded him of something he had drawn as a teenager; simple, expressive, private and it touched something inside him that felt real. That part mattered.
But what followed was a more difficult question. He asked me if I thought it was a good investment; not spiritually, but financially. He asked whether I believed that this artist’s painting, as popular as they appeared online, would accrue monetary value over time. And I had to answer truthfully: no, I didn’t believe that it would. But then I told him something more important. That shouldn’t be the reason to buy art in the first place.
The true act of patronage is not transactional , it is relational. Buying art should not be a bet placed on the rise of someone’s fame or the churn of a speculative market. It is a commitment, a quiet affirmation of an artist’s purpose, a vote of confidence in their voice.
When patrons fund artists, they fund the conditions for art to exist: rent, materials, time. In return, they become a part of the story of how the artist came to be who they are. The artwork, then, is not merely owned, it is lived with. It becomes a conversation piece, a memory-maker, an heirloom with a soul.
Money itself was never meant to be the glue that holds art together. Even the ancient Hebrew “shekel” contained in its name a sense of a temporary exchange evaporating, incomplete, intentionally unfinished. But art carries within it the promise of endurance. It speaks to something larger: truth, beauty, clarity, resistance, and the pursuit of something real. Artists live with these ideals. And if the current state of the art world reflects anything, it’s that our society has begun to forget them.
We are at risk of turning the arts into a realm accessible only to the privileged, where value is dictated by wealth and metrics, rather than meaning. But art is not for the few. It is, and has always been, for everyone. Its power is not in its price tag, but in its ability to awaken our imaginations, to provoke dialogue, and to remind us of what it means to be alive.
If we want art to thrive again, not just as product, but as practice, we must rethink how we assign value. We must bring art back into the realm of everyday life and conversation, without sacrificing its integrity. We must resist the marketplace logic that rewards polish over depth, and rediscover art as a form of nourishment for the intellect, for the spirit, and for the benefit of culture as a collective whole.
