I always enjoy Seth Godin's reflections on marketing (and other topics). On one of the recent posts on his blog, he muses about a topic that has long bothered me, too:
"What makes a great work of art? Almost entirely, it's how much it sells for. An expensive avant garde painting that breaks through a price barrier will define an entirely new school for years to come. We do the same thing with music... if a song takes off, sells lots of copies and makes the musician rich and famous, we assume that there's some sort of inherent 'quality' in what they did, as opposed to deciding that our definition of quality in that field is: what sells."
He adds:
"The critic in me cringes to write this. After all, what makes a great work of art should have nothing at all to do with how much it sells for and everything to do with how it makes you feel. I think the game here is in the definition of 'great.' And what society has chosen--for a coffee shop, a song, a poem, a new kind of workman's comp insurance--is that 'great' means successful. Not the other way around."
If you need proof, last month a piece of graffitto spray-painted with a stencil by an artist called Banksy sold for £96,000 (about $175,000). By the way, I think some of his images are clever and enjoyably ironic...but so are the cartoons drawn by, say, Steve Bell, and I don't think he's making two hundred grand per cartoon...
