1. "the rich" seems pretty clear an concise. What else would you call them. How is "rich people" any more or less crass?

2. You say it provides a strawman. But then you go on to basically confirm what the article says. And your defense is "that's just how it is"

It's difficult to see how a lurid view of how some people with money live (e.g. the article) improves peoples lives any more than say, porn.

The idea class mobility needs some sort of moral "defense," is certainly challenging. Sure, it hollows out the ranks of the aggrieved, but that's the point.

Views of how the 'rich' live are vitally important today, when wealth inequality is the central social issue of our time, impacting government, policy, wages, and consumer markets alike. (Piketty).

Class mobility is good, of course - it's been a central tenet of American values, even if it's been smaller than thought. But I'm not sure that mobility between the 0.1% and 0.01% is the key flow - mobility between the middle 50% and top 5% is probably what we should be caring about.

Well if you're an artist with an MFA over time its easy to be sitting on over 250k in debt. The key point is the artist is selling a piece for $750, the collector then can turn around and sell the same piece for $40k+. The art doesn't start gaining real value until the artist is no longer participating in the value chain of their work.

Honestly, as a collector with 16 years of collecting under my belt, I can tell you this does not happen very often. I do have a few things that I paid hundreds for that are now worth thousands, but I also have works that I paid hundreds (and sometimes thousands) for that are worth nothing (although I really treasure them).

If you happen to catch an artist at the beginning of their careers, and are willing to take a chance on them, then this might happen but more often than not it won't.

Also, as a collector you actually want artists to be successful so you want them to be growing and continuing to get more recognition and keep producing work. In order for them to do that you want them to get better and better value from their work.

The artists mentioned here might not have done so well in that auction but they certainly went on to very lucrative careers.

> no longer participating in the value chain of their work

I'm not sure what you mean by that.

If you mean the value chain of the gallery/dealer/auction world is where prices go up then yes, that's true, but the artist is very much participating by creating and selling new work. In the $750 -> $40K+ example the artist will definitely get a lot more than $750 per piece in the future.

If you mean art only gains real value after the artist is no longer making any (i.e. is dead), then actually that's not true for contemporary art.

It would be funny to ask a founder who has been diluted out whether one could say the same thing about software.

I would say that your explanation is simplistic, but really it's no explanation at all (and has little to do with the article, so I'm not even sure what it is that you're responding to except your own interpretation of the title). What does it mean that art is "an asset class like any other"? First, no asset is like any other when its particulars are the subject under discussion. Food isn't like transportation, and neither of them is like art. Second, what does "that's really how it works" explain? It's like saying money is just money. The question is what power structure and dynamics it creates. It's not that "the rich" are "offensive", but they do create a certain dynamics, which is important to understand. And so what if "that's how it works"? Does that mean that the dynamics must never change? It's changing constantly, both in the small (e.g. the particular tax tactics that artworks are used for, discussed in the article) and in the large (the relative power of the rich vs. that of the rest of society). Highlighting the power structure in society (both in the small and in the large) is neither an expression of offense (at least not in the sense of taking offense you seem to allude to) nor an immutable law of nature. It is both an interesting subject of study as well as a subject for change.

Interesting. To me, "highlighting the power structure," is a critical technique that frames one party as a moral antagonist and there is nothing neutral, objective, or rigorous about that. I should perhaps have been more brief and said only that the article was tawdry marxist outrage porn, but I my intent was to contribute a view that untangled it from its tendentious frame.

> To me, "highlighting the power structure," is a critical technique that frames one party as a moral antagonist

That's unfortunate. Exploitation does not imply a moral failure on the part of the exploiter (just as "sexist" and "racist" aren't moral accusations like misogynist/xenophobe) but is a description of a dynamics where all parties can (and often do) have good intentions. It seems like the moral reading is your own interpretation, and it is you who is taking offense. Note that the desire to fight the dynamics also does not imply an assumption of a moral failure on the part of those you wish to fight. For example, much of civilization is about fighting nature, yet this does not imply that we believe nature has an ill intent towards us.

I would be very surprised if anyone outside a few fringe email newsletters would agree that racism and sexism are not moral accusations. In a case where that statement were true, where sexism and racism were intrinsic facts of a struggle between exploiters and exploitees and not circumstantial beliefs to be mitigated by discourse, there is no possibility of peace, tolerance, or coexistance. And yet, these manage to exist today almost everywhere where people who do not believe that sort of thing live.

The main implication of such a view is that discourse is just an artifact of that oppression, that only postpones an inevitable conflict that is necessarily fatal for one of the exploiter or exploited. It also excuses the exploited from being held to the ethics and morality of the exploiter.

Hard not to see such a system of belief as beyond reason and even incarnate evil, but as they say, the devil's greatest trick was convincing us he didn't exist. :)

You're conflating character assessments with moral ones.

A racist may be both immoral and good natured.

Exploitation is a moral term. It says that the mere existence of a whole group of people is immoral. It's not clear that it is, nor even really what "exploitation" means.

Moral culpability assumes responsibility. I'm racist and sexist because I was born in a racist and sexist society -- that was not my fault. I spread disease because germs exist, and that's not my fault. But now that I've learned to see and recognize racism, sexism and germs, I try to fight them and not to spread them. If I don't wash my hands or do not fight sexism and racism, then I am morally culpable now, but those facts in themselves do not imply moral culpability even though they do imply harm (in all three cases).

Your statement about exploitation is just an expression of laziness and anger. It is hard for me to believe that you believe that scholars believe that the existence of a group of people is immoral. If that is what you believe, then you aren't paying attention.

“It’s an asset class like any other” says a lot about how market economics affect people’s conception of value.

> “It’s an asset class like any other” says a lot about how market economics affect people’s conception of value.

Indeed. There is a strong argument (does this go back to Kant?) that art only "works" when it is not pragmatic. That a tool is not art, no matter how elegant and functional. Hence, if art nowadays works primarily as a financial instrument, it is not actually free to do the work of being art. If an art fair is visited with an eye to current and potential economic value, and the art at the fair is represented and even made with that eye, then it ceases to have the "that image saved my life on a sad day" or "I see in that painting the terror and fragility of existence" or such energy that we actually seek in the arts.

(Of course, you could argue about whether anything pragmatic is not art, e.g. that industrial design is art. And things get really slippery with ceramics. As the article suggests, much great art has been made within very strict economies, often via commission. But a well made bowl or a portrait of a bishop are still not asset classes...)

Your analysis is all perfectly correct if you presuppose that "art" is purely epiphenomenal. But if you start from the perspective that "art" is something in and of itself, with its own set of values that economics only tangentially interacts with, then you would view the ways in which economics reduces art to "mere" exchange value as positively immoral, if that's the right word.

To adapt a Father John Misty line: Maybe art is just an economy based on resource scarcity but I fail to see what that's got to do with you and me.