Renzo Martens is brilliant and huge inspiration of mine. I haven’t seen anything from him in a few years though..

Assuming this is sarcastic.

But I actually think this makes the work more interesting. Hirst has always been something of an art world Conman, that’s basically his brilliance. You don’t have to like it but you should respect it.

This is actually sick. I don’t like Kanye but this makes perfect sense - to use gen AI for a music video. No one is making any money from music videos anyway

It’s kinda just a fact.
Look at the biggest artists in the world.
Popularity: Banksy, Koons, MSCHF, Ai Weiwei, Kaws, Barbara Kruger..
More insider artworld: Gerard Richter, Mark Bradford, Kara Walker, Theaster Gates, Cecilia Vicuña..
All of these artists are working in the conceptual tradition.

8/8
MSCHF is drawing our attention to the fact that the monetary value of an artwork is somewhat arbitrary, based on unquantifiable metrics like authenticity and reputation. And they are doing it in a much more concise, interesting way than Cattelan and his banana.

7/
in 2021, MSCHF acquired a Warhol drawing, "Fairies" for $20k, they then produced 999 exact replicas before mixing them all together and selling them for $250 each. 99.9% of the work sold were essentially worthless, only one being worth the $20k price tag, but how would you be able to tell which?

6/
On the other hand, this is what makes the contemporary collective MSCHF so interesting.
What MSCHF is doing in their practice is explicitly testing the boundaries of value through art. For example,

5/
That is why, despite (or even because of) it's utter lack of technical skill, and it's absolutely redundant conceptual threads, Cattelan's piece has garnered far more public attention than many, many objectively better works of art. Because someone was willing to pay so much money for it.

4/
And, I think that really gets to why it is these artworks that garner the attention of a broader audience. It's not the artwork that interests people, it is the price tag.
In our late-stage, capitalist-realist environment, the measurement of value consists of a single metric: its monetary value.

3/
Some recent examples of this kind of artwork would include the work such as NFT's, like the Bored Ape Yacht Club, artists like Daniel Arsham and KAWS, or Maurizzio Cattelan's “Comedian", a banana duct taped to the wall, is expected to sell at Sotheby's (Auction
November 20) for a million dollars.

2/
Here I'm talking about art in the broader public consciousness, not the work recognized in the isolated and specialized artworld/art-market, which has its own set of issues, but artwork which escapes this sphere and becomes fodder in the broader attention economy.

I find it interesting that our culture has such a degraded opinion of art that the only time the average person hears about contemporary art is when it sells for some exorbitant sum. And that’s because the people are interested in the sum, not the art.

The whole argument around AI art is kinda ridiculous. Artists have been using ready made, industrial production, and armies of assistants to make their art for decades, since Duchamp at least. People making this argument obviously have about zero historical knowledge of modern art history

Contemporary art is conceptual at its very core.

That’s like being a physicist and saying: relativity is dumb. Everyone I talk to can’t explain particle physics.

Maybe ask a physicist? Or in this case an artist?