Money

Art has changed drastically over recent years. Purchasing art has become harder due to the increase in all forms of art. Robert Hughes is an art critic who resides in New York and has lived through changes which has taken the art world by storm. He began his journey has an art critic in Europe, where in Florence he helped crews try to save art from a massive flood that put the city in ruins in 1966. It was from this experience that art really took off in Hughes life and ultimately led him to move to New York where young artists had the best chance of making it big in the industry. Hughes sees the traveling of the Mona Lisa to New York as the turning point in how people perceive art. Previously people who go to museums to view the art and its beauty. Now with the Mona Lisa in town viewers were flooding to museums to view the piece just to say they saw it, almost a as a life accomplishment. The news of the paintings swept through the news and JFK even greeted the piece as it made a short stop in the Capital. Expectations for art grew a significant amount and social status of obtaining prestigious works of art also grew significantly. Art became an icon and people viewed it as a possession rather then a beautiful piece of art. This became a major problem when collectors such as Scull would purchase works from artists at low costs and then auction them off for extremely large sums of money. Money transformed the art world and put many players that did not have a lot of money aside. Hughes predicts that this will become the future of art. No longer will it be about the artist, or the painting, but the social statues that comes along with the newly acquired painting.