Contemporary art is a pretentious term; let’s treat it as it is. One may say that art today is different from before insomuch as it has ceased trying to be beautiful. Somewhere in the twentieth-century things went wrong: Andy Warhol and his soup, Marcel Duchamp and his fountain, Andres Serrano and his Christ.

“Gimmick” is a seemingly derogatory word, conjuring an image of a gullible audience lured to a sub-par product by clanging bells and flashing lights. The art-gimmick also exists as “style.” In the best cases, style inspires an immediate attraction or revulsion, a means to the end of closer examination.

One of the benefits of Contemporary Art is that it allows individuals a means of personal expression. Through painting, sculpture, and performance art, anyone can express themselves in a way that will be safely observable for others.

Since every technique and material are allowed to make contemporary art, the artist doesn’t usually pay much attention to how realistic or well it is done. It’s like aesthetics are not longer important: a work of art needs to say something in a contemporary way and the technique doesn’t really matter.

Narrator: Modern art is expensive. From completely white canvases to simple, abstract colors, these seemingly basic works can cost you millions. Once photography was invented, that was a skill the camera could do, so artists no longer felt that that was their primary reason for making art. Art isn’t about beauty.

Guinness World Records lists Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa as having the highest ever insurance value for a painting. On permanent display at the Louvre in Paris, the Mona Lisa was assessed at US$100 million on December 14, 1962. Taking inflation into account, the 1962 value would be around US$860 million in 2020.