Now open your eyes and look at this, she (Lady GaGa) has over 10.000.000 (ten million) followers on Twitter http://twitter.com/ladygaga. It's like an entire population of a country like Belgium or a State like Michigan following her! Not too bad. Just for comparison. Gerhard Richter, arguably one of the greatest painters of our times has just 5000 followers on Twitter. No, just around 4627 as of today just to be clever http://twitter.com/gerhardrichter
What are both of them doing? Both producing imagery of our times, indeed. Both making a lot of money from their artwork. Is Lady Gaga a true pop artist like Andy Warhol and Gerhard Richter is a true aristocrat like a British Queen. But wait British Monarchy has 185,339 followers on twitter, a bit more. Definetely wide popularity is not a goal for a Richter. Question arises. Should the Contemporary art be made more popular and accessible to a wider audience? Or should the wider audience be left with a cheap copies of old masters many of them buy to decorate the walls. Of course posters also and option, but what a disregard for an art of painting itself is existence of those cheap copies which is everywhere. Just search Google. On first pages of search for a painting you will find dozens of a cheap painting factories instead of a promicing young painters. Those young painters who can't make a decent living from their art anymore. Interesting, can Google see the difference between paintingz and paintings? And why the paintingz and canvasez prevail in their usually quality results?
Interesting question. How did with such a small interest of general public in art, some art still commanding such prices at the auctions, $10,000,000, $40,000,000 for contemporary art isn't surprising sum. But how many artworks will newer ever be sold. Have you ever counted the number of working artists?
Is billionaires most caring people about art, just those who finally got little bit more time to understand it? Or it's just an another fashionable toy, such expensive and lucrative toy for a few. Now some more statistics. Both, Tate director Nicholas Serota and MoMA director Glenn Lowry having around 1000 Google searches per month, Gerhard Richter has 60,000, Damien Hirst has 130,000 and Lady Gaga, ok well 25,000,000... and Van Gogh has around 2,250,000 those interested in his art and consequences of life. Mozart by the way is not far forgotten today as well, 3,300,000 searches for his name is not a small amount. But Lady Gaga topped him almost 10 times. What a power of marketing i must admit.
