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Comment by chews | Hacker News Reader

Damien Hirst does not paint his dots, Jeff Koons has a team of fabricators. Modern art is just money laundering with some sort of output.

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I think the money laundering thing is orthogonal.

Koons is the prototypical example of delegation (to carefully selected artisans), but many less notable contemporary artists delegate realisation to fabricators (I have seen this first hand only in sculpture.) I think the fact that this is now acceptable has something to do with the decoupling of visual art-as-concept from art-as-object that has occurred over the past 150 years. The rise of CAD also makes it easier to design a work and delegate fabrication. Of course Music and Theatre have been delegating realisation pretty-much forever.

I don’t know that I agree that it’s only now become acceptable. Successful artists have long employed others to aid in their work - see e.g. Leonardo and his studio assistants who helped paint probably large parts of some of the paintings attributed to him.

The vast majority of artists don't have those kinds of resources. That's a lot like saying, "programming is just making infrastructure for surveillance." That's where the money is, a lot of programmers are working in adtech, but most programmers aren't. Similarly the people at your local art festival don't have wealthy patrons or a staff.

I see the idea that art is a form of money laundering a lot online but I’m not sure I understand the mechanism of how that works. Can you explain it?

Hirst | Koonz is more of a pyramid scheme of confidence tricksters, limited supply, envy, FOMO and other factors - the ego of those with money to burn and wanting to make a statement has play here.

Money laundering itself in the art market is duller, by design, it trades on lesser regulation and inspection of the funds bought to sales and auctions and often uses decoupling mechanisms, illegal funds -> art -> inflated values -> legitimate money via loans backed by art as collateral, etc.

Searching a bit I found two articles that seem okay on quick skim reading:

* https://alessa.com/blog/art-money-laundering-explained/

* https://www.dentons.com/en/insights/articles/2024/march/11/t...

Art has a subjective value. If you want to legitimise large amount of money, buy a piece of art for little money, sell it to a friend for lots of money, legalize profit.

That money still needs to be laundered somewhere though for the friend to purchase the piece. Otherwise why not just have the friend gift it to you or lose it to you in a poker game?

The documentary Made You Look: A True Story About Fake Art (2020) explains the concept and process better than I could hope to do myself, so to do your question justice, I would advise you to seek it out and to watch it. Exit Through the Gift Shop (2010) is adjacent to the topics raised and is also worth a watch.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Made_You_Look:_A_True_Story_Ab...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exit_Through_the_Gift_Shop

Freeport facilities are part and parcel to enabling these complex businesses arrangements, and they are mentioned in an aside in the documentary Made You Look; the Geneva Freeport being one of, of not the, world’s oldest and most important such facility is called out specifically if I remember correctly, or maybe one in Antwerp.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geneva_Freeport

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free-trade_zone

It is relatively straightforward to money launder through $1 million or so private sales (e.g. random "Qi Baishi" paintings). The pieces are low profile enough to not attract attention, but expensive enough for overhead to be low. The highly publicized auctions the internet declares as "money laundering" are the least likely to be actual money laundering.

Would it be more legitimate if the artists didn’t employ anyone else in the process?

Are they prompt engineers or Artists?

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