Some of it certainly is.
https://redstate.com/bonchie/2024/01/09/new-hunter-bidens-art-dealer-testifies-reveals-white-house-scheme-to-protect-the-presidents-son-n2168498

Before those deals were made, the ethical issues were already apparent, and the White House claimed that it had set up a system where the buyers would be anonymous. That would supposedly eliminate the ability of the purchasers to gain favor with the Biden family by dropping huge sums of money on amateur paintings.

Hunter Biden’s art dealer is telling a different story, though. He testified before the House Oversight Committee on Tuesday, and he revealed that the buyers were not kept anonymous from Hunter Biden.

No way the Bidens are unique here.
I also doubt that only modern art is involved in being the pretext for transferring large sums of money from Person A to Person B without raising red flags.
However, that’s not the same as saying some (or any) of the famous (actual) artists themselves were/are in on the laundering, just that their work lends itself to that kind of scam.

Not even when he was cranking out lithos like an old-school mimeograph and selling them at cut rates?

Nope. To me, abstract art is essentially what I see as practice pieces. They ring no chimes for me.

Must we?

We must. 🙂

Other art supplies. And probably lunch.

I would not expect that you would appreciate a Pollock even in person. Nor would a great many people. It’s not my cup of tea either. But for me, seeing them in person makes me understand better the work that went into them and why some people might think highly of them.

Essentially, it was available in various mall art places in the 80s, as a print, and clearly hasn’t made enough money, yet…. Plus, sometime in the last 5-odd years, every single search engine on the planet has become largely useless.

It’s pretty much a picture of dali, looking across his canvas at a mirror, and he’s painted pretty much the entire thing except the face in the canvas. And it’s just… odd. There’s something akilter in it, and it’s not clear what, it just makes part of you go… “wait, what?” and you don’t even know what it is you’re responding to. Took me multiple stops at that art shop over a while at that mall.

Finally, I figured it out — the part “unfinished” was the part that you would think would have been done first, not last. 😀

Anyway, that’s my favorite Dali, not his melty stuff.

My own innate preferences tend to run to the representational. The documentary film “Tim’s Vermeer” is a fascinating one, to me.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3089388/
It is, literally, about trying to figure out exactly how it is that Vermeer did his amazingly photographic art in an era long before cameras. Right down to the way the colors interact.

But I have to say — Ed Harris’s passion piece, a biography, about Jackson Pollock, is also an interesting enough film. One of the key things Harris did manage with it is to actually get all the different pieces from Pollock’s breakout 40s show into one place, and he has the camera walk around and through them, as though you are, personally, in the gallery at the time.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0183659

And I will ack, in this scene, if no other, you do get the feel for what Pollock was about, and how his creations are not just merely “paint spatters”, but more than that. I came away appreciating that some elements of non-representational art are worthy of respect, even if they have limited appeal and, I personally find, limited value.

I recommend both these films are worth checking out, both offer interesting views into the art world — Vermeer did some amazing stuff in his time, and, yes, Pollock was not trivial, either.

Note that I did see both in the theater — not sure how much that can affect the experience, if you’ve got a small viewing setup. They both do work well “writ large”, because… visual art, right?

Back in the 1990s Discovery magazine was losing its reliability as a science magazine and becoming a “popular science fad” magazine.

They had a mag with a cover piece titled, “Animal Artists”.

Apparently they found about a half dozen “talented animals” who created modern “works of art”, or so it was claimed. I don’t recall too much of it — one was an elephant, one was an ape of some kind, and there was probably another, different ape. I forget what the others were, offhand.

The piece culminated when they took the pieces “created” by the animals and, without explaining their source of origination, requested an analysis from a number of art appraisers/experts.

For the most part, they were relatively positive.

The author of the piece took this to make the argument that, perhaps, the animals had talent.

It never seemed to occur to them — not for a moment — that it was, perhaps, much more a commentary on the quality of Modern Art than that it had anything to do with the “artistic talent” of animals…

LMAO. SMH.

I will also note. My late mother was doing estate appraisals in the 90s. Her primary client was usually attorneys wanting to get valuations for insurance purposes, and she was known for being honest and fairly reliable in the local (Palm Beach FL area) legal community.

She would sometimes be called upon to get an appraisal value for an art piece. She did not tend to make the appraisal for something like that, but had art appraisers who she relied upon for the job, who she then gave a fee to, and included their appraisal in her summary for the estate.

She noted that one of the more common responses/complaints was the estate owner going, “Oh, no, that can’t be right. I paid twice that for that piece.” Again, LMAO.