The Tragedy of Famous Art

As we saw in the film we have been watching in class the past few classes, The Mona Lisa Curse narrated by Robert Hughes, is a tale of the decline of art as a visual and conceptual comodity to becoming a monetary comodity. Art has changed ever since the tour that the Mona Lisa took through the United States. Robert Hughes questions, " Is the authoritarian book on art these days a check book?". It seems that the more an artwork is worth at an auction, the more it becomes a celebrity in the art world, and the more commercialized it becomes. Often it is the doing of the museums that commercialize and drape art with monetary values. The survival of many museums are based on outside funding and if the museum does not popularize itself my advertising certain works of art it will crumble. I beleive it is the job of the museum to protect art and to preserve it's conceptual value. Works such as Starry Night by Vincent Van Gogh have been so commercialized they are everywhere. There are postcards, shirts, and bedding with this image on it. This over exposure changes the meaning of the art and degrades it.