I've found this story a bit odd because if a child even just a few years older made paintings like these, they would maybe win a prize, but certainly not sell for $70,000 a piece.
You seem to be missing the point. He is saying that the paintings have little intrinsic worth, but gain it from the external circumstance of being created by such a young artist. Your response that people buy the paintings therefore they have value is completely orthogonal, because that doesn't prove either way whether the value is intrinsic or extrinsic (and art is a market know for extrinsic value, such as a painting going up in price once the formerly unknown artist is discovered, etc).
The comment "typical Bob Ross stuff that doesn't have any market outside of art fairs" is directly talking about perceptions of market worth, not intrinsic value.
Well done for using the word orthogonal though. I like that word. It isn't as good as susurrous however.
I'm not really wrong on that score, just look at some of the paintings in the article, and check out his website. Many of the examples given aren't even very good, especially the "winter landscape" image 7/8 in the article. I don't want to sound like I'm slagging some little kid, because it's great for a child of his age, but if he was even slightly older, say 11 or 12, he wouldn't be selling anything. There are loads of young painters this good in China, for example, and they aren't selling for 5 digits.
The interesting part of story is that the kid is actually selling the paintings for such amounts. If he was just painting them but not selling them, I'm not sure this would even make the news.
Well, you are though. You said that his work has no market outside of art fairs, and that is patently untrue as he is selling them for a lot of money and not through art fairs.
You also claimed that it is easy to tell a painting's quality from low resolution photographs and that these paintings are "typical Bob Ross stuff" when they are in a very different style from Bob Ross.
Basically, as far as I can tell, you either want an argument out of this, or are merely pissed off that some kid has got rich from paintings you don't personally appreciate after only seeing photos of them on the net.
I didn't mean this kid's paintings don't have a market outside of art fairs, I meant that is where this sort of impressionist painting is usually found when produced by someone else.
Yeah, one of the very amazing things about going to an art museum is that paintings are often incredibly different in "real life" than they are in reproductions (pictures on the net, postcards, posters, etc, even high-quality art books).
It's not just the colors, which are very often completely mutilated by reproductions—and sometimes that's inevitable as many paints react to light in a way that's simply not possible to reproduce using simple colors and standard inks, from differences in gloss, to metallic pigments, to paints with embedded "stuff", to paints that are oddly "intense" (due to fluorescence?)—but also the textures of paintings, which can range from dead flat to subtle but noticeable strokes, to painting where the paint is literally 10+cm thick, and sculpted, often with fabric and other materials incorporated.
Seeing a painting on wikipedia is not really seeing it. This isn't mere pedantry either—in many cases it's an utterly different experience.
I don't think it takes a trip to the gallery to conclude that the paintings aren't all that great. After all, the paintings themselves are based on photographs:
I'm sorry, but everyone can have an opinion about art, that's what makes it so easy to value it at so high a price, and in my opinion I'd probably never pay even a thousand dollars for one of those paintings. Now that's me, somebody may like them more, but I still just from a scroll through them have trouble understanding what the commotion is all about, except perhaps that he's so young.
