Wednesday, May 25, 2011

If Lady GaGa was a painter, how happy would we be

Just open your eyes and look at this, she (Lady GaGa) has 10.000.000 (ten million) followers on Twitter http://twitter.com/ladygaga. It's like a whole population of country like Belarus following her. Not too bad  Just for comparison. Gerhard Richter, arguably one of the greatest painters of our times has 5000 followers on Twitter. No, just 4627 as of today just to be clever http://twitter.com/gerhardrichter 
What both of them doing? Both producing images at some extent. Both making a lot of money from their art. Is Lady Gaga true pop artist like 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.
Interesting question arise. How did with such a little interest of general public in art, it still commanding such prices at the auctions, $10,000,000, $40,000,000 for contemporary art isn't surprising sum.
Is billionaires most caring people about art, just those who finally got little bit more time to understand it? Or it's just a fashionable toy, such expensive and lucrative toy for a few. Wait some more statistics. Both, Nicholas Serota and Glenn Lowry having around 1000 Google searches a month, Gerhard Richter has 60,500, Damien Hirst has 135,000 and Lady Gaga, ok well 25,000,000, ah, and Van Gogh has around 2,240,000 those interested in his art and biography. Mozart by the way is not forgotten as well, 3,350,000 searched for his name is not a small amount. But Lady Gaga topped him 10 times. What a power of marketing.