Why do people buy huge canvases with a few dots on from an arts unheard of for millions? I know it’s commonly used to launder money. Can someone explain how the process works?
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As others have pointed out, the value of art is so subjective that you can easily agree an arbitrary price with other parties without raising much suspicion. Say you owe someone $5 million for a cocaine shipment – simply transferring the money might attract attention from the authorities, because they’ll want to know what it was for, but if you instead agree to buy a random painting from them for its expected sale price + $5 million, then it looks less suspicious.
But another big factor is that art is very easy to move around and smuggle. A painting can be worth far more than the equivalent volume or weight of gold or cash, and even if someone notices it they won’t necessarily suspect that it’s particularly valuable. Lots of people have cheap paintings hung on their walls, and lots of people buy paintings as holiday souvenirs and transport them home on the plane. You really have to know a lot about art to be able to pick out the rare super-expensive pieces from the rest.
> Why do people buy huge canvases with a few dots on from an arts unheard of for millions?
That isn’t *necessarily* money laundering though. Lots of wealthy people enjoy collecting pieces of art as status symbols. They might get into bidding wars over pieces by particularly sought-after artists, and when it comes to status symbols things can be considered valuable *because* they cost a lot of money. In other words, they may not even particularly like the art itself, they just like being able to say they bought it for millions.
Also the artists and art dealers themselves obviously benefit from inflating the price of artworks.
Having said that, lots of people legitimately enjoy contemporary art that can be reductively described as “a few dots”. It’s weird that people spend millions on it, but it’s not necessarily weird that people like it.
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