We live in an age when the traditional great subjects - the human form, the landscape, even newer traditions s... — Andy Warhol

We live in an age when the traditional great subjects - the human form, the landscape, even newer traditions such as abstract expressionism - are daily devalued by commercial art.

Author: Andy Warhol

Insight: There's a strange irony buried in this observation: Warhol, the guy who turned soup cans into gallery pieces, worried that commerce was hollowing out real art. But he was onto something we still wrestle with today. Every time a museum feels obligated to launch a gift shop, or a powerful photograph gets cropped to fit an Instagram square, or an artist has to think about "engagement metrics," we're watching that devaluation happen in real time. The things that supposedly matter—human beauty, natural wonder, genuine experimentation—get flattened into content. What makes this sting differently now is the speed and scale. A landscape photographer's work doesn't just compete with advertisements; it competes with thousands of similar images churned out daily by algorithm-optimized creators chasing clicks. Depth gets buried under noise. Even abstract art, once the last refuge of "pure" artistic expression, now gets repurposed as trendy wallpaper or startup office decoration faster than you can say "commodification." The unsettling part isn't that commerce exists—it always has. It's that the line between "real" art and marketing has become so blurred that artists themselves sometimes can't tell if they're making something meaningful or just being efficient with attention.