2015-01-08
Explanation
The Joke
An art dealer (or artist) is trying to sell a Cubist painting to a skeptical buyer by pitching it as a "three-for-one sale" -- arguing that since Cubism depicts an object from multiple angles simultaneously, you are effectively getting three different views in a single painting. The caption below reads: "Fun Fact: Cubism was originally a marketing scam."
The Humor
The joke reframes one of the most important movements in modern art history as nothing more than a dishonest sales pitch. Cubism genuinely does depict objects from multiple perspectives at once -- that is its defining artistic innovation. By recasting this as a con artist''s attempt to charge for one painting while claiming the customer is getting three, the comic deflates the lofty art-historical significance of the movement into crass commercial trickery. The humor also plays on the common suspicion that modern art is, at some level, a scam -- that artists and galleries convince people to pay enormous sums for work that could be dismissed as gimmickry. The buyer''s annoyed, skeptical expression reinforces the idea that he is not buying (literally or figuratively) this pitch.
References
Cubism was an early 20th-century art movement pioneered by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, characterized by depicting subjects from multiple viewpoints simultaneously, fragmenting forms into geometric shapes. It is considered one of the most influential movements in modern art.