
Leonardo Da Vinci Painting Sells for $450.3M, Shattering Auction Records - aaronbrethorst
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/15/arts/design/leonardo-da-vinci-salvator-mundi-christies-auction.html?action=Click&contentCollection=BreakingNews&contentID=66089700&pgtype=Homepage&_r=0
======
comboy
Marketing wins everywhere. Paintings, IT, open source projects, startups,
everything. It seems to be responsible for 90%+ value in worryingly many
cases. It may be getting worse.

I think in the next few years we will see rise of companies that help
customers make decent choices that are not solely based on advertising. We
have many user review based solutions but it just doesn't work with most
things (not even touching on fake reviews). Even for things where the whole
value of the product is about how user feels about it, most users don't have
other products to compare. Plus choice-supportive bias.

For tech stuff there are reviewers out there who test many things and which
you can trust. Some take them apart and can reason about used components and
so on. Not so easy when you are visiting a grocery store or wondering what's
the story of the organic food that you are looking at (or maybe it was just
mislabled?). Some educated 3rd party could research that for you.

Again, it's different from what we have today because even though it's
tempting, sexy and scalable, it can't be just about letting users send
opinions and info. It must be expert web of trust. Those companies may end up
with a lot of power. But at least in this case if some of them try to misuse
it, somebody can stumble upon it and show that they are not trustworthy.

~~~
elorant
You don't seem to understand how the art world works. Buying art at this level
has nothing to do with the work itself. It has everything to do with
demonstrating power. Whoever bought that will have the best Leonardo work
outside of museums. Art is a positional good, it shows that you have class and
at this level nothing is as prestigious. Say you put that thing in a house or
a museum, you can invite the Pope himself to view it. In terms of networking
this is the holy grail.

Just because Christie’s went to unprecedented lengths to market the painting
it doesn't mean that without that effort the painting wouldn't have sell at
this price level. The art market is highly unpredictable.

~~~
speedplane
I agree. Paradoxically, buying this work buys you something that money can't
buy, even though it actually did.

------
brm
Fascinating to watch Rybolovlev move money in the open like this with the help
of the art market apparatus. What a time to be alive.

If you're not keeping track this was almost double the price expected for a da
Vinci of questioned provenance sold by the fertilizer magnate who bought
Donald Trump's Palm Beach mansion for double the estimated price and then
never lived in it.

~~~
omarchowdhury
Wouldn't he need someone to pay that same amount or more for the painting to
effectively have moved money with this apparatus? And if the next buyer is
similarly motivated, isn't the valuation akin to a Ponzi?

~~~
Gargoyle
If you have $400 million in funds whose origin you can't account for, you move
it into some opaque account to buy the painting for that $400 million. The
buyer (you) remains "unknown" but now you have $400 million that you _can_
account for, since it came from selling a painting.

In the art auction world, either or both sides can remain as anonymous as they
wish, which makes this whole scheme possible.

~~~
null0pointer
But how do you explain your acquisition of the $400MM painting when the taxman
comes knocking?

~~~
ctdonath
You don't. Tax man cares not how you bought it, only that tax is fully paid
when sold.

~~~
jvln
Is not it cheaper to pull this trick with higher number of no-name artists
paintings by moving the money betweent two ofshore companies that belong to
you. Therefore I believe this purchasecwas was a status purchase like yachts.
It is a show off that a person has so much resources that can spend part of it
on a peace of art that nobody can get.

------
dbkelly
For anyone paying attention, the seller of the painting is Dmitry Rybolovlev.
How did Rybolovlev amass so much money? Through pollution. His company
Uralkali is listed as one of the top polluters in Russia. This is how
externalities work: He keeps the profits, you (literally) eat the losses.
Perhaps this detail is the biggest story here.

~~~
adventured
Even for a Russian oligarch, context is relevant.

It's not his company. He hasn't owned it since 2010. The roots of Uralkali go
back 80 years, he owned it for 15 years.

Uralkali is 20% of the global potash market, without their mining a billion
people wouldn't have food - at a minimum - given the present 7.6 billion world
population. Russia has become a wheat juggernaut [1], to put it mildly;
without their food production, the developing world will not develop given the
population growth occuring.

That doesn't defend the pollution, it does however bring some very important
context to the situation that you entirely neglected.

[1] [https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-11-15/europe-
is...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-11-15/europe-is-falling-
behind-russia-in-the-global-wheat-market)

------
bwang29
According to another source from BBC, the final bid for the work was $400m,
with fees bringing the full price up to $450.3m.
[http://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-
arts-42000696](http://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-42000696)

What's interesting from the BBC article is the image "The painting has been
cleaned and restored from the image on the left to the one on the right"
doesn't even look like the same person?

Another anecdote - In 1958 it was sold at auction in London for $60. By then
the painting was generally reckoned to be the work of a follower of Leonardo
and not the work of Leonardo himself.

~~~
dchuk
That's...kinda weird, right? The before and after are clearly two different
paintings. Hair is different, mouth is different...I would assume, as a
layman, that restoring a piece of art the goal should keep it looking nearly
the same just cleaning it up and removing damage. This looks like they just
straight up painted over it.

~~~
onewaystreet
Christie's has more details here: [http://www.christies.com/features/Salvator-
Mundi-timeline-86...](http://www.christies.com/features/Salvator-Mundi-
timeline-8644-3.aspx)

That BBC quote is a bit misleading. The photo on the left is what the painting
looked like before restoration, not what it looked like when it was originally
painted. Parts of it had been damaged and repainted over multiple times in the
past which is why the restored version looks so different.

~~~
Jaruzel
Bearing in mind here, that Christie's had a vested interest in the painting
selling for as high as an amount as possible. So interesting this may be, it's
hardly unbiased.

Personally, I'm a believer. :)

------
blunte
Why is this a surprise? There's a point at which money no longer makes sense -
both to the people without it as well as the people with it.

There are many reasons for spending relatively incomprehensible amounts of
money for something. One is to show others that you can; it's a demonstration
of just how wealthy you are. Another is to try to make something special of
the money that otherwise has reached a level of being useless/pointless.

Think a bit in terms of a normal human lifetime. If you aspire to be rich,
what amount of money defines that level? Once you reach a level where you can
own and operate more properties, vehicles, and even employees than you can
even remember, what does the excess money represent?

Ok, this is an absurd analogy. But as technical people, imagine building a
multi-petabyte storage device. Practically no private individual has such a
thing. Using your intellect, experience, and perhaps ingenuity you can have
such a thing. Then what? You store all the porn you have time to download. You
save every movie you ever thought about watching. You take 1000 photos every
time you go out. It's thrilling! But how much of it do you ever really go back
and enjoy?

Frankly, unless the buyer places it in a public museum, I judge it as a hollow
effort to find value in excess (which will last about three months). Humans
are great at acclimating to new and better, and soon we need more. What else
is there?

~~~
comboy
> What else is there?

Storage of value. If you want to diversify, you may want something easy to
move/hide for some scenarios. I'm not saying this painting works great for
that purpose, just that that's one of the things that may make people want to
buy it.

~~~
blunte
If you have $4bn, unless you're investing in Beanie Babies, you really don't
have to struggle to find stable stores of value.

At that stratosphere of wealth, an art piece is not about diversification.
It's a bit like buying a 200m yacht to surpass all other private yachts.

What I find amusing is that even the ultra rich people are statistically NEVER
the richest people. There are perhaps 5 people in the world who could be
debated as one of the richest people in the world. And their individual wealth
exceeds the "poor rich" such as this person by a factor of 20+. To people
outside their bubble it just looks "sad" (pardon the Trumpism).

~~~
drcode
I agree- I would estimate 95% or more of really rich people are mostly
indistinguishable from an upper middle class person from the outside: Sure,
they have maids and maybe fly their own plane or have an expensive classic car
but there are these 5% of rich people who somehow have a strange compulsion to
advertise their wealth as widely as possible and they're the ones who have the
100 mil yachts and go to these sorts of auctions (the exception maybe being
Bill Gates' Da Vinci notebook purchase... likely Bill just thought those were
super cool)

~~~
blunte
Clearly Bill Gates doesn't need to flaunt his wealth. I'm sure he was just
really excited by Da Vinci, and the opportunity to own a real piece of history
was totally worth it.

Despite Gates's (very) questionable method of rising to greatness, what he has
attempted to do with his wealth is well above what most "rich" people do.

~~~
vixen99
And he's done a brilliant PR job. [https://www.liberationnews.org/real-agenda-
gates-foundation/](https://www.liberationnews.org/real-agenda-gates-
foundation/)

~~~
zxcmx
Oddly enough I find it easier to believe that Bill Gates wants to change the
world for the better than to believe that he is secretly pushing some
neocapitalist agenda.

Mainly because he personally has everything to gain from the former and
practically nothing from the latter at the wealth level he operates at.

Dude could get a better return on index funds than from his philanthropy.
Cynically, plain investing is low status where he is at, less cynically he has
a lot of time to think about things and a lot of resources and I believe many
(most? hmm) humans would act the same way under those conditions. Maybe I'm
just an optimist.

------
_nedR
Art is supposed to inspire our inner eye for beauty. Seeing the 450 million
dollar price tag, i feel an unusual amount of anger, disgust, revulsion at the
ostentatiousness, excesses and brazen corruption of the rich and of the fine
art world. I feel more disgust at this than i would at the usual gaudy, blingy
excesses (like gold-plated cars and mansions) of the tasteless wealthy. I
suppose good art can also seek to inspire these feelings, even if the price
tag has only cheapened the actual artwork in my eye. I wonder how the millions
of the poor, nameless, talented artists around the world feel about this.

A portrait of Jesus Christ of questionable origin and authenticity being sold
by a Russian fertilizer magnate for 450 million usd. Says quite a bit about
the times we live in, Doesn't it?

edit: Sorry for my salty tirade; Just sharing a viewpoint.

~~~
anjc
> Art is supposed to inspire our inner eye for beauty

These paintings were only painted because exceedingly wealthy families
commissioned and collected them. If it were up to people like me and you,
there'd be no art to inspire people in the first place.

> I wonder how the millions of the poor, nameless, talented artists around the
> world feel about this.

This community wouldn't exist if it weren't for the hierarchy of the art
world.

~~~
DomreiRoam
> If it were up to people like me and you, there'd be no art to inspire people
> in the first place. Art would still exist but some master pieces wouldn't
> exist. I agree that patronage has allowed artist to produce magnificent art
> piece but is not the case for all masterpieces.

~~~
anjc
You only have to casually witness the art world - even just at a local level -
to see that speculation by wealthy buyers sustains it, and also, that it costs
a lot to produce art as a professional. So maybe without patronage some level
of art would exist, but it wouldn't exist as a community without people
ultimately paying a lot of money for work.

Furry porn producers would continue to make a mint though.

~~~
DomreiRoam
The fact that patronage can be good for the Arts is not in question but if you
do a search for great artist that die in poverty and unrecognized during their
lifetime you will find plenty of very famous name.

My rapid search brings me El Greco, Claude Monet, Johan Sebastian Bach, Franz
Kafka, Johannes Vermeer, Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, Vincent Van Gogh
from [http://www.toptenz.net/top-10-now-famous-artists-died-
ignomi...](http://www.toptenz.net/top-10-now-famous-artists-died-ignominy.php)
; I think it wouldn't be fair to consider them minor artist.

Art co-exist with society for more that 17,000 years if you consider Lascaux.
It doesn't make sense to reduce Art to profitable or bankable Art.

To produce Art can be expensive and can be cheap, without money you will not
produce beautiful marble statue or Faberge eggs but Art doesn't do be
expensive.

------
olympus
You could buy three F-22 Raptors with that kind of money. Well, Congress would
never approve the sale, but this painting went for triple the per-copy price
of the F-22, according to Wikipedia
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_Martin_F-22_Raptor](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_Martin_F-22_Raptor)

I might be biased, but I know what I would pick if given the option, and it
cruises 1,200 mph.

~~~
hw
Trying to compare a piece of art, history and culture, with a weapon of
destruction.

Great job.

~~~
dingaling
An F-22 is, regardless of its function, one of the most complicated devices
ever created by man. In that sense it is an example of the combined 'art' of
the skills of many thousands of highly-skilled individuals.

In past centuries cathedrals were hailed as the masterpieces of the skills of
craftsmen.

~~~
speedplane
F-22s are cool, but sadly, probably won't hold their value as well as a
DaVinci.

~~~
zxcmx
Yeah the F-22 really is useless without a military industrial complex behind
it. And a defense use. Sort of a parable about modern products really. Self
driving cars with no maps, phones with no updates, no app store. Our best
products are really infrastructure products, supported by a cast of thousands.

But the painting stands on its own and a decent pair of leather shoes will get
you from a to b just as well as they did centuries ago.

If I remember rightly the most universal item of soldier's kit throughout all
history was the spoon.

------
the_common_man
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d7omwQLuGJQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d7omwQLuGJQ)
was the marketing campaign

~~~
ktta
If anyone want's to know the soundtrack, it is 'On the Nature of Daylight' by
Max Richter.

If you think you've heard it somewhere, it was in Arrival -
[http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2543164/](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2543164/)

~~~
Gargoyle
A version of it was also the main theme in Shutter Island.

------
sytelus
What is interesting is that if this painting was attributed to someone
unknown, its price would have fallen off the cliff even though there would
have been zero material change in goods that buyer would be receiving. This
says a lot about our hero worship tendencies. People are going to look very
hard to see what is so special about this painting.

~~~
puranjay
You're implying that a painting has any inherent value (it does not). Just
like everything else in the material world, it only has contextual value.

Before the 1900s, aluminum was valued more than gold. Today, it is one of the
cheapest metals around. Nothing changed but the _context_ in which we were
able to extract it.

In the case of this painting, the context is what makes it valuable - the last
known privately owned painting by a name nearly the entire western world
recognizes immediately.

~~~
runeb
I would assume an increased availability of aluminum because of better or
cheaper production processes makes the price drop?

------
mynegation
"the old masters market is contracting, because of limited supply"

Can someone familiar with the art market comment on how that works? That seems
contrary to what I know about markets. I mean, I understand that the volume is
contracting, but the context is that such "[high] price is remarkable".

~~~
evgen
There are never going to be any new old masters and because shit happens the
supply is slowly shrinking over time as various works leave the market due to
museum acquisition, accident, war, and theft. The demand side of the equation
however is growing as various new money entrants to the art market compete for
this diminishing supply. The demand side is also boosted by the fact that art
like this has now become something of a financial tool for capital flight,
corporations, investment funds and criminal interests.

------
libertine
Is it just me that feels like this is rather a symptom of money being
devaluated by the day?

This may sound ridiculous, but it reminds me of a private server of Lineage 2
(RPG) when old admins returned to the game as normal players and had almost
infinite currency and completely ruined the server economy by simply buying
rare stuff, with limited supply, at any price.

I make this analogy for the housing market, art, soccer players,
cryptocurrency, and many other markets where you have limited supply - which
is where you actually see how much washed money is starting to show up...

It's scary and no ones talks about this.

Edit: btw the solution for the private server economy disease was to wipe it -
real life markets can't be wiped.

------
virtualwhys
> The artwork has been the subject of legal disputes and amassed a price
> history that ranges from less than $10,000 in 2005, when it was spotted at
> an estate auction...

The heirs of that estate are probably not thrilled with this headline.

------
l33tbro
Funny that Da Vinci remains the most bankable 50 years after he first sky-
rocketed the perceived value of art.

Basically, In 1962 the Mona Lisa was loaned to Metropolitan Museum of Art by
the Louvre. Huge marketing campaign resulted in over a million of Americans
going to see it, ushering in the new era of art as mass spectacle/consumption.

Obviously there were other factors involved - but Robert Hughes made an
amazing documentary about this subject called the Mona Lisa Curse, which you
can watch online [1].

[1] [https://vimeo.com/62973616](https://vimeo.com/62973616)

------
soneca
What high art, diamonds, and bitcoin have in common? They all would have a
much much much lower value if they weren't so good for money laundering.

------
Antimachides
[http://www.vulture.com/2017/11/christies-says-this-
painting-...](http://www.vulture.com/2017/11/christies-says-this-painting-is-
by-leonardo-i-doubt-it.html)

>Christie’s Is Selling This Painting for $100 Million. They Say It’s by
Leonardo. I Have Doubts. Big Doubts.

tl;dr: The painting is an old-hat style and pose not becoming of a Renaissance
artist of Leonardo's caliber.

Me: ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯

------
mrb
I think the buyer probably had a net worth at least ≥ $4.5 billion (I wouldn't
spend more than 10% of my wealth on a single painting.) According to
[https://www.forbes.com/billionaires/list/](https://www.forbes.com/billionaires/list/)
there are only ~380 persons that would qualify. Any one knows who is the
buyer?

~~~
khazhou
You wouldn't spend more than 10% of your wealth on a Da Vinci?

~~~
username223
Nope. Let's say I'm worth between $10k and $10m, i.e. somewhere in the range
of a normal human. I would be crushed by the maintenance costs, even if I kept
it in a Swiss vault instead of on my wall where I could actually look at it.
The only reason I would spend 10% of my net worth is to immediately sell it to
a Russian oligarch for a fat profit.

------
5706906c06c
TL;DR - I'm not saying it isn't real, but I'm not saying it's fake either;
[http://ualrpublicradio.org/post/100-million-leonardo-da-
vinc...](http://ualrpublicradio.org/post/100-million-leonardo-da-vinci-
painting-might-not-even-be-leonardo-da-vinci)

------
wallflower
In the book "$12 Million Stuffed Shark: The Curious Economics of Contemporary
Art", it describes the insanity of the skyrocketing auction prices with the
following analogy (paraphrasing since I do no longer have a copy of the book).

"If you have a $20M painting, you can imagine an equivalently priced apartment
where you can display that painting in one of the world's great cities. But
$150M? There is no equivalent for that. There are no apartments that
expensive."

And now $450.3M?! for the top.

In "China's Art Factories: Van Gogh From the Sweatshop", you can see the
bottom of the economic scale. About $20-$30-$50 for a good copy of a Van Gogh
or other masterpiece.

[http://www.spiegel.de/international/0,1518,433134,00.html](http://www.spiegel.de/international/0,1518,433134,00.html)

------
myth_buster

      Some art experts pointed to the painting’s damaged condition and its questionable authenticity.
    
      This was a thumping epic triumph of branding and desire over connoisseurship and reality.
    

Interesting quote.

------
madads
Store of value comes to mind, a la crypto currency phenomena.

------
Stratoscope
Now this is freaky.

I thought I was done with HN for the evening after reading about this painting
and a few other things.

So I opened my Kindle to read something else, and the advertising screen
showed a book called _Typhoon Fury (The Oregon Files)_.

I grew up in Oregon, so I figured I would take a look.

The blurb began:

> Hired to search for a collection of paintings worth half a billion dollars,
> Juan Cabrillo and the crew of the Oregon soon find themselves in much deeper
> waters.

~~~
hvidgaard
That is data mining and advertising networks for you.

------
thetruthseeker1
I wonder if its a person or a corporation/org that bought the painting. Number
of people who may buy such a painting is probably only a handful.

------
elmar
This as just reminded me of another news from 2014.

Stolen paintings hung on Italian factory worker's wall for almost 40 years

[https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2014/apr/02/stolen-...](https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2014/apr/02/stolen-
paintings-italian-works-wall-40-years-gaugain-bonnard)

------
gadders
I wonder if the painting will end up in Geneva Free Port, "the greatest art
collection no-one can see"

[http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-
arts-38167501](http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-38167501)

------
heifetz
lol, I guess there are three or four people in the world willing to pay that
price. I'll be interested to see if this ever gets sold again and at what
price.

I'm guessing the buyer (if it's a single person) is a royal, oligarch (could
even be Putin) or someone in China.

------
ireadfaces
Is it too late to ask that how such art is valued? Of course I read about the
theory that it depends on art dealers and a lot of things, less to do with
quality of art. As quality of art is subjective after a certain point.

Just thought someone could guide me.

~~~
cepth
[https://www.economist.com/blogs/economist-
explains/2017/01/e...](https://www.economist.com/blogs/economist-
explains/2017/01/economist-explains-3)

> About half of the market is accounted for by sales through dealers, either
> directly from the artist’s studio (the “primary market”) or by reselling a
> work that has already been bought once (the “secondary market”) and which is
> now being sold on, often with several commissions being paid to
> intermediaries along the way. The other half of the art market is made up of
> sales by auction, a system that claims to be open and competitive, with both
> artwork and potential bidders being visible to all. In reality, it can be as
> secretive as the dealing world, with complex financial arrangements and
> discounted commissions being not uncommon.

------
mars4rp
the interesting thing to me is how the face completely changed in the
restoration(more like repainting)!

Jesus in color is very similar with our 21 century image of him, no mustache,
eyes completely changed and ... the painting is relatively new compare to
Jesus himself! and his image in the eyes of it followers changed so
dramatically!

I am wondering what else could have changed in 2000 years!

------
tnt128
noob question, I wonder the reasons people are spending 100m+ on paintings.

is it possible that buying art is actually a great way of storing wealth? Like
buying real estate but less flashy, easier to store, and easier to transport.
I assume there aren't too many ways you can safely store 400m cash?

------
Quiza12
It will look good on the wall of a safe.

------
tomp
Why the $0.3M?

~~~
jonlucc
I didn't see a breakdown in the article, but it could have to do with the fees
and or monetary conversion.

------
bedhead
This is an absurdly rich guy (obviously) who is just bored out of his goddamn
mind.

------
WheelsAtLarge
Bill Gates is a big DaVinci fan. I bet he was the final bidder. He's one of
the few that can buy it. Must be nice!

------
unixhero
To be fair, it's a frigging good painting.

