

They Paid What? Absurd Paintings that Sold for Millions - andrewcross
http://www.artsumo.com/blog/post/4

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wallflower
Reposting an old comment. The art world obeys supply and demand - where demand
has no relation to the real world:

If you are more curious about the contemporary art world market and why $29M
is not that expensive[1], I recommend "The $12 Million Stuffed Shark: The
Curious Economics of Contemporary Art".

In general, brand (in this case Christie's and Sotheby's) ranks supreme above
all else. Once you are branded, you can pretty much sell anything as expensive
art.

Also, an interesting factoid - when we hear of Far East/Middle East buyers
bidding tens of millions (or more) for a painting, we naturally tend to think
- who buys that without seeing it - but as the book points out - the painting
has most likely gone to see the buyer already (e.g. Dubai/Hong Kong pre-
auction private tour).

Excerpts from the book:

"Money itself has little meaning in the upper echelons of the art world --
everyone has it. What impresses is ownership of a rare and treasured work such
as Jasper Johns' 1958 White Flag. The person who owns it (currently Michael
Ovitz in Los Angeles) is above the art crowd, untouchable. What the rich seem
to want to acquire is what economists call positional good; things that prove
to the rest of the world that they really are rich."

Jasper Johns' White Flag

[http://michaelovitz.blogspot.com/2011/04/weve-featured-
this-...](http://michaelovitz.blogspot.com/2011/04/weve-featured-this-l.html)

<http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/works-of-art/1998.329>

Estimates on the artist economy:

"40k artists resident in London (about same number in NYC)

For London and NYC each:

75 superstar artists (>$1M/yr income)

300 mature, successful artists (>$100k/yr income)

5,000 part time artists (need to supplement their income)"

[http://www.amazon.com/The-Million-Stuffed-Shark-
Contemporary...](http://www.amazon.com/The-Million-Stuffed-Shark-
Contemporary/dp/0230620590)

[1] "If a great apartment costs $30 million, than a Rothko [big deal famous
contemporary artist] that hangs in the featured spot in the living room can
also be worth $30 million - as much as the value of the apartment. But no one
could envision a $72.8 million apartment to use for comparison..."

~~~
philwelch
This is the kind of conspicuous consumption that used to get people beheaded
or shot in revolutions. It's an obscenity.

~~~
aaron695
This is not consumption at all.

A painting is probably a few hundred $ worth of materials perhaps a couple of
hundred hours labour tops.

The average person probably wastes/consumes more rubbish in a week or two.

This is a rich person not consuming if anything.

~~~
philwelch
"Conspicuous consumption" refers to the practice of spending money purely to
demonstrate your ability to spend money. Don't be obtuse.

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numlocked
This is pretty disappointing, treading over the same old ground - "my daughter
could paint that". I was particularly disappointed with the inclusion of the
Miro and the Rothko. Those Rothkos are incredibly subtle, and arresting, and
enormous, and have dozens and dozens of layers of paint put together in really
complex ways that we are still trying to understand. The Tate Modern put on a
Rothko show a few years ago and exhibited a cross section of a Rothko (cut out
of one of his canvasses that I believe was ruined some other way) and you
could see this complexity. These paintings are often very compelling in
person, even if they "boring" on the screen of your iPhone or laptop.

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mjn
Meh, _any_ piece of art in this price range is typically being bought mainly
for the right to own "the original" of a piece that had some kind of
historically important role. Sure, you can copy lots of things, which is true
of older art, too. For rather less than the price of a Picasso you can get a
very nice, extremely accurate copy that requires forensic methods to
distinguish from the original (though some artists are easier to duplicate
precisely than others). But it'd be a copy, and some people are willing to pay
millions to "own a piece of history". There's no real reason that'd be
different just because the piece of history is 20th-century art history,
and/or you don't like the piece or the artistic movement it was part of.

Heck, one of the points of Warhol's art was mass-producing screen prints, and
people still pay a lot for an original, rather than a screenprinted
reproduction.

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aaron695
Ummmm you could sell your "3 year old nephew's" art for $100,000 but for some
reason you haven't? Right....

I do get tired of the old insult to art that "I could do better" but for some
reason that person has 'chosen' not to make millions and be famous.

People need to stop fearing things they don't or can't understand.

~~~
philwelch
What's there to understand?

~~~
aaron695
Exactly, really it's not that hard, but as this blog article shows some people
still just don't get art and/or how it's valued.

And it's ok not to understand things, but it's not ok to ridicule things just
because you don't understand them.

~~~
philwelch
I think one of us missed the other's point.

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pedalpete
Are the paintingss absurd? or the price? The author seems to be suggesting
that the paintings sold for more than their value, but the market sets the
value, not the percieved effort in the creation of the art.

It isn't much different in many other industries. The buyer /market sets the
value, not those who aren't in the market.

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mtraven
This seems relevant: [http://www.jehsmith.com/1/2013/02/eefin-and-hambone-or-
what-...](http://www.jehsmith.com/1/2013/02/eefin-and-hambone-or-what-is-
culture.html)

What gives the appearance of some monopoly on genius to the sort of cultural
output that is housed in museums and Lincoln Plaza and so on is just this:
that brainless one-percenters are spending huge amounts of money to put their
names on these monuments, and the brainless bourgeoisie makes pilgrimages to
them, spending medium sums of money to have a brush with cultural objects that
supposedly edify by their simple proximity. The illusion that genius is stored
up in sites of high culture is sustained by capital and by the laziness and
gullibility of culture's consumers: all the season-ticket holders, all the
dupes of the museums' advertising departments, for their part driven ever
further, under the compulsion of capital, to make the Ottoman sultan's throne,
or medieval armor, or Greco-Bactrian statuary, look like so many things to
buy-- passing them off as a special class of objects, museum objects, that you
can buy in a way just by going and standing in front of them.

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charonn0
The value of artwork (or other non-utilitarian object) is very much
subjective. Human value judgements can become absurdly skewed (e.g. [1]) by
our interpretation of an object as a status symbol, which can lead us to value
in the extreme otherwise useless objects.

[1]: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_mania>

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dblock
Why does everyone want to count other people's money?

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helloamar
Omg this is so bad, we have great paintings at <http://piazzaart.com/>

