Three hundred million dollars for a Gauguin painting seems a
bit excessive. Has the art market entered a period of collective insanity? Are collectors
vying for first place in the Outrageous Extravagance category? Are high-end
buyers going off the deep end? The madness of artistic genius seems to pale
before the madness of buying for the sake of outdoing other buyers in the game
of one-upsmanship. Where and when will it stop? Would an individual artist
refuse to make a sale because it is too high? Of course not. Would an artist
sell a painting knowing it would be buried in someone’s private collection and
never be seen by the public? Most likely. The higher the price paid for a work,
the more it drives up the prices for other work by the same artist. The value
of a work seems more and more to be determined by extraneous factors such as
the artist’s moral depravity. Can an artist who lives a quiet life become
famous for being a recluse and thereby increase the value of his work? Perhaps.
But that route to fame will probably only come to fruition posthumously. And so
the game of selling art gets more and more like an unstoppable runaway train.
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