Some lucky bidder stole this magnificent sculpture for a little more than a measly $141,000,000!
Checkout “Man Pointing” and tell me that the masterpiece is not worth way more dough than what it sold for! (I love how the light dances off his hip and moves up to strike the eyes, creating an absolute abstraction of marvelous colors and phonic wisdom bringing the whole kaleidoscope into a Niagara of incalculable splendor!:eek:)
I would assume your comments about the work are sarcastic and you are somehow trying to imply that the price wasn’t justified, but it’s a bit hard to tell exactly what your point is, let alone any topic for debate.
For all we know, the buyer might have received information about a (thin) scroll that reveals the location of a treasure valued at $142 million. That’s pretty hard to pass up!
It seems like a reasonable art piece (not my taste, but reasonably executed). But as something less than a hundred years old, I’m pretty amazed that it’s going for such a high price. I’d be impressed by the Mona Lisa going for that price.
I’d say that really all this tells is the amount of excess cash some people have rather than how may multiples of times better this statue is than one by some unknown modern day artist who has made something fairly similar in look and quality.
Someone with a billion dollars had a statue worth 160 million now doesn’t have the statue but does have the cash, while some other billionaire is out 160 million but has a statue worth the same amount. So while it seems like a huge amount of money for even a very nice piece of art, in reality its just kind of a glass bead game for the uber-rich. Their net worth doesn’t really change except to the extent that the statue ap/depreciates, and while they loose some liquidity, if you’re an aging billionaire, that probably makes little difference to you.
I always wonder, when I see such sales, whether the guy that bought it got it because he loved it and it spoke to him, or purely as an investment / hedge against inflation.
Because really, objectively, I am sure there are people who love this sculpture, but I would expect their number is not huge. And I am sure there are people who can afford to spend 190M on a piece of art but their number is not huge either. The question is whether the intersection of the two groups is an empty set or not.
I wanted to debate it from the side of it being worth every dime, just to see how it would washout with certain folks that think CEOs getting 300 x the pay of their regular workers is fine, but the Mod didn’t like the idea (I guess). Just as well, I needed the nap.:o