I have never really understood is the obsession with extremely expensive paintings and before you say it i know that yeah, I art is subjective, and I know there are people who can look at a painting and see something profound in it that I probably would not see but sometimes I look at the prices attached to some of these paintings and genuinely wonder how we got here.
I mean, I can appreciate a beautiful painting. I can understand the skill, the creativity, the time and the thought that goes into creating something. There are paintings that I can look at and immediately think, wow, this is beautiful but then there is a completely different category where a painting is sold for millions of dollars, and at that point I start wondering whether we are still paying for the painting itself or something else.
That is probably what makes expensive art so interesting to me. Unlike a car, a house or even a watch, you cannot really measure the value of a painting in the traditional sense. There is no obvious calculation that tells you that a particular painting should be worth $50 million. You cannot say it has better materials than another painting and therefore should cost ten times more. Its value is largely determined by what people are willing to believe it is worth. You could put two paintings next to each other and one could be worth a few hundred dollars while the other is worth millions. To someone who understands art history, there may be a very clear difference between them. To someone like me, I might just be standing there thinking, "Okay... but what exactly am I supposed to be seeing?" Lol. Of course, I know there is much more to it than simply looking at whether something is beautiful. The artist's reputation matters. The period in which the work was created matters. Its historical significance matters, but still......
At a certain level, buying art isn't necessarily about putting something beautiful on your wall. It becomes about owning something that very few people can afford to own. It becomes a conversation piece. To me it becomes a way of signalling wealth without having to say, "I am wealthy." The funny thing is that most people will never experience the painting in the way they imagine. They might see a photograph of it online, read about the price and be amazed that someone could spend that much money on a picture. Meanwhile, the person who bought it may have it sitting somewhere in a private collection where almost nobody gets to see it. Like you spend millions of dollars on something because it is supposedly priceless, and then you put it somewhere where hardly anyone can actually enjoy it.
Maybe I just don't understand the art market well enough. I mean there are entire academic disciplines dedicated to understanding art, its history and its cultural significance, so I am definitely not going to pretend that a five minute opinion qualifies me as an art critic but if we are talking about luxury, I think extremely expensive paintings deserve a place on the list.
Not because art itself is overrated. Far from it.
But because sometimes we stop paying for the art and start paying for the privilege of saying we own it.
And once the price becomes the most interesting thing about the painting, I start wondering whether we are still buying art at all鈥攐r whether we are simply buying status with a frame around it.
