Posted on 05/21/2017 10:37:49 AM PDT by Timpanagos1
Seasoned art collectors know it’s usually wise to go into an auction with a set budget; otherwise one can get carried away by the adrenaline. It helps when that budget is about $100 million.
Yusaku Maezawa, the Japanese e-commerce billionaire, hewed to what appears to be his annual $100 million high-profile spring auction season spend, with his purchase of Jean-Michel Basquiat’s Untitled (1982) at Thursday night’s Contemporary Art evening sale at Sotheby’s. The canvas was hammered down at $98 million after a dramatic 10-minute bidding war, coming to $110.4 million with the buyer’s premium. It marks the highest auction price ever for an American artist—unseating Andy Warhol, whose $105 million auction record was set by Silver Car Crash (Double Disaster) (1963) at Sotheby’s New York in November 2013—and the second-highest price for any contemporary work.
Maezawa purchased $98 million of art at last year’s spring auctions, in a spending binge that included a $57.3 million Basquiat, then a record for the artist.
Bidding began at $57 million, a sum that sounded a little cheeky at first, and drew murmurs from the crowd. The murmurs morphed into gasps as that figure, and with it Basquiat’s record, receded into history and the bidding soared. Sotheby’s specialist Yuki Terase, on the phone with Maezawa, used incongruously slight gestures—a delicate wiggle of a finger—to indicate she was ramping up the price by another million.
(Excerpt) Read more at artsy.net ...
Wow. You could buy an awful lot of heroin with that kind of money.
I would not pay 10 cents to buy that to use as a backdrop for an outdoor urinal. It’s ugly.
That is not art. Art is beautiful because it reflects the harmony of nature. This reflects the cynical scratchings of a talentless fool.
Mental illness.
Man, did I ever pick the wrong career path...
I was involved in that auction. I bid $12 for the painting, as it reminded my of an old girlfriend. You can well image my shock and disappointment when I lost to that Japanese fellow.
Art is trash.
And paint more repulsive stuff!!!
Art just ain't what it used to be. Cannot imagine daubing paint on a canvas, like that c#ap in school without being thrown out of class. Makes me think perhaps I'm Renoir;) LOL!!!
Good video. Worth spending 5 or 6 minutes to see it.
I also like Tom Wolfe’s book “The Painted Word”. Tom also does not care for this modern crap.
But I agree that the piece in question is ugly and pretty pointless.
“Art just ain’t what it used to be.”
And that has been true for every point in art history.
I’m not saying that I would have paid $110 million for this piece, but the guy who bought it for $19,000 in 1984 sure is looking smart today.
dumb money
“dumb money”
There is no such thing as dumb money.
Modern art has abandoned and rejected beauty. To quote an “artist” (Grosz) from early in the Twentieth Century, “I drew and painted from a spirit of contradiction, and tried by means of my work to convince the world that it is hideous, sick and dishonest.”
Eh, it’s not like JMBasquiat got to enjoy that kind of wealth. Even 10 years ago these paintings were only selling at $5,000,000 and he’d been dead for decades at that point.
Dead at 28. The fortune comes to those flipping the works after he’s dead.
And these prices are just a proxy for moving large amounts of money around.
It took a lot of heroin to make that canvas.
Hideous.
Pablo Picasso
well,
some people try to pick up girls
and get called an _________
this never happened to pablo picasso
he could walk down your street
and girls could not resist to stare
and so pablo picasso was never called an _________
JONATHAN RICHMAN
That particular painting might make them reconsider.
Unless you know the history of it, it's just a mess of images. Without knowledge of history, of which .. it must be admitted .. most people younger than 30 have no idea, it's meaningless scribblings.
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