art & money
... last year. The CEO of Sotheby’s says that if 500 people were alive today, they would spend more than $25 million for one of these prized paintings. It is also rumored that “Au Lapin Agile” could maybe sell for $60 million. At the auction, a publishing magnate named Walter Annenberg bought the painting for $40.7 million and was the third most expensive painting to ever be auctioned off. That amount of money could buy a lot of things but was it really worth it to spend that much on a painting? And that night’s art sale made a little bit more than $250 million dollars. What exactly is a picture worth and how far will a person go to make it theirs? And where will the person get the money from? No one really has an idea of how it works. The game of auctioning has its winners and losers. The winners are certainly the collectors and auctioneers, where the auctions are at, such as Christie’s and Sotheby’s. The losers, however, are the museums and of course the public because that is the only place that we have a chance to view these precious possessions. The director of the Art Institute in Chicago says “there are areas where museums can no longer buy.” And that means it is bad for the country. Some museums even say that any prized paintings are absurdly expensive to the point where it is impossible to get their hands on it. When the museums can no longer buy art, that means that the public can no longer experience art and young people who are interested in art cannot learn and know more about it. Tax is also becoming a bigger problem for American museums. These museums got funded because of tax exemptions through donations and that it is banned, how will these places survive? Living artists cannot donate their work to museums due to tax relief, is the cost of their materials. So the government starves the museums while art market leaves them paralyzed. Also museums cannot even get loans. Since 15 years ago, it has been the golden age for museums where the best paintings were hanged and great exhibits were displayed. But now insurance for museums are at an unreasonable price and owners of the valuable paintings will now let it hang on the walls without insuring for more th...