I think the buyer probably had a net worth at least ≥ $4.5 billion (I wouldn't spend more than 10% of my wealth on a single painting.) According to https://www.forbes.com/billionaires/list/ there are only ~380 persons that would qualify. Any one knows who is the buyer?
Non-glib answer: Art tends to hold value very well. For someone in that wealth bracket, this is probably a very reasonable diversification + having a significant amount of sentimental value. (it's Davinci, which even for a pleb like me would be neat to have in your living room)
glib answer: More money than sense.
Edit: I realize you didn't have "why would you" in your question and answered something you didn't ask. Apologies. (I nontheless maintain my statements :) )
> For someone in that wealth bracket, this is probably a very reasonable diversification + having a significant amount of sentimental value.
I can't even pretend to understand how people in that "wealth bracket" think. Imagine if you knew, or at least knew of, every person in the world with as much or more money than you (i.e. a few hundred). Imagine if you had enough money to ensure that, barring major wars or mistakes, all of your close friends and descendants could live comfortably without ever having to work another day. What would you do with the spare hundreds of millions of dollars? Build space ships? Build islands? Buy paintings? Buy paintings, only to set them on fire to demonstrate your power?
> (it's Davinci, which even for a pleb like me would be neat to have in your living room)
Imagine the maintenance costs. I'd keep the thing in a Swiss vault, and sell it to the highest bidder.
It's not really spending. If you look at the resale values it is investing. High art is more investment than consumption (as they say, the rich get richer...)
Nope. Let's say I'm worth between $10k and $10m, i.e. somewhere in the range of a normal human. I would be crushed by the maintenance costs, even if I kept it in a Swiss vault instead of on my wall where I could actually look at it. The only reason I would spend 10% of my net worth is to immediately sell it to a Russian oligarch for a fat profit.
What's interesting from the BBC article is the image "The painting has been cleaned and restored from the image on the left to the one on the right" doesn't even look like the same person?
Another anecdote - In 1958 it was sold at auction in London for $60. By then the painting was generally reckoned to be the work of a follower of Leonardo and not the work of Leonardo himself.
I'd actually be inclined to have an escalating fee (as a % of sale price) for a higher final price (relative to an independent appraisal) if I were a seller - just to keep the incentives aligned.
> the work of a follower of Leonardo and not the work of Leonardo himself
How are they certain now that it is indeed Leonardo's job.
Also if the exact same painting is sold for $60 when it is thought to be work of a follower of Leonardo and $450m when it is believed to be Leonardo's work, what does this say about the collectors?
That's...kinda weird, right? The before and after are clearly two different paintings. Hair is different, mouth is different...I would assume, as a layman, that restoring a piece of art the goal should keep it looking nearly the same just cleaning it up and removing damage. This looks like they just straight up painted over it.
That BBC quote is a bit misleading. The photo on the left is what the painting looked like before restoration, not what it looked like when it was originally painted. Parts of it had been damaged and repainted over multiple times in the past which is why the restored version looks so different.
Bearing in mind here, that Christie's had a vested interest in the painting selling for as high as an amount as possible. So interesting this may be, it's hardly unbiased.
I wonder when the world is going to have a conversation that amassing the kind of wealth this would require, to spend a (small?) portion on a painting, is absurd.
I'd like to get insight into the minds of the people e.g. Gates, Murdoch et al that are so driven by profits and wealth to the detriment of so many others.
Fascinating to watch Rybolovlev move money in the open like this with the help of the art market apparatus. What a time to be alive.
If you're not keeping track this was almost double the price expected for a da Vinci of questioned provenance sold by the fertilizer magnate who bought Donald Trump's Palm Beach mansion for double the estimated price and then never lived in it.
Wouldn't he need someone to pay that same amount or more for the painting to effectively have moved money with this apparatus? And if the next buyer is similarly motivated, isn't the valuation akin to a Ponzi?
Ponzi scheme is a scam where buyer is fooled into buying something that has no value. Here if the painting is used as an apparatus to move money, it becomes sort of a currency to move $450 million dollars. As long as the big money movers honor its price it could be used for such purpose. Almost like Bitcoins!
Some ideas are ancient. The painting doesn't have to move. The money doesn't have to move. We just all agree to assign it to someone else.
"Because these stones are too large to move, buying an item with one simply involves agreeing that the ownership has changed. As long as the transaction is recorded in the oral history, it will now be owned by the person it is passed on to and no physical movement of the stone is required."
Sadly, this appears to be true. Tons of art just sits in secure warehouses like gold bars, never seen by anyone. https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-freeports-oper... (I've never heard of Rybolovlev before, but his name comes up in this article as well.)
Rybolovlev was the seller, the question is who is paying him and who did he buy it from for $127 million in the first place? At this high a price it seems more like money laundering than painting the tape, but who knows.
It says in the article that Dmitry Rybolovlev (his family's trust to be exact) bought it from Yves Bouvier for $127.5 million in 2013, which occurred soon after Bouvier had purchased it earlier in 2013 for $80 million in a private sale via Sotheby's.
If you have $400 million in funds whose origin you can't account for, you move it into some opaque account to buy the painting for that $400 million. The buyer (you) remains "unknown" but now you have $400 million that you can account for, since it came from selling a painting.
In the art auction world, either or both sides can remain as anonymous as they wish, which makes this whole scheme possible.
Is not it cheaper to pull this trick with higher number of no-name artists paintings by moving the money betweent two ofshore companies that belong to you. Therefore I believe this purchasecwas was a status purchase like yachts. It is a show off that a person has so much resources that can spend part of it on a peace of art that nobody can get.
Your summary was a little too clever for its own good, and I'm having trouble following. But I do find the idea intriguing that rare art presents a unique and seemingly-safe, almost "perfect-crime"-level opportunity for money laundering and bribery. Could you dumb it down a little?
Who are you alleging was the ultimate source of this money, and what was their real objective?
Even if the seller is not “in” any scheme, this could be money-laundering in action: buy an asset in cash from a seller that won’t ask too many questions, then resell it for a little bit less - voilà, clean money without losing much of it.
If the seller is actually “in”, the price might actually include some sort of commission for other services of dubious nature. This happens all the time in sports and other “emotional” markets.
Why is this a surprise? There's a point at which money no longer makes sense - both to the people without it as well as the people with it.
There are many reasons for spending relatively incomprehensible amounts of money for something. One is to show others that you can; it's a demonstration of just how wealthy you are. Another is to try to make something special of the money that otherwise has reached a level of being useless/pointless.
Think a bit in terms of a normal human lifetime. If you aspire to be rich, what amount of money defines that level? Once you reach a level where you can own and operate more properties, vehicles, and even employees than you can even remember, what does the excess money represent?
Ok, this is an absurd analogy. But as technical people, imagine building a multi-petabyte storage device. Practically no private individual has such a thing. Using your intellect, experience, and perhaps ingenuity you can have such a thing. Then what? You store all the porn you have time to download. You save every movie you ever thought about watching. You take 1000 photos every time you go out. It's thrilling! But how much of it do you ever really go back and enjoy?
Frankly, unless the buyer places it in a public museum, I judge it as a hollow effort to find value in excess (which will last about three months). Humans are great at acclimating to new and better, and soon we need more. What else is there?
Storage of value. If you want to diversify, you may want something easy to move/hide for some scenarios. I'm not saying this painting works great for that purpose, just that that's one of the things that may make people want to buy it.
If you have $4bn, unless you're investing in Beanie Babies, you really don't have to struggle to find stable stores of value.
At that stratosphere of wealth, an art piece is not about diversification. It's a bit like buying a 200m yacht to surpass all other private yachts.
What I find amusing is that even the ultra rich people are statistically NEVER the richest people. There are perhaps 5 people in the world who could be debated as one of the richest people in the world. And their individual wealth exceeds the "poor rich" such as this person by a factor of 20+. To people outside their bubble it just looks "sad" (pardon the Trumpism).
I agree- I would estimate 95% or more of really rich people are mostly indistinguishable from an upper middle class person from the outside: Sure, they have maids and maybe fly their own plane or have an expensive classic car but there are these 5% of rich people who somehow have a strange compulsion to advertise their wealth as widely as possible and they're the ones who have the 100 mil yachts and go to these sorts of auctions (the exception maybe being Bill Gates' Da Vinci notebook purchase... likely Bill just thought those were super cool)
Clearly Bill Gates doesn't need to flaunt his wealth. I'm sure he was just really excited by Da Vinci, and the opportunity to own a real piece of history was totally worth it.
Despite Gates's (very) questionable method of rising to greatness, what he has attempted to do with his wealth is well above what most "rich" people do.
Oddly enough I find it easier to believe that Bill Gates wants to change the world for the better than to believe that he is secretly pushing some neocapitalist agenda.
Mainly because he personally has everything to gain from the former and practically nothing from the latter at the wealth level he operates at.
Dude could get a better return on index funds than from his philanthropy. Cynically, plain investing is low status where he is at, less cynically he has a lot of time to think about things and a lot of resources and I believe many (most? hmm) humans would act the same way under those conditions. Maybe I'm just an optimist.
What are examples of those 4bn+ stores of value then? I was thinking of something that can be easily moved around - e.g. 400M in gold is 10 tonnes. Not super handy. Stocks, currencies, real estate - those are cases when you trust somebody else to take care of storing your value, most often the gov. Not trying to make an argument for my example here, just sincerely curious what those stable store of value can be.
If you have 4bn, you own interests in many companies, many funds, direct physical properties, property funds, etc.
If you have 4bn, you don't "move" money around at that scale. You move small fractions around. And in terms of what you can spend... aside from the occasional private island purchase, there's really not a lot you can spend significant fractions of that worth on.
Enjoy a little exercise. Imagine you have 1bn to blow. Google for things you would desire. Unless you want to try to buy a block of SF, you'll find it hard to spend more than a few hundred million at once. How many 100+ meter yachts can you use? The nicest Gulfstream global jet is about 100 million nicely equipped. A used Boeing jumbo jet is even less...
It's actually hard to spend that kind of money unless you basically give it away.
Marketing wins everywhere. Paintings, IT, open source projects, startups, everything. It seems to be responsible for 90%+ value in worryingly many cases. It may be getting worse.
I think in the next few years we will see rise of companies that help customers make decent choices that are not solely based on advertising. We have many user review based solutions but it just doesn't work with most things (not even touching on fake reviews). Even for things where the whole value of the product is about how user feels about it, most users don't have other products to compare. Plus choice-supportive bias.
For tech stuff there are reviewers out there who test many things and which you can trust. Some take them apart and can reason about used components and so on. Not so easy when you are visiting a grocery store or wondering what's the story of the organic food that you are looking at (or maybe it was just mislabled?). Some educated 3rd party could research that for you.
Again, it's different from what we have today because even though it's tempting, sexy and scalable, it can't be just about letting users send opinions and info. It must be expert web of trust. Those companies may end up with a lot of power. But at least in this case if some of them try to misuse it, somebody can stumble upon it and show that they are not trustworthy.
“When information is cheap, attention becomes expensive.”
― James Gleick
We've come to a point where we're inundated with everyone trying to push their own agenda that it is difficult to both sort the BS out, while also becoming impossible to really appeal/reach out to the people who would appreciate and benefit from what one has to offer.
>I think in the next years we will see rise of companies that help customers make decent choices that are not solely based on advertising.
I'm skeptical. It all comes down to money. The big boys have a lot to spend. Sure, there will always be someone somewhere doing something, but coming out of a niche and reaching out to people is difficult. It is easier get subconsciously influenced by billboards and banners than being aware and knowing what you really want. Especially since no one seems to be aware of if they really need something. Something to watch - https://www.netflix.com/title/80114460
Case in point - is the 'undisclosed buyer' really benefiting $450.3 mil worth? Money has diminishing returns after $70k/yr/person (from the doc above) but people just want more. So we're ready to listen to what people say would be nice to have. Another part is how they've become status symbols.
>For tech stuff there are reviewers out there who test many things and which you can trust
I'm just going to link to a site which I think is very impartial for as long as I've known them and have excellent reviews with their methodology outlined.
It was called thesweethome(.com), but I guess now it redirects to their other website, thewirecutter (was tech stuff only). It has reviews of everything from knives to dishwashing soap (the long read on that was interesting[1]).
It was acquired this time a year ago by NYT and I haven't been too keen on buying stuff in general for a while (again, minimalism) so can't say if anything has changed since then.
> Case in point - is the 'undisclosed buyer' really benefiting $450.3 mil worth?
Of course not! They are benefiting from whatever the difference is between $450.3M and what they expect to sell it for in the future, discounted to present value.
Which means they might either expect to make money on it, or at least not lose too much on it.
For some people, buying art aren't isn't too different from buying stocks... except you can't do anything to enjoy equities hanging on your wall.
>For some people, buying art aren't isn't too different from buying stocks
You are making it look like there's no emotion involved. Buying art in my opinion is mostly an emotional one, unless you're lucky and getting a Monet in a yard sale (which you admit by saying 'you can't do anything to enjoy equities hanging on your wall.'). Also, it is definitely not a logical rationale like buying stocks. Atleast not a stable one.
For half a billion dollars there are better ways to invest, and diversity. Without risking a single point of failure like here.
Also, what guarantee is there that this will appreciate? What's stopping from this painting's value from dropping to zero in a decade or two? Other investments do too, but that's where the diversification part comes in. Art definitely has it's place in the future, but a specific piece isn't worth risking half a billion dollars over.
There is centuries of data about how this asset has appreciated. It has a brand that has endured 500 years. Most of the stocks you will invest in, probably won't exist in 50.
What could you possibly want to diversify against? It has outlasted Governments, new technologies, and new ideologies. Diversification is a durability strategy and this painting has proven durability across a multitude of change.
>>Of course not! They are benefiting from whatever the difference is between $450.3M and what they expect to sell it for in the future, discounted to present value.
You're writing about him, so he's benefiting. He knows and everyone in his social circle know that he has a painting of DaVinci. His children's friends etc etc. After securing our daily bread and then some, we do things for bragging, pleasure..
Not knowing the buyer, it may also be a way to move cash outa his corrupt country (Russia, China, Saudi Arabia...). 'Whatever happens, I have 2 apartments in NYC, one in Miami and a DaVinci painting i can sell'
> you can't do anything to enjoy equities hanging on your wall.
I can't imagine a half a billion dollar painting being hung on anyone's wall. In fact I can't imagine it bringing much enjoyment to anyone, given it is likely to spend it's life locked up in top secret high security climate controlled vaults.
I doubt the buyer would do that with this piece. It's too expensive and one-of-a-kind to stash away. If you're buying artwork just as an investment to stash away, you'd probably buy many much smaller pieces rather than a headline grabbing one.
I'd bet that this will be hanging in someone's billionaire's living room somewhere (hopefully behind some protective glass). These guys have egos. Saying you own the most expensive piece of artwork ever gets you something that money can't buy (even though you did buy it).
I think it would be best if it could also get as local as possible. If it's global, even per country, it still can only cover the most popular products i.e. those most advertised.
In Australia we've got https://www.choice.com.au/ that provide in depth product/service comparisons and also advocate a lot on behalf of consumers with the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission.
They're also independant and I trust that they don't have any ulterior motives.
> Marketing wins everywhere. Paintings, IT, open source projects, startups, everything. It seems to be responsible for 90%+ value in worryingly many cases. It may be getting worse.
Although I agree with your message (and very much so, I'm reading Herbert Marcuse's "One Dimensional Man", which among other things laments the rise of technological rationality, and the failure of capitalism to optimise for needs by creating False needs), your premise is that there is some fairness in the way values are traded. Although the law of value (assuming the classical law of value) holds for freely reproducible commodities, this sense of long run equality of the socially necessary labour input and the amount for which goods are exchanged does not apply to commodities that can't be reproduced. There is no fairness here other than the whims of speculators. The value of the good may range from nil to infinity. This is a normal part of capitalism, and it's nothing new. It happens regardless of marketing.
I don't see how the value of a Da Vinci painting is a triumph of marketing. If marketing was ruling, I'd expect a contemporary piece of junk to be higher valued.
As it is, I think you have something of undeniable, a classical part of European and world civilization, given a monetary value that seems a bit absurd.
And seems more easily explainable in the way that commodity bubble can be explained - combine investors wanting something guaranteed to be worth something and investors following trends into bubble territory. All exacerbated by the general trend to print money when the financial system is under threat (so money goes into stuff that seem "of certain value").
> Christie’s marketing campaign was perhaps unprecedented in the art world; it was the first time the auction house went so far as to enlist an outside agency to advertise the work. Christie’s also released a video that included top executives pitching the painting to Hong Kong clients as “the holy grail of our business” and likening it to “the discovery of a new planet.” Christie’s called the work “the Last da Vinci,” the only known painting by the Renaissance master still in a private collection (some 15 others are in museums).
> many art experts argue that Christie’s used marketing window dressing to mask the baggage that comes with the Leonardo, from its compromised condition to its complicated buying history and said that the auction house put the artwork in a contemporary sale to circumvent the scrutiny of old masters experts, many of whom have questioned the painting’s authenticity and condition.
The painting has a volatile sales history, and there's many opinions that it's not an actual Da Vinci. Additionally, it has a lot of flaws that simply make it less valuable, however Christie's marketing has apparently been full-force and managed to fetch this figure. The previous record for an Old Master at auction was allegedly ~$105m taking into account inflation, so this is truly out of left field.
Be that as it may, there are very few Da Vinci paintings in the world, even fewer for sale, and the man's cultural clout is still riding high a decade after Dan Brown's book. Once you're in the rarefied space of having "tres commas", you gotta set yourself apart somehow.
I personally think the painting is worth more. It's an absolute steal for $450M. I mean, you have all sorts of startups with funky names these days with no profits being valued at hundreds of millions. In contrast, for a truly classic masterpiece of an art, why wouldn't I pay so much?
This is not so much of marketing, but rather the (perceived) value. It's a classic piece of art, it doesn't need any marketing. Not a website, not a .ly domain, not an appstore app. It can sell itself like it has. That's art.
I think this one is fairly priced but something like starry night could probably fetch a billion. Mona Lisa? Probably ten times that without breaking sweat in this environment.
It appears to be perfect timing for trading in da Vinci, seeing that the biography by Walter Isaacson[0] is a bestseller and likely to be turned into a movie. You'd guess that market liquidity would be greatly increased by this, and liquidity (the ease with which one can find buyers and sellers -- buyers esp in this case) is likely to be a major issue in the art market. And a da Vinci might appeal to bidders who aren't normally involved in the art market.
Walter Isaacson talks about his book and the painting in question, "Salvator Mundi," "the one that's going to be going on sale," in a 50-minute interview with Charlie Rose.[1] The talk of this painting is at 31:45. That's pretty good marketing right there.
The painting itself is mesmerizing, gorgeous, awakening, tremendous.
> liquidity is likely to be a major issue in the art market
How much art is being bought only to park some money (like Chinese rich buying houses in US and Canada, keeping them empty)? They might treat art like bitcoin - as unreproducible proof of work standing in for money.
Rich people store art in freeports (along with gold bars, like in the Geneva Freeport) to secure their assets while avoiding paying taxes. And from times to times, they lend some of their art pieces to museums in countries where they want to further reduce their taxes.
According to an article in The Economist[1] in 2013: "Because of the confidentiality, the value of goods stashed in freeports is unknowable. It is thought to be in the hundreds of billions of dollars, and rising."
> ... decent choices that are not solely based on advertising
Marketing and advertising are different things. Marketing wins everywhere, that's absolutely true. Advertising helps, if marketing is good to begin with. Advertising a badly marketed product will not save it.
Marketing is framing, positioning, helping customers (future customers, but also present customers) see the value of an offering. Marketing is the CEO's job. Marketing wins everywhere because it is everything.
> I think in the next few years we will see rise of companies that help customers make decent choices that are not solely based on advertising.
I hope for this.
I am concerned that what will actually happen though, is that companies will purport to do this, but the call of making money through ads will be too strong. Either by morphing into a review site where reviews occur not through independent research but because companies sent them their product, or by being one of those companies that supposedly sort of fashion or whatever for you, but presumably get their stock based on deals that are not based on quality or research, but on whatever they can get for cheap.
You don't seem to understand how the art world works. Buying art at this level has nothing to do with the work itself. It has everything to do with demonstrating power. Whoever bought that will have the best Leonardo work outside of museums. Art is a positional good, it shows that you have class and at this level nothing is as prestigious. Say you put that thing in a house or a museum, you can invite the Pope himself to view it. In terms of networking this is the holy grail.
Just because Christie’s went to unprecedented lengths to market the painting it doesn't mean that without that effort the painting wouldn't have sell at this price level. The art market is highly unpredictable.
I don't think they are in the same market. Say I want to give you $100m. I tell you to buy a painting for $10m, then I buy it from you for $110. $10m cost for money laundering.
I'm not saying that money laundering is the ultimate business. But these paintings are like Bitcoin: they are traded actively by rich people.
The advertising/branding is required to give value to a certain item.
In the UK we have Which?[1], do you not have something like that in America? It used to be a magazine you subscribed to, but is now mainly online (as far as I remember).
It's a subscription service, I know people who subscribed for a bit when making a lot of purchases, like when they bought their first home.
I guess Wirecutter is the closest thing, although they make money from referrals (not sure if Which do), so that might influence their recommendations.
Which? are a not-for-profit charity, consumer rights advocates as well as doing the reviews. I think the membership is the only income source, so all the reviews are behind a paywall.
Well said. It's easy to take all the in-depth information we have available for granted when it comes to tech buying decisions, but once you try to research more traditional products (I was looking for a new fridge the other day) you end up in a sea of worthless search engined optimized and affiliate link-ridden sites disguised as review sites.
User reviews won't work either since most of them have the experience of less than a handful of comparable products, at best, or value completely different attributes - if they aren't fake.
Even communities you'd expect to feature lots of expert knowledge often turn into an echo chamber: Subreddits discussing certain product categories quickly settle for a very limited selection that gets reommended over and over again.
I agree with you. A service that provides guidance and is dependent on the customers' satisfaction, not commissions or other vendor-related incentives, should be very valuable, if not downright necessary.
lol, I guess there are three or four people in the world willing to pay that price. I'll be interested to see if this ever gets sold again and at what price.
I'm guessing the buyer (if it's a single person) is a royal, oligarch (could even be Putin) or someone in China.
"the old masters market is contracting, because of limited supply"
Can someone familiar with the art market comment on how that works? That seems contrary to what I know about markets. I mean, I understand that the volume is contracting, but the context is that such "[high] price is remarkable".
There are never going to be any new old masters and because shit happens the supply is slowly shrinking over time as various works leave the market due to museum acquisition, accident, war, and theft. The demand side of the equation however is growing as various new money entrants to the art market compete for this diminishing supply. The demand side is also boosted by the fact that art like this has now become something of a financial tool for capital flight, corporations, investment funds and criminal interests.
For anyone paying attention, the seller of the painting is Dmitry Rybolovlev. How did Rybolovlev amass so much money? Through pollution. His company Uralkali is listed as one of the top polluters in Russia. This is how externalities work: He keeps the profits, you (literally) eat the losses. Perhaps this detail is the biggest story here.
Well he is a typical russian arrogant oligarch asshole. Culprit in various murders, even served some jail time for it (of course not much compared to us peasants). It would be actually strange if any common good would ever come from such a person.
It's not his company. He hasn't owned it since 2010. The roots of Uralkali go back 80 years, he owned it for 15 years.
Uralkali is 20% of the global potash market, without their mining a billion people wouldn't have food - at a minimum - given the present 7.6 billion world population. Russia has become a wheat juggernaut [1], to put it mildly; without their food production, the developing world will not develop given the population growth occuring.
That doesn't defend the pollution, it does however bring some very important context to the situation that you entirely neglected.
the interesting thing to me is how the face completely changed in the restoration(more like repainting)!
Jesus in color is very similar with our 21 century image of him, no mustache, eyes completely changed and ...
the painting is relatively new compare to Jesus himself! and his image in the eyes of it followers changed so dramatically!
I am wondering what else could have changed in 2000 years!
> The artwork has been the subject of legal disputes and amassed a price history that ranges from less than $10,000 in 2005, when it was spotted at an estate auction...
The heirs of that estate are probably not thrilled with this headline.
Funny that Da Vinci remains the most bankable 50 years after he first sky-rocketed the perceived value of art.
Basically, In 1962 the Mona Lisa was loaned to Metropolitan Museum of Art by the Louvre. Huge marketing campaign resulted in over a million of Americans going to see it, ushering in the new era of art as mass spectacle/consumption.
Obviously there were other factors involved - but Robert Hughes made an amazing documentary about this subject called the Mona Lisa Curse, which you can watch online [1].
What is interesting is that if this painting was attributed to someone unknown, its price would have fallen off the cliff even though there would have been zero material change in goods that buyer would be receiving. This says a lot about our hero worship tendencies. People are going to look very hard to see what is so special about this painting.
You're implying that a painting has any inherent value (it does not). Just like everything else in the material world, it only has contextual value.
Before the 1900s, aluminum was valued more than gold. Today, it is one of the cheapest metals around. Nothing changed but the context in which we were able to extract it.
In the case of this painting, the context is what makes it valuable - the last known privately owned painting by a name nearly the entire western world recognizes immediately.
Some art experts pointed to the painting’s damaged condition and its questionable authenticity.
This was a thumping epic triumph of branding and desire over connoisseurship and reality.
In the book "$12 Million Stuffed Shark: The Curious Economics of Contemporary Art", it describes the insanity of the skyrocketing auction prices with the following analogy (paraphrasing since I do no longer have a copy of the book).
"If you have a $20M painting, you can imagine an equivalently priced apartment where you can display that painting in one of the world's great cities. But $150M? There is no equivalent for that. There are no apartments that expensive."
And now $450.3M?! for the top.
In "China's Art Factories: Van Gogh From the Sweatshop", you can see the bottom of the economic scale. About $20-$30-$50 for a good copy of a Van Gogh or other masterpiece.
You could buy three F-22 Raptors with that kind of money. Well, Congress would never approve the sale, but this painting went for triple the per-copy price of the F-22, according to Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_Martin_F-22_Raptor
I might be biased, but I know what I would pick if given the option, and it cruises 1,200 mph.
An F-22 is, regardless of its function, one of the most complicated devices ever created by man. In that sense it is an example of the combined 'art' of the skills of many thousands of highly-skilled individuals.
In past centuries cathedrals were hailed as the masterpieces of the skills of craftsmen.
Yeah the F-22 really is useless without a military industrial complex behind it. And a defense use. Sort of a parable about modern products really. Self driving cars with no maps, phones with no updates, no app store. Our best products are really infrastructure products, supported by a cast of thousands.
But the painting stands on its own and a decent pair of leather shoes will get you from a to b just as well as they did centuries ago.
If I remember rightly the most universal item of soldier's kit throughout all history was the spoon.
Well I think having a hangar with three F-22's in it would be pretty dang artistic. We're talking about spending money on frivolous stuff, at least mine can be used for transportation.
The buyer of the Da Vinci painting could have also done that. The difference is, instead of me having fantasizing about having $450mm, he/she actually has the money and didn't do it. And you're judging me?
151 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 194 ms ] threadglib answer: More money than sense.
Edit: I realize you didn't have "why would you" in your question and answered something you didn't ask. Apologies. (I nontheless maintain my statements :) )
I can't even pretend to understand how people in that "wealth bracket" think. Imagine if you knew, or at least knew of, every person in the world with as much or more money than you (i.e. a few hundred). Imagine if you had enough money to ensure that, barring major wars or mistakes, all of your close friends and descendants could live comfortably without ever having to work another day. What would you do with the spare hundreds of millions of dollars? Build space ships? Build islands? Buy paintings? Buy paintings, only to set them on fire to demonstrate your power?
> (it's Davinci, which even for a pleb like me would be neat to have in your living room)
Imagine the maintenance costs. I'd keep the thing in a Swiss vault, and sell it to the highest bidder.
Well I guess it’s easier to spend 10% of your wealth if you know you still have $4 billion left.
What's interesting from the BBC article is the image "The painting has been cleaned and restored from the image on the left to the one on the right" doesn't even look like the same person?
Another anecdote - In 1958 it was sold at auction in London for $60. By then the painting was generally reckoned to be the work of a follower of Leonardo and not the work of Leonardo himself.
How are they certain now that it is indeed Leonardo's job.
Also if the exact same painting is sold for $60 when it is thought to be work of a follower of Leonardo and $450m when it is believed to be Leonardo's work, what does this say about the collectors?
That BBC quote is a bit misleading. The photo on the left is what the painting looked like before restoration, not what it looked like when it was originally painted. Parts of it had been damaged and repainted over multiple times in the past which is why the restored version looks so different.
Personally, I'm a believer. :)
I'd like to get insight into the minds of the people e.g. Gates, Murdoch et al that are so driven by profits and wealth to the detriment of so many others.
If you're not keeping track this was almost double the price expected for a da Vinci of questioned provenance sold by the fertilizer magnate who bought Donald Trump's Palm Beach mansion for double the estimated price and then never lived in it.
"Because these stones are too large to move, buying an item with one simply involves agreeing that the ownership has changed. As long as the transaction is recorded in the oral history, it will now be owned by the person it is passed on to and no physical movement of the stone is required."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rai_stones
Sadly, this appears to be true. Tons of art just sits in secure warehouses like gold bars, never seen by anyone. https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-freeports-oper... (I've never heard of Rybolovlev before, but his name comes up in this article as well.)
Rybolovlev and Bouvier have been in a legal battle over their business dealings (including the da Vinci sale): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bouvier_Affair
If you want to read a long-form story on Bouvier (which does touch on this situation), I'd recommend this: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/02/08/the-bouvier-af...
In the art auction world, either or both sides can remain as anonymous as they wish, which makes this whole scheme possible.
That eyesore of a house was actually torn down.
Back story:
http://www.chicagotribune.com/classified/realestate/ct-donal...
Who are you alleging was the ultimate source of this money, and what was their real objective?
If the seller is actually “in”, the price might actually include some sort of commission for other services of dubious nature. This happens all the time in sports and other “emotional” markets.
There are many reasons for spending relatively incomprehensible amounts of money for something. One is to show others that you can; it's a demonstration of just how wealthy you are. Another is to try to make something special of the money that otherwise has reached a level of being useless/pointless.
Think a bit in terms of a normal human lifetime. If you aspire to be rich, what amount of money defines that level? Once you reach a level where you can own and operate more properties, vehicles, and even employees than you can even remember, what does the excess money represent?
Ok, this is an absurd analogy. But as technical people, imagine building a multi-petabyte storage device. Practically no private individual has such a thing. Using your intellect, experience, and perhaps ingenuity you can have such a thing. Then what? You store all the porn you have time to download. You save every movie you ever thought about watching. You take 1000 photos every time you go out. It's thrilling! But how much of it do you ever really go back and enjoy?
Frankly, unless the buyer places it in a public museum, I judge it as a hollow effort to find value in excess (which will last about three months). Humans are great at acclimating to new and better, and soon we need more. What else is there?
Storage of value. If you want to diversify, you may want something easy to move/hide for some scenarios. I'm not saying this painting works great for that purpose, just that that's one of the things that may make people want to buy it.
At that stratosphere of wealth, an art piece is not about diversification. It's a bit like buying a 200m yacht to surpass all other private yachts.
What I find amusing is that even the ultra rich people are statistically NEVER the richest people. There are perhaps 5 people in the world who could be debated as one of the richest people in the world. And their individual wealth exceeds the "poor rich" such as this person by a factor of 20+. To people outside their bubble it just looks "sad" (pardon the Trumpism).
Despite Gates's (very) questionable method of rising to greatness, what he has attempted to do with his wealth is well above what most "rich" people do.
Mainly because he personally has everything to gain from the former and practically nothing from the latter at the wealth level he operates at.
Dude could get a better return on index funds than from his philanthropy. Cynically, plain investing is low status where he is at, less cynically he has a lot of time to think about things and a lot of resources and I believe many (most? hmm) humans would act the same way under those conditions. Maybe I'm just an optimist.
If you have 4bn, you don't "move" money around at that scale. You move small fractions around. And in terms of what you can spend... aside from the occasional private island purchase, there's really not a lot you can spend significant fractions of that worth on.
Enjoy a little exercise. Imagine you have 1bn to blow. Google for things you would desire. Unless you want to try to buy a block of SF, you'll find it hard to spend more than a few hundred million at once. How many 100+ meter yachts can you use? The nicest Gulfstream global jet is about 100 million nicely equipped. A used Boeing jumbo jet is even less...
It's actually hard to spend that kind of money unless you basically give it away.
I think in the next few years we will see rise of companies that help customers make decent choices that are not solely based on advertising. We have many user review based solutions but it just doesn't work with most things (not even touching on fake reviews). Even for things where the whole value of the product is about how user feels about it, most users don't have other products to compare. Plus choice-supportive bias.
For tech stuff there are reviewers out there who test many things and which you can trust. Some take them apart and can reason about used components and so on. Not so easy when you are visiting a grocery store or wondering what's the story of the organic food that you are looking at (or maybe it was just mislabled?). Some educated 3rd party could research that for you.
Again, it's different from what we have today because even though it's tempting, sexy and scalable, it can't be just about letting users send opinions and info. It must be expert web of trust. Those companies may end up with a lot of power. But at least in this case if some of them try to misuse it, somebody can stumble upon it and show that they are not trustworthy.
― James Gleick
We've come to a point where we're inundated with everyone trying to push their own agenda that it is difficult to both sort the BS out, while also becoming impossible to really appeal/reach out to the people who would appreciate and benefit from what one has to offer.
>I think in the next years we will see rise of companies that help customers make decent choices that are not solely based on advertising.
I'm skeptical. It all comes down to money. The big boys have a lot to spend. Sure, there will always be someone somewhere doing something, but coming out of a niche and reaching out to people is difficult. It is easier get subconsciously influenced by billboards and banners than being aware and knowing what you really want. Especially since no one seems to be aware of if they really need something. Something to watch - https://www.netflix.com/title/80114460
Case in point - is the 'undisclosed buyer' really benefiting $450.3 mil worth? Money has diminishing returns after $70k/yr/person (from the doc above) but people just want more. So we're ready to listen to what people say would be nice to have. Another part is how they've become status symbols.
>For tech stuff there are reviewers out there who test many things and which you can trust
I'm just going to link to a site which I think is very impartial for as long as I've known them and have excellent reviews with their methodology outlined.
It was called thesweethome(.com), but I guess now it redirects to their other website, thewirecutter (was tech stuff only). It has reviews of everything from knives to dishwashing soap (the long read on that was interesting[1]).
https://thewirecutter.com/
It was acquired this time a year ago by NYT and I haven't been too keen on buying stuff in general for a while (again, minimalism) so can't say if anything has changed since then.
[1]: https://thewirecutter.com/reviews/best-dish-soap/#are-green-...
Of course not! They are benefiting from whatever the difference is between $450.3M and what they expect to sell it for in the future, discounted to present value.
Which means they might either expect to make money on it, or at least not lose too much on it.
For some people, buying art aren't isn't too different from buying stocks... except you can't do anything to enjoy equities hanging on your wall.
You are making it look like there's no emotion involved. Buying art in my opinion is mostly an emotional one, unless you're lucky and getting a Monet in a yard sale (which you admit by saying 'you can't do anything to enjoy equities hanging on your wall.'). Also, it is definitely not a logical rationale like buying stocks. Atleast not a stable one.
For half a billion dollars there are better ways to invest, and diversity. Without risking a single point of failure like here.
Also, what guarantee is there that this will appreciate? What's stopping from this painting's value from dropping to zero in a decade or two? Other investments do too, but that's where the diversification part comes in. Art definitely has it's place in the future, but a specific piece isn't worth risking half a billion dollars over.
What could you possibly want to diversify against? It has outlasted Governments, new technologies, and new ideologies. Diversification is a durability strategy and this painting has proven durability across a multitude of change.
I wasn't just talking about stocks. There are so many other places to invest with that amount of money.
You're writing about him, so he's benefiting. He knows and everyone in his social circle know that he has a painting of DaVinci. His children's friends etc etc. After securing our daily bread and then some, we do things for bragging, pleasure..
Not knowing the buyer, it may also be a way to move cash outa his corrupt country (Russia, China, Saudi Arabia...). 'Whatever happens, I have 2 apartments in NYC, one in Miami and a DaVinci painting i can sell'
I can't imagine a half a billion dollar painting being hung on anyone's wall. In fact I can't imagine it bringing much enjoyment to anyone, given it is likely to spend it's life locked up in top secret high security climate controlled vaults.
The buyers might not even get that benefit... there are billions of dollars worth of artworks sitting in storage in tax-efficient 'freeports':
https://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21590353-ever-more-w...
I'd bet that this will be hanging in someone's billionaire's living room somewhere (hopefully behind some protective glass). These guys have egos. Saying you own the most expensive piece of artwork ever gets you something that money can't buy (even though you did buy it).
"Saying you own the most expensive piece of artwork ever" is literary what money can buy.
Consumer Reports does this.
Donate link is in upper right corner:
https://www.consumerreports.org/cro/index.htm
Here is the direct link, but it looks weird, so I included the other link.
https://donateconsumers.org/ea-action/action?ea.client.id=19...
They're also independant and I trust that they don't have any ulterior motives.
Although I agree with your message (and very much so, I'm reading Herbert Marcuse's "One Dimensional Man", which among other things laments the rise of technological rationality, and the failure of capitalism to optimise for needs by creating False needs), your premise is that there is some fairness in the way values are traded. Although the law of value (assuming the classical law of value) holds for freely reproducible commodities, this sense of long run equality of the socially necessary labour input and the amount for which goods are exchanged does not apply to commodities that can't be reproduced. There is no fairness here other than the whims of speculators. The value of the good may range from nil to infinity. This is a normal part of capitalism, and it's nothing new. It happens regardless of marketing.
As it is, I think you have something of undeniable, a classical part of European and world civilization, given a monetary value that seems a bit absurd.
And seems more easily explainable in the way that commodity bubble can be explained - combine investors wanting something guaranteed to be worth something and investors following trends into bubble territory. All exacerbated by the general trend to print money when the financial system is under threat (so money goes into stuff that seem "of certain value").
> Christie’s marketing campaign was perhaps unprecedented in the art world; it was the first time the auction house went so far as to enlist an outside agency to advertise the work. Christie’s also released a video that included top executives pitching the painting to Hong Kong clients as “the holy grail of our business” and likening it to “the discovery of a new planet.” Christie’s called the work “the Last da Vinci,” the only known painting by the Renaissance master still in a private collection (some 15 others are in museums).
> many art experts argue that Christie’s used marketing window dressing to mask the baggage that comes with the Leonardo, from its compromised condition to its complicated buying history and said that the auction house put the artwork in a contemporary sale to circumvent the scrutiny of old masters experts, many of whom have questioned the painting’s authenticity and condition.
The painting has a volatile sales history, and there's many opinions that it's not an actual Da Vinci. Additionally, it has a lot of flaws that simply make it less valuable, however Christie's marketing has apparently been full-force and managed to fetch this figure. The previous record for an Old Master at auction was allegedly ~$105m taking into account inflation, so this is truly out of left field.
This is not so much of marketing, but rather the (perceived) value. It's a classic piece of art, it doesn't need any marketing. Not a website, not a .ly domain, not an appstore app. It can sell itself like it has. That's art.
and politics. Don't forget politics.
In this case: Painting for sale; of Jesus; by Leonardo da Vinci.
I don't think you can cram more important Western culture into one object.
Walter Isaacson talks about his book and the painting in question, "Salvator Mundi," "the one that's going to be going on sale," in a 50-minute interview with Charlie Rose.[1] The talk of this painting is at 31:45. That's pretty good marketing right there.
The painting itself is mesmerizing, gorgeous, awakening, tremendous.
[0] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34684622-leonardo-da-vin...
[1] https://charlierose.com/videos/31068 (31:45 for talk of "Salvator Mundi")
How much art is being bought only to park some money (like Chinese rich buying houses in US and Canada, keeping them empty)? They might treat art like bitcoin - as unreproducible proof of work standing in for money.
Hard to tell.
Rich people store art in freeports (along with gold bars, like in the Geneva Freeport) to secure their assets while avoiding paying taxes. And from times to times, they lend some of their art pieces to museums in countries where they want to further reduce their taxes.
According to an article in The Economist[1] in 2013: "Because of the confidentiality, the value of goods stashed in freeports is unknowable. It is thought to be in the hundreds of billions of dollars, and rising."
[1] https://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21590353-ever-more-w...
> ... decent choices that are not solely based on advertising
Marketing and advertising are different things. Marketing wins everywhere, that's absolutely true. Advertising helps, if marketing is good to begin with. Advertising a badly marketed product will not save it.
Marketing is framing, positioning, helping customers (future customers, but also present customers) see the value of an offering. Marketing is the CEO's job. Marketing wins everywhere because it is everything.
I hope for this.
I am concerned that what will actually happen though, is that companies will purport to do this, but the call of making money through ads will be too strong. Either by morphing into a review site where reviews occur not through independent research but because companies sent them their product, or by being one of those companies that supposedly sort of fashion or whatever for you, but presumably get their stock based on deals that are not based on quality or research, but on whatever they can get for cheap.
Just because Christie’s went to unprecedented lengths to market the painting it doesn't mean that without that effort the painting wouldn't have sell at this price level. The art market is highly unpredictable.
I'm not saying that money laundering is the ultimate business. But these paintings are like Bitcoin: they are traded actively by rich people.
The advertising/branding is required to give value to a certain item.
It's a subscription service, I know people who subscribed for a bit when making a lot of purchases, like when they bought their first home.
[1] https://www.which.co.uk/
More about them here:
https://www.which.co.uk/about-which/who-we-are
User reviews won't work either since most of them have the experience of less than a handful of comparable products, at best, or value completely different attributes - if they aren't fake.
Even communities you'd expect to feature lots of expert knowledge often turn into an echo chamber: Subreddits discussing certain product categories quickly settle for a very limited selection that gets reommended over and over again.
I agree with you. A service that provides guidance and is dependent on the customers' satisfaction, not commissions or other vendor-related incentives, should be very valuable, if not downright necessary.
If you think you've heard it somewhere, it was in Arrival - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2543164/
I'm guessing the buyer (if it's a single person) is a royal, oligarch (could even be Putin) or someone in China.
Can someone familiar with the art market comment on how that works? That seems contrary to what I know about markets. I mean, I understand that the volume is contracting, but the context is that such "[high] price is remarkable".
It's not his company. He hasn't owned it since 2010. The roots of Uralkali go back 80 years, he owned it for 15 years.
Uralkali is 20% of the global potash market, without their mining a billion people wouldn't have food - at a minimum - given the present 7.6 billion world population. Russia has become a wheat juggernaut [1], to put it mildly; without their food production, the developing world will not develop given the population growth occuring.
That doesn't defend the pollution, it does however bring some very important context to the situation that you entirely neglected.
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-11-15/europe-is...
Jesus in color is very similar with our 21 century image of him, no mustache, eyes completely changed and ... the painting is relatively new compare to Jesus himself! and his image in the eyes of it followers changed so dramatically!
I am wondering what else could have changed in 2000 years!
The heirs of that estate are probably not thrilled with this headline.
Basically, In 1962 the Mona Lisa was loaned to Metropolitan Museum of Art by the Louvre. Huge marketing campaign resulted in over a million of Americans going to see it, ushering in the new era of art as mass spectacle/consumption.
Obviously there were other factors involved - but Robert Hughes made an amazing documentary about this subject called the Mona Lisa Curse, which you can watch online [1].
[1] https://vimeo.com/62973616
Does it? Or does it say more about its value as being incredibly rare, and one of only a few Leonardi paintings.
You understanding the value of scarcity right?
Leonardo da Vinci painted it, for a start
Before the 1900s, aluminum was valued more than gold. Today, it is one of the cheapest metals around. Nothing changed but the context in which we were able to extract it.
In the case of this painting, the context is what makes it valuable - the last known privately owned painting by a name nearly the entire western world recognizes immediately.
"If you have a $20M painting, you can imagine an equivalently priced apartment where you can display that painting in one of the world's great cities. But $150M? There is no equivalent for that. There are no apartments that expensive."
And now $450.3M?! for the top.
In "China's Art Factories: Van Gogh From the Sweatshop", you can see the bottom of the economic scale. About $20-$30-$50 for a good copy of a Van Gogh or other masterpiece.
http://www.spiegel.de/international/0,1518,433134,00.html
I might be biased, but I know what I would pick if given the option, and it cruises 1,200 mph.
Great job.
In past centuries cathedrals were hailed as the masterpieces of the skills of craftsmen.
But the painting stands on its own and a decent pair of leather shoes will get you from a to b just as well as they did centuries ago.
If I remember rightly the most universal item of soldier's kit throughout all history was the spoon.
But, hey, who am I to judge...?
>Christie’s Is Selling This Painting for $100 Million. They Say It’s by Leonardo. I Have Doubts. Big Doubts.
tl;dr: The painting is an old-hat style and pose not becoming of a Renaissance artist of Leonardo's caliber.
Me: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯