I don’t think it is necessarily appropriate to casually condemn successful or established art. However, I do think there should be a general consensus that no intellectualization of colored rectangles justifies a price of $85 million. That is 546 million Danish kr. — or more than half a billion Danish kr.
Salary for the entirety of painters in Denmark
Let us put that into perspective.
If there are approximately 2,000 Danish visual artists, and that amount were split between them, they would each receive close to a year’s salary (273,000 kr.). That is salaries for an entire field of work in an entire country for a year, based on the price of one sold item. Wild! If we only took the top 100 Danish visual artists and split the amount among them, they would each receive more than 5.46 million kr. And if we split it between the top 10 Danish visual artists, they would each receive more than 54.6 million kr.
0.0022%
My paintings (whether you like them or not) — which I am absolutely confident justify contemplation and reflection to the same extent, and beyond what a Mark Rothko does — sell at 0.0022% of the price of the recently sold Mark Rothko painting. If we ever see paintings by Samuell Karim at Sotheby’s that will mark the point where the paintings have surpassed the status of art and instead become symbols of status — as I believe is the case with paintings by the likes of Mark Rothko.
- What do you think about art selling at these prices?
- Pick a Samuell Karim or Mark Rothko painting.
Comment and vote below!
