Art and Values: Leonardo da Vinci Painting Sells for US $450 Million - What Do We Value?

Last week, a Leonardo daVinci painting sold at the prestigious Christie's auction house in New York for US $450.3 million, the highest price ever paid for a piece of art at auction. In the course of some seven minutes, the "Salvator Mundi" became one of the most expensive "things" ever traded.

A Change of Direction?

On a personal (philosophical) level, this makes me happy because it was the sale of an "old master work," seemingly shattering the the previous stranglehold of record high art sales held by abstract and modernist painting. For some 50+ years, the art world has pretty much looked down its nose at traditional figurative work and even derisively labeled it "craft," and that has been reflected on prices at auction.

It was almost as if there was a wholesale rejection of art that demonstrated its maker having technical skill, as well as vision. 

Does this represent a change of values? A movement toward something less abstract?

In his post "$450 Million Contemporary Art Butthurt" (published shortly after the sale took place), @leoplaw makes an excellent analysis, if you're interested in that end of the equation.

But that's not really what I want to look at, today.

How Do We "Value" Things?

I am more interested in looking at the "value" of things. 

Here we have a piece of art, obviously "valued" by someone at $450.3 million (winning bid of $400 million + auction commission). But let's add some perspective to this reality... because this was sold at public auction, there was also ANOTHER bidder who thought it was worth... $420 million? Or whatever the second highest bid was.

In fact, if you watch the live-action bidding embedded in the first article I link to, you'll see that there were at least 3-4 bidders involved till the price passed $250 million.

One quarter billion dollars.

But in assigning these "values," what does the new owner actually have?

Sure, they have "a piece of art" with a long documented provenance that includes royal families, but it begs the question of how much of that price is actually for the ART, and how much is for intangibles such as social status, bragging rights, establishing reputation, a personal sense of power, and whatever else is important to the extremely rich?

That part gets a lot harder to sort out. 

Art... and Professional Sports

Part of what I end up looking at here is the remarkable similarity between art and professional sports. 

Even though Leonardo da Vinci is long dead, the art world is made up of a tiny handful of extreme superstars and an ocean of (mostly) starving contenders. It tends to be a field of huge inequities. 

In sports, whether it's baseball player Alex Rodriguez being signed to the New York Yankees for $275 million or Brazilian soccer star Neymar going to Paris Saint Germain for $270 million, these heady prices tend to include a lot more than the actual value of the player, themselves.

And so it is, with the upper echelons of art. We end up in places where the value of the "bragging rights" of ownership far outrank the value of the "thing" that is being valued.

So What DO We Value?

Whereas the sale of the "Salvator Mundi" certainly ranks highly as an exciting event in the art world, it brings to mind questions of what we value, as a culture.

What does a single person paying $450 million for a single piece of art say... for example, in comparison to that figure representing more than 20% of the Gross Domestic Product of the Central African Republic... a nation with over four million people?

What does it say that this happens in a "highly developed" industrialized nation where 44 million people depend on food stamps to get by?

What do we VALUE? And WHY? 

Thank you for reading! Red Dragonfly is a proud member of the @sndbox creative initiative.

The Red Dragonfly is an independent alternative art gallery located in Port Townsend, WA; showcasing edgy and unique contemporary art & handmade crafts by local and worldwide artists. All images are our own, unless otherwise credited. Where applicable, artist images used with permission.