While browsing the news I saw an article that said a painting had recently been sold for the highest price ever, a bit over $142 million dollars. I was intrigued by the headline, figuring it was some Da Vinci or other artist with a household name.

The work in question was actually “Three Studies of Lucian Freud” by Francis Bacon. Personally, I had never heard of the artist and I'm not familiar with his work but I'll be the first to admit outside a few humanities classes in college I don't have the biggest array of art knowledge.

Here is a picture of the piece(s):



While it is certainly a visually pleasing painting, can someone please tell me why this is worth such an extreme amount of money? The previous highest price ever paid for a painting was a couple years ago when the "The Scream" by Edvard Munch sold for ~$120 million.

I can understand why "The Scream" went for so much money because it is probably one of the most well known paintings in the world. Can someone help me wrap my head around what is so special about this piece of work to justify it's price? Is it beautiful on some levels I simply don't comprehend?

I guess what's considered a beautiful painting is in the eye of the beholder. Art is a very strange thing and can feel backwards..

Sometimes I see magnificent works of art that don't get much attention and sell for quite little. Other times I see paintings that look sloppy, or are in my opinion of low quality that seem to sell for outrageous prices.

It might have something to do with the artist or the story behind the piece. For example: Vincent Van Gogh was a starving artist whos work didn't become popular until after he died unfortuntely.

I like the painting but paying that amount of cash for it is a disgrace.

I read this today in an article:


An auction sale for millions will hardly have anything to do with the intrinsic qualities of the painting, such as beauty. It's an investment, and even if the value of art is volatile, it can be raised at your convenience as long as you have a lot of money. If someone has been purchasing art works of a famous/critically acclaimed painter, paying a lot for one key piece will automatically increase the value of your whole collection of that painter.

We know the number of millionaires and billionaires is on the rise... so this is not that surprising.

The answer is simple really. I used to think long and hard about why a blank or blue tinted canvas would make someone rich, when someone might slave over a painting for months and never make a penny. Finally when it hit me I realised it was just ridiculously obvious.....

Culture. You create a belief, and someone acts accordingly. Something is worth whatever someone is willing to pay for it. A painting itself has no intrinsic value at all. You give a rich guy the idea that something ought to be worth a huge sum of money and this is what happens.

Also as Vodsel pointed out, doing this can be used to just perpetuate itself, making even more intrinsically worthless objects sky-rocket in their perceived value.

What Vodsel said...

I can't say that the price is justified or anything like that, but as I study it, it becomes more appealing to me. In some ways it's very DMT-like. The actual aesthetic, perhaps not so much (save the floating wire-frame geometry) but the concept as I perceive it is pretty cool. You can judge the angle of your perspective relative to the figure by the background "poles". You see that as your angle changes, the person's appearance changes to that of the wolf. DMT (and the godhead from my experiences in particular) can and like to do this as well. With the godhead for example, I've spoken about this effect exactly that the artist here captures. With the slightest rotation in angle and perspective, the geometry (though itself stationary) appears to transform into something else entirely, but the geometry has remained completely still, and it only you and your perspective that has moved. This seems perhaps to be a property of holograms, and not just the fancy DMT ones either. You can easily grasp this concept with one of those holographic 2D cards where the image appears to move or change, based on how you tilt the card toward or away from you. Similarly with DMT, the plane that you are on changes relative to the geometry, and this creates the illusion that there is motion, even though there is not, as can be seen in the example with the 2D card where the card (or plane) may be moving, but the actual pixels on the card that contain the visual information are not actually reconfiguring themselves or moving freely or anything of the sort. In the case of this artwork, there is probably more symbolism here as well with the human transforming into the wolf (or animal). If we keep the hologram analogy going, then it would mean that in this painting, the entity represented is both human and beast at the same time, and it is merely perspective and relativity that affect the way you perceive that entity.