Posted on 05/21/2017 10:37:49 AM PDT by Timpanagos1
Seasoned art collectors know it’s usually wise to go into an auction with a set budget; otherwise one can get carried away by the adrenaline. It helps when that budget is about $100 million.
Yusaku Maezawa, the Japanese e-commerce billionaire, hewed to what appears to be his annual $100 million high-profile spring auction season spend, with his purchase of Jean-Michel Basquiat’s Untitled (1982) at Thursday night’s Contemporary Art evening sale at Sotheby’s. The canvas was hammered down at $98 million after a dramatic 10-minute bidding war, coming to $110.4 million with the buyer’s premium. It marks the highest auction price ever for an American artist—unseating Andy Warhol, whose $105 million auction record was set by Silver Car Crash (Double Disaster) (1963) at Sotheby’s New York in November 2013—and the second-highest price for any contemporary work.
Maezawa purchased $98 million of art at last year’s spring auctions, in a spending binge that included a $57.3 million Basquiat, then a record for the artist.
Bidding began at $57 million, a sum that sounded a little cheeky at first, and drew murmurs from the crowd. The murmurs morphed into gasps as that figure, and with it Basquiat’s record, receded into history and the bidding soared. Sotheby’s specialist Yuki Terase, on the phone with Maezawa, used incongruously slight gestures—a delicate wiggle of a finger—to indicate she was ramping up the price by another million.
(Excerpt) Read more at artsy.net ...
“But when I am alone, I do not have the effrontery to consider myself an artist at all, not in the grand old meaning of the word: Giotto, Titian, Rembrandt, Goya were great painters. I am only a public clown—a mountebank. “I have understood my time and have exploited the imbecility, the vanity, the greed of my contemporaries. It is a bitter confession, this confession of mine, more painful than it may seem. But at least and at last it does have the merit of being honest.
Pablo Picasso, 1952
And who can forget when Picasso declared a painting he did to be a forgery. “I can paint a fake Picasso as well as anybody!”
There’s still good art out there. Here is a link to the Scholastic national art awards. I’ve filtered it for Ohio Portfolios that won a Silver Medal with Distinction...because my daughter Sakurako won one of them....take a look. Proud papa!
He paid $100 Million for that? It is terrible.
I continue to be amazed at prices paid for Art, especially Jackson Pollock’s.
I suppose this is Modern Art or something but it just doesn’t do much for me.
See my 22 above :)
Back in the late 1940’s when Pollock was painting, or as I put it, throwing paint on a canvas. He had little money and was under the patronage of, I think, Peggy Guggenheim, he would trade some of paintings to the local grocer for food and beer. I have often wondered if that grocer kept them long enough to sell when Pollock’s started rising in price, especially after his death.
WOW!!!!!
That is talent. She is on the road to fame and fortune.
God bless.
more money than sense
How do i get in on this scam?
I expected ugly, since I heard it was “modern”, but that is far uglier and more amateurish than I expected.
I used to play that song a lot in my 1980 Z-28 with the T-tops out..
Looks like something you would find on the side of a boxcar tagged by some ferro-equinologist “artist.”
“more money than sense”
The buyer paid $110 million at auction and that likely means there were other bidders willing to pay $108-109 million. That market for that one piece of art not only still exists but has appreciated in value.
In all likelihood, it was a good investment.
That is really cool, i never knew it existed.
Straight into my youtube favorites folder.
Thanks
Basquiat was the politically correct darling of the rich stupids in New York
He had something to say in his work and they loved it
+1
Blame Impressionism
I’m dead serious
I had a print of an early Picasso painting of a dove. Beautiful
He had the talent, but most of what he is noted for is grotesque IMO.
Goya’s depressing. Saw an exhibit at the Boston MFA a couple of decades ago.
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