Leonardo Da Vinci Painting Sells for $450.3M, Shattering Auction Records
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
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]).
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.
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.
More about them here:
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'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."
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.
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...
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. :)
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.
A portrait of Jesus Christ of questionable origin and authenticity being sold by a Russian fertilizer magnate for 450 million usd. Says quite a bit about the times we live in, Doesn't it?
edit: Sorry for my salty tirade; Just sharing a viewpoint.
These paintings were only painted because exceedingly wealthy families commissioned and collected them. If it were up to people like me and you, there'd be no art to inspire people in the first place.
> I wonder how the millions of the poor, nameless, talented artists around the world feel about this.
This community wouldn't exist if it weren't for the hierarchy of the art world.
Furry porn producers would continue to make a mint though.
My rapid search brings me El Greco, Claude Monet, Johan Sebastian Bach, Franz Kafka, Johannes Vermeer, Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, Vincent Van Gogh from http://www.toptenz.net/top-10-now-famous-artists-died-ignomi... ; I think it wouldn't be fair to consider them minor artist.
Art co-exist with society for more that 17,000 years if you consider Lascaux. It doesn't make sense to reduce Art to profitable or bankable Art.
To produce Art can be expensive and can be cheap, without money you will not produce beautiful marble statue or Faberge eggs but Art doesn't do be expensive.
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...?
If you think you've heard it somewhere, it was in Arrival - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2543164/
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.
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".
This may sound ridiculous, but it reminds me of a private server of Lineage 2 (RPG) when old admins returned to the game as normal players and had almost infinite currency and completely ruined the server economy by simply buying rare stuff, with limited supply, at any price.
I make this analogy for the housing market, art, soccer players, cryptocurrency, and many other markets where you have limited supply - which is where you actually see how much washed money is starting to show up...
It's scary and no ones talks about this.
Edit: btw the solution for the private server economy disease was to wipe it - real life markets can't be wiped.
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].
>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)_/¯
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 :) )
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.
"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.
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.
I thought I was done with HN for the evening after reading about this painting and a few other things.
So I opened my Kindle to read something else, and the advertising screen showed a book called Typhoon Fury (The Oregon Files).
I grew up in Oregon, so I figured I would take a look.
The blurb began:
> Hired to search for a collection of paintings worth half a billion dollars, Juan Cabrillo and the crew of the Oregon soon find themselves in much deeper waters.
Stolen paintings hung on Italian factory worker's wall for almost 40 years
https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2014/apr/02/stolen-...
I'm guessing the buyer (if it's a single person) is a royal, oligarch (could even be Putin) or someone in China.
Just thought someone could guide me.
> About half of the market is accounted for by sales through dealers, either directly from the artist’s studio (the “primary market”) or by reselling a work that has already been bought once (the “secondary market”) and which is now being sold on, often with several commissions being paid to intermediaries along the way. The other half of the art market is made up of sales by auction, a system that claims to be open and competitive, with both artwork and potential bidders being visible to all. In reality, it can be as secretive as the dealing world, with complex financial arrangements and discounted commissions being not uncommon.
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!
is it possible that buying art is actually a great way of storing wealth? Like buying real estate but less flashy, easier to store, and easier to transport. I assume there aren't too many ways you can safely store 400m cash?