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Comment by happytoexplain | Hacker News Reader

It's frankly hard to imagine somebody putting a Picasso in that position. Look at the height of the painting! Look at how low the wall it's resting on is! Look at the surface it's sitting on! How is it that nobody there has their intuitive every-day-physics alarms going off??

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What really got me is how immediately after it fell, they put it back exactly the same.

Sometimes, you need to be honest even if harsh - the people putting a picasso painting on that space to fall off are incompetent fools who should never touch expensive art in the first place...

How much of your salary are you willing to sacrifice in order for police to be able to afford such competent smarts?

$3.50

In other words, the same amount the government is willing to pay you to do your civic duty of sitting as a juror.

"Local man surprised police officer who makes $15.50 an hour lacks qualifications to handle $100m artwork."

Who cares. It's just a piece canvas that derives its value from provenance, not condition.

You've confused value and price. Its price may not be affected by deterioration. But its value to people who study art is absolutely affected by the shape it's in.

The most obvious example is "Ecce Mono", item 15 on a list of botched restorations here: https://news.artnet.com/art-world/art-history-restoration-fa...

> But its value to people who study art is absolutely affected by the shape it's in.

Who cares for its value "to people who study art"? It's also contigent on BS cultural norms. It's not even some objectively impressive artwork. Not to mention that Picasso mass produced tons of them after he got famous, for easy money...

Who cares? People who study art. People who care about people who study art.

And almost everything is contingent on "BS cultural norms". Most of the rest is contingent on random evolutionary history. If your point is that everything is ridiculous, I certainly agree. But I disagree that the things other people care about are more ridiculous than the things I care about. It's all bananas.

> But its value to people who study art is absolutely affected by the shape it's in.

> The most obvious example is "Ecce Mono", item 15 on a list of botched restorations here

You are right, but probably not for the reason you think. Ecce Mono had no value until it was botched, and then it became famous. So, yes, its value to people who study art probably is affected by the shape it's in, but it's anyone's guess whether the value of the Picasso will go down or up now that it's "the Picasso that fell on the floor".

You are also confusing value and price.

Ecce Homo lasted 90 years and was important enough to the people responsible for it that they wanted to restore it. Those are clear signs of value.

You're right that the open-market price of Ecce Mono, were it ever to be cut out and sold, has gone up due to its global meme status. You're also right that the price of the Picasso could well go up due to notoriety.

You mean item 17.

I would argue that the restoration is way more valuable than the original in this case. The original is a decently executed yet run-of-the-mill iconography with nothing remarkable about it. The restoration is a unique world-famous piece of art that draws thousands of visitors each year (before the pandemic) to see it.

> Who cares. It's just a piece canvas that derives its value from provenance, not condition.

Apple II. It's just a piece of plastic and silicon that derives its value from provenance, not condition.

See how that works? Just because you don't care, it doesn't mean that it isn't important to a lot of people.

>See how that works?

Great? You kind of made the parent's point.

>Just because you don't care, it doesn't mean that it isn't important to a lot of people.

And just because it's "important to a lot of people" doesn't mean it should be.

I doubt their salary is that high, btw.

And touching it with their bare hands getting finger prints on the canvas.

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