I don’t understand a lot of these pieces. But I’ve also experienced tremendous emotion over something that I try to share with others who give the same kind of “uhh what?” response. So I accept that I’m probably not the audience.

That being said I think there’s probably a few things that happen sometimes:

1. Money laundering

2. Rich people buying status

3. Rich people figuring out what exactly to do with their money

4. like crypto and other things, it has value because a community has decided it has value. It doesn’t have to make any sense. It’s self-fulfilling.

Think of it this way: props from the original Star Wars films fetch millions of dollars at auction. Most movie fans and even most Star Wars fans would never pay that much for a prop. But you can understand wanting to own part of a piece of history. Now, consider these paintings are props for a movie you haven't seen yet, a movie called 'the history of art'. Perhaps if these pieces had a significance to you beyond their visual appearance, it would make more sense why they could be so valuable (to a very small minority).

A lot of art is part of some sort of conversation that those in the know had, and so it makes sense to them, but those outside that scene have no idea.

What I think is particularly confusing about art is that in other disciplines, you pretty much never see such things exhibited to the public. Eg, take Perl poetry for instance:

    # The Cow
    #    by Ogden Nash
    #
    # The cow is of the bovine ilk;
    # One end is moo, the other, milk.
    #
    package cow;
    @ISA = qw(bovine);
    push @cow, 'moo';
    unshift @cow, 'milk';

Now imagine somebody framed that and hung it in a museum and normal people trying to understand what is this all about.

"Particular art pieces sell for ridiculous prices because of the strange world of art investment" is a reasonable opinion to hold. But the article is just "wow, Rothko sure is shit."