First thing first: let’s start talking about value. What exactly do we mean when we talk about “value” in art? How do you establish the value of a work, and decide “how much it costs”? And above all, who decides, and why?
This isn’t a five-minute question indeed. Art market outsiders may be puzzled by the apparent discrepancy between aesthetic value, historical value and economic value. And let’s face it: the very reason why art has become so popular among the general public is that it has suddenly become so expensive. High prices command media headlines, and the number of people who don’t just collect but stockpile outrageously expensive art has grown from the hundreds to the thousands’ between the end of the 20th and the beginning of the 21st century.
Top prices at Christie’s and Sotheby’s evening auctions may be shocking for some of us, not only because of the staggering amount of money that buyers are scrambling to cough up, but mainly because these sums do not seem to have an obvious counterpart – in terms of intrinsic value. After all, the intrinsic value of a painting amounts to no more than the cost of the paint, the canvas, and a few hours of labour. Everything else, what sets the real value of a work, is intangible, or at least not determinable. No doubt that is how it sounds to most people (certainly for all those who read about the fabulous results of evening auctions in the newspapers, tops). It does not really make sense that a lustrous, giant-scale stainless steel bunny (the inflatable stainless steel rabbit created in 1986 by U.S. artist Jeff Koons, which set an all-time record price for a living artist) could seriously be worth the $91.1 million shelled out by financial mogul Steven A. Cohen in May 2019 – especially if we compare that figure to, say, the price paid for Gustav Klimt’s Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I ($87 million), Claude Monet’s Water Lilies ($84 million), or Vincent van Gogh’s Portrait of Dr. Gachet ($82 million). It makes no sense, does it.
Those who like to think that the value of art depends only, or mainly, on its aesthetic or historical value may find disconcerting the prices reached at auction by artists who gained a foothold in the market no more than a couple of years ago by offering giant balloons (Jeff Koons), bull carcasses in formaldehyde (Damien Hirst), or a life-size statue of the Pope felled by a meteorite (Maurizio Cattelan).
