Thursday, November 16, 2017

All Praise Janet Yellen!: Leonardo da Vinci’s “Salvator Mundi” Has Sold for Record Near Half Billion Dollars...


... despite concerns over its condition and complex history

The New York Times reports:
Leonardo da Vinci’s “Salvator Mundi,” considered either the most important old master work to be auctioned in a generation or a damaged painting hyped by savvy marketing, sold on Wednesday night for $450.3 million with fees, a record for any work of art sold at auction. It far surpassed the sale of Picasso’s “Women of Algiers,” which fetched $179.4 million at Christie’s in May 2015.
The price is all the more remarkable at a time when the old masters market is contracting, because of limited supply and the penchant of collectors for contemporary art.
And here's the real kicker, it may not even be
a da Vinci. Jerry Saltz writes:
I’ve looked at art for almost 50 years and one look at this painting tells me it’s no Leonardo. The painting is absolutely dead. Its surface is inert, varnished, lurid, scrubbed over, and repainted so many times that it looks simultaneously new and old. This explains why Christie’s pitches it with vague terms like “mysterious,” filled with “aura,” and something that “could go viral.” Go viral? As a poster, maybe. A two-dimensional ersatz dashboard Jesus.

Why else do I think this is a sham? Experts estimate that there are only 15 to 20 existing da Vinci paintings. Not a single one of them pictures a person straight on like this one. There is also not a single painting picturing an individual Jesus either. All of his paintings, even single portraits, depict figures in far more complex poses. 
All, I have to say is praise Janet Yellen and her mad money printing.

Below is video of the final minutes if the auction where the painting went for $400 million plus fees:


1 comment:

  1. Are these purchases just an elaborate means of money laundering?

    ReplyDelete