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.
Leonardo Da Vinci Painting Sells for $450.3M, Shattering Auction Records
61–70 of 152 posts
Re: Leonardo Da Vinci Painting Sells for $450.3M, Shattering Auction Records
#62I wonder if its a person or a corporation/org that bought the painting. Number of people who may buy such a painting is probably only a handful.
Re: Leonardo Da Vinci Painting Sells for $450.3M, Shattering Auction Records
#63In the book "$12 Million Stuffed Shark: The Curious Economics of Contemporary Art", it describes the insanity of the skyrocketing auction prices with the following analogy (paraphrasing since I do no longer have a copy of the book).
"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.
Re: Leonardo Da Vinci Painting Sells for $450.3M, Shattering Auction Records
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wouldn't he need someone to pay that same amount or more for the painting to effectively have moved money with this apparatus? And if the next buyer is similarly motivated, isn't the valuation akin to a Ponzi?
If you have $400 million in funds whose origin you can't account for, you move it into some opaque account to buy the painting for that $400 million. The buyer (you) remains "unknown" but now you have $400 million that you can account for, since it came from selling a painting. In the art auction world, either or both sides can remain as anonymous as they wish, which makes this whole scheme possible.
But how do you explain your acquisition of the $400MM painting when the taxman comes knocking?
Re: Leonardo Da Vinci Painting Sells for $450.3M, Shattering Auction Records
#65You could buy three F-22 Raptors with that kind of money. Well, Congress would never approve the sale, but this painting went for triple the per-copy price of the F-22, according to Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_Martin_F-22_Raptor
I might be biased, but I know what I would pick if given the option, and it cruises 1,200 mph.
Re: Leonardo Da Vinci Painting Sells for $450.3M, Shattering Auction Records
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
You would spend 10% of your wealth on a painting?
Non-glib answer: Art tends to hold value very well. For someone in that wealth bracket, this is probably a very reasonable diversification + having a significant amount of sentimental value. (it's Davinci, which even for a pleb like me would be neat to have in your living room) 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. A…
> For someone in that wealth bracket, this is probably a very reasonable diversification + having a significant amount of sentimental value.
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.
Re: Leonardo Da Vinci Painting Sells for $450.3M, Shattering Auction Records
#67http://www.vulture.com/2017/11/christies-says-this-painting-...
>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)_/¯
Re: Leonardo Da Vinci Painting Sells for $450.3M, Shattering Auction Records
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
If you have $4bn, unless you're investing in Beanie Babies, you really don't have to struggle to find stable stores of value. 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 cou…
What are examples of those 4bn+ stores of value then? I was thinking of something that can be easily moved around - e.g. 400M in gold is 10 tonnes. Not super handy. Stocks, currencies, real estate - those are cases when you trust somebody else to take care of storing your value, most often the gov. Not trying to make an argument for my example here, just sincerely curious what those stable store of value can be.
Re: Leonardo Da Vinci Painting Sells for $450.3M, Shattering Auction Records
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you have $4bn, unless you're investing in Beanie Babies, you really don't have to struggle to find stable stores of value. 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 cou…
What are examples of those 4bn+ stores of value then? I was thinking of something that can be easily moved around - e.g. 400M in gold is 10 tonnes. Not super handy. Stocks, currencies, real estate - those are cases when you trust somebody else to take care of storing your value, most often the gov. Not trying to make an argument for my example here, just sincerely curious what those stable store of value can be.
If you have 4bn, you own interests in many companies, many funds, direct physical properties, property funds, etc.
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.
Re: Leonardo Da Vinci Painting Sells for $450.3M, Shattering Auction Records
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you have $4bn, unless you're investing in Beanie Babies, you really don't have to struggle to find stable stores of value. 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 cou…
I agree- I would estimate 95% or more of really rich people are mostly indistinguishable from an upper middle class person from the outside: Sure, they have maids and maybe fly their own plane or have an expensive classic car but there are these 5% of rich people who somehow have a strange compulsion to advertise their wealth as widely as possible and they're the ones who have the 100 mil yachts and go to these sorts…
Clearly Bill Gates doesn't need to flaunt his wealth. I'm sure he was just really excited by Da Vinci, and the opportunity to own a real piece of history was totally worth it.
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.