Painting and their price ....

[Rubu]

This has always been a mystery to me: what makes a paint expensive. famous painter, fine. what what is so special about a paint that would make it so expensive?

take this one for example



it was sold for 82.5 million.

What is special about this picture (beside the fact that it was drawn by a famous painter) but again these are the painting that made him famous. so there has to be something special about it. What it is?

[Fazal]

Originally Posted by Rubu
so there has to be something special about it. What it is?

I think thats what the model was also thinking. Looks like tini-o khubyee Chintito.

[Tigers_eye]

This is all hyped up. While the painters are alive no one buys them. After their death all of a sudden those painting worth millions??? It is the seller who creates the market. Dumb buyers just get sucker punched. Do you know any painter who is alive and his painting selling over a million? let alone 82 million?

[abdulw11]

I seriously hate paintings, especially the way people try to sell them. They give some lame BS about how the picture represents this and how it shows that, but it's mostly just a pile of crap.

[Rubu]

What do they say when the create the hype? I am interested to know the seller's description of the picture.

[ialbd]

i think its more like showing off ones intellectual taste in the high end society.....

for example all the bilionaires hav expensive cars & private jet so theres no point in bragging with those, but when one one buys a van gogh (spelling thik hoilo naki?) or sth like that he definitely outclasses the one buying a Greek Island in the billionaire society.

Everytime someone buys a painting with such a ridiculous amount, the party thrown is attended by the senators to painting connoisseurs, and the buyer sort of goes down in history. But obviously its more social than personal....

[Orpheus]

Well price like anything else depends on supply and demand.....There is a huge demand for original work of Gogh and supply is only one. Currently, Van Gogh is probably the most famous painter after Da Vinci... so if you can buy yourself to history books, why not? Vang Goghs paintings are discussed in books from every subjects - whether it's astronomy (discussion of starry night), psychology (this painting of the doctor) or art. Because of this purchase the owner will probably be mentioned along side the discussion of this art.

Now, what makes Van Gogh's picture more appealing than others? It's because Gogh's life wasn't so normal. His life is movie like - talented artist with all sorts of problems. He was believed to suffer from bipolar disorder (meanning severe depression along with mania (delusions))...He died by committing suicide. I think because he committed suicide, his paintaints towards the end of his life are more famous than others (starry night was his last piece before he killed himself, so many try to find meaning there).

If you read about this painting, i think you will appreciate it a bit more. you can't just look at the pic and ask yourself what is so special about it? Given 20 bux, any streeet painter can draw this. I think once you know the story, you will appreciate the art million times more... otherwise you will only ejoy art that give you certain illusion.. like the pic changes in every blink

If I was unable to get my point across, perhaps the example of "the last supper" may be helpful.... I can bet you that the painting of Da Vinci multiplied in value over last few years because of the book/movie da vinci code. The drawings didn't change but the meaning of the picture changed significantly. And more people are aware of the meaning.. thus the demand for the painting goes up, hence the price. Also, the painting maybe a proof of something that was hidden from billions of followers.... it's similar to finding a Quran (suppose an original one) with extra paras.. how significant is that? will you pay 100 million dollars for that? I think Hell Ya!!

[Hatebreed]

Some of these paintings/painters are popular because during their time they were the best. They may have invented that particular style or type of art. Not all paintings are great, they are famous because they are old and rare, but others are really are mind-blowing, like the Mona Lisa (Da Vinci), Scream (Munch), Persistence of Memory (Dali), etc. Ultimately it comes down to your taste, and the depth of your pocket. It doesn't mean that art is better, it's just expensive.

[P.Warner]

Young Sirs,

It appears that not one of you have mentioned 'aesthetics' as yet! Aesthetics, as an academic discipline and is simply translated (in this context) as the study of the appreciation of beauty beauty. Artistic representation of any form forms part of that. To question art one needs to have an interest in art. I believe that if you are interested in being interested in art do visit a local art gallery. It need not be an exhibition of the Dutch Impressionists. There was a fabulas painter from Bangladesh, Mr Abedin whose works I have here in my study in the form of a callender. His charcoal work is particulaly impressive. Whatever you do, if you want to discuss paintings do take the time to visit a gallery. Looking at pictures online at 72 dpi resolutions or lower within the confines of one's computer monitor is neither beneficial to art nor to the development of an aspiring art critic!


The picture submitted by Mr Rubu is rather a famous example of the Dutch master Vincent Van Gogh. What do you see in the painting? A few of you have brought on the subjective issue of 'value'. Value in itself is rather a fickle perspective in my opinion as so much of that depends on market forces. We are talking about art and artistic representation in this thread primarily, not the value of a work of art. The value is not related to the artist when he is creating the work. Older paintings by famous artists do sell for more money than works of contemporary painters but that is not a discussion on art but more the monetary value of art! Let us discuss the painting and what you see. I see a pensive old man. He is morose. Perhaps he is weighed down by the trauma and trivialities of life. Indeed this is a selfportrait! The tragedy is that this is not too old a man looking old weighed down by life.

'The Last Supper' was already an astronomically expensive work of art if we are talking figures prior to the paltry second rate novella by Dan Brown. If anything, Brown's book has made an element of the populace look at religion with a new sense of enthusiasm. However, this in itself is not central to our discussion. We are discussing art and artistic representation. To understand art one must first look at how art came to be. Are cave paintings art? There are many theories of art. The most controversial and famous of the recent theories is known as the 'Art-World Theory'. This basically describes art as any phenomenon that has been thought of as a work of art by members of the artworld. The members of the artworld are those who enjoy going to galleries, buy paintings, buy books on art, artists and curators themselves. So it is a large body of people. The artworld theory does not impose any characteristics of goodness or bad into a work of art as having to be a criteria for its inclusion in a gallery, but just that at least more than one member of the artworld had discussed it to give it a conferral of status. This theory helps us to include many modern paintings and other forms of art when classifying art. The works of Picasso, Duchamp, Damien Hirst et all., might have had their detractors in their time and still do, but they are considered as works of art regardless of how good or bad they are. Curiously enough, this theory also helps us to distinguish between works of art through the forms of a simple painting by a human being to some brushwork by an elephant or a monkey!

Any discussion on art and what is art would not be complete without mentioning the ancient Greek philosopher Plato and his idea of 'trompe l'oeil'. Simply translated in our context this basically means that a work of art is representing something real. So the painting of a chair is representing a chair that is physically existant. Plato's idea was that God had created a chair in heaven. This gave the carpenter the idea of making the chair for sitting on. The the artist who saw the chair wanted to paint it. Which one of these three chairs would be the best chair?!?

To conclude my little lecture I would like to draw your attention to the idea of forms, what the forms represent and how an artist sees the form. In the early days of painting the idea was to create a two dimensional painting. Objects and persons of importance would be the largest in a painting. So the King or the Bishop would be the looming larger figures. In fact this is rather true of the persian and Moghul paintings of India. However, with the Renaissance came about idea of perspectival painting. When you see a painting by a artist during renaissance or after this period you notice the element of depth and a third dimension. If lots of people are depicted in a painting, you see their size relative to how close or farther away they are from the person looking at the painting, not how important they are. Artists in 20th century when art material slowly began to get cheaper, and tubes of paint came along, could experiment rather more with the form. No longer would the artist confine himself to drawing a likely rendition of the chair but he would like to create the chair in whichever way he wanted. If we take the example of the Bangladeshi painter Mr Abedin, his brush strokes are not directly representative of cow in a ploughfield, however, looking at it we can make out the cow and the struggling, ploughing peasant rather easily because we know the form. Why didn't he simply draw that sceneray as he would have seen it? Perhaps he saw it differently. The artist saw the struggle, the grief of the struggle, and represented it in a different form. So this in itself is the creation of a new form. Whether we agree with this form or like it is a different discussion.

That my young friends is art, it is the representation of form! As for the value of it, well, when there is less of it and more demand for it, the price is bound to rise. That is simple economics. The best aspect of art is that you don't have to own a painting or a work of art to appreciate it. I urge you to visit some local galleries before commenting on art objectively.

[Hatebreed]

Douraa! VladMamu 2.0 ailoreyy!!


j/k. Excellent post Warner, even though I had to whiz through it in under a minute.

[Nocturnal]

Very nice post Mr.Warner.
If anyone interested in paintings and have time then I would say you should read
" LUST FOR LIFE" by Irving Stone....one of my fav.
Amazon.com:
LUST FOR LIFE is a fictionalized biography of the Dutch painter, Vincent Van Gogh and is based primarily on Van Gogh's three volumes of letters to his brother, Theo. Van Gogh was a violent, clumsy and passionate man who was driven to the extremity of exhaustion by his fervor to get life -- the essence of it -- into paint. Irving Stone treats the artist with great compassion and gives us a portrait that is sympathetic but fair.

[Dhurr]

Well said, P.

[ialbd]

US$ 72.8 million......hmmm......

[layperson]

Originally Posted by ialbd

US$ 72.8 million......hmmm......

The painter is the luckiest bastard alive if he was able to enjoy the money.

[Rabz]

I think its more of a showcase and prestige value to those super upper class friggin loaded filty rich people...

after all..if you got billions..u gotta spend them on something....

[P.Warner]

Originally Posted by ialbd

US$ 72.8 million......hmmm......

This is a painting by the enigmatic Mark Rothko. It is part of his series on focusing on the most fundamental colours and forms that create a work of art. There are different variations to it the most famous being orange in red. So much has been written about this series of paintings that I really feel that the readers should do a google search on Mark Rothko before deriding his works of art. As I wrote before, value is something that is associated with a painting or a work of art, usually, long after the work of art have come of its production state. Why is it that a 1928 Rolls Royce car sells for more than 2007 model? It is because of the value we are prepared to pay for it based on the market forces created by demand for it.

I would urge everyone again to visit a gallery, look at the paintings for real before criticising them at a superficial value based level looking at online pictures!