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Finer Things
The World's Most Expensive Piece Of Art
By Jennifer Thorp
In today's art world, where buyers shell out $US100 million for a diamond-encrusted skull by British artist Damien Hirst almost without blinking, mind-bogglingly high prices are the norm, not the exception. Yet identifying the most expensive piece of art in the world - excluding lost artistic treasures, like the fabled Amber Room looted by the Nazis from St Petersburg in World War II and never seen again - is more difficult than it seems.
Sometimes the results can be unexpected. Hirst's skull, entitled "For The Love Of God", unsurprisingly comes out on top on the sculpture stakes, auctioning for precisely $122.3 million; the skull, from the 18th century, cost him $20 million to cover in over 8,500 diamonds. Amazingly, the sculpture runner-up, a 5,000 year old Mesopotamian stone lioness, was auctioned for precisely half that amount, and the third, a Picasso, for half again. The highest price ever legitimately paid for a painting, however, was not, as it happens, for a Van Gogh or a Renoir (though both are in the top ten), but for a painting by the abstract expressionist Jackson Pollock. No 5, 1948, a huge canvas drizzled with yellow and brown, was sold in 2006 by David Geffen for the record price of a little over $US140 million.
But things aren't as simple as that. It all comes down to how you define the word 'expensive'. If that means the artwork for which the highest price was historically paid, Pollock and Hirst win out, at least in the legitimate stakes - we obviously don't have information about the prices paid on the black market for, say, those Picasso paintings stolen from a Swiss exhibit in 2008. Yet the art world is also rife with stories of masterpieces of tremendous worth picked up for a pittance, from people who didn't know the value of what they had. Adriaen de Vries's Dancing Faun, though it was eventually auctioned for a very realistic $US10.4 million, was bought from a family who thought it was a piece of garden sculpture. Past prices can be a little deceiving.
Even if you take it to mean, say, the amount of money for which you could expect to pick up a masterpiece, the idea of priceless artwork keeps things complicated. For instance, Leonardo Da Vinci's painting Mona Lisa - probably the artwork for which people would expect to pay the most - usually has its monetary value assessed by the $100 million value for which it was insured while travelling the US in 1962. In today's money, that's $US670 million. Hirst and Pollock start to look a bit like chicken-feed.
However, the Mona Lisa is very unlikely to be placed on the auction block for a private bidder to name a price any time soon. In a sense, the $US670 million number is almost meaningless, aside from putting it at the front of the field for insurers. Tellingly, its famous disappearance from the Louvre in 1911 was motivated not by money but by patriotism; an Italian museum employee believed it should be resident in Italy, and tried after stealing it to sell it to the Uffizi gallery in Florence.
It's a theme which re-emerged in the headlines this year, when the art collection of Yves Saint Laurent, the late fashion designer, went to auction in Paris. Two of his Chinese bronzes, of a rabbit and a rat's head, were apparently stolen from a Beijing palace during the opium wars of 1860, and the Chinese government demanded their return. The story took a twist when it was revealed they were secretly bought by a Chinese national, Cai Mingchao, who then publicly said he wouldn't pay the $US39 million he had bid.
He, like the Italian museum employee, said the act was 'patriotism'; monetary value had nothing to do with its true worth, he implied. Expensive art's a tricky business. Sometimes the most valuable things are the ones nobody is willing to sell.