Georgia O'Keefe (Hands), by Alfred Stieglitz. Sold for $1,470,000 in 2006.
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"The rich are different from you and me."
"Yes, they have more money."
—Attributed to F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway respectively but not quite ...
Georgia O'Keefe (Hands), by Alfred Stieglitz. Sold for $1,470,000 in 2006.
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"The rich are different from you and me."
"Yes, they have more money."
—Attributed to F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway respectively but not quite accurately.
Of the 19 most expensive photographs sold to date, two are by Alfred Stieglitz and two are by Edward Weston.
Also represented twice each on the list are Jeff Wall, Andreas Gursky, and Cindy Sherman.
One is a "recontextualized" copy photograph, one a tatty old tintype of a mythical criminal, one a portrait of a famous art-world celebrity, and one a perfectly nondescript nature shot. At least one was extensively digitally manipulated.
An interesting list. For one thing, the numbers aren't bunched; the dropoff from #1 ($4, 338,500) to #19 ($609,600) is pretty steep. (Sorry, I don't know what that concept would actually be called in proper economics terminology.)
It strikes me that money = power and so large sums of money command a respectful attitude generally, which is somewhat difficult to look past in the case of just one picture. When a sale record is set, people tend to scrutinize the picture with great curiosity to see what might be there that they might not be seeing. Looked at collectively, however, one thing seems pretty clear: there's no hidden wisdom there. The art market has no better an idea of what constitutes a good photograph than anyone else does. It is no better at distilling excellence into a small sampling than any given collector, curator, or savant with a point of view would be. The list encourages a different conclusion: that value is ultimately a temporary and arbitrary confluence of chance and circumstance. Why that Atget, that Sherman, that Gursky? Well, because someone who had that much money to spend wanted it that much at that time, that's why.
Mike(Thanks to Red Dog News)
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