Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/02/18/billionaire-superyacht-owner.html
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Sharpen the guillotines.
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Well you can’t really blame the kids… unless they’re over 30.
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Well, now I don’t feel so upset about when my 2 year old decided to empty a bottle of pancake syrup onto the carpet.
I can sympathize about the fact that it just gets worse the more I try to clean it up.
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I guess moving the painting from the breakfast room wasn’t an option?
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I imagine Basquiat, if he’d still been around, would have been delighted.
The owner of a $100-million Basquiat covered in breakfast, not so much.
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I am not, personally, a big fan of Basquiat’s work. That said, I feel pretty safe saying that painting contributes more to humanity than those kids ever will.
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Another alternative would be to place the painting behind a sneeze guard. 
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Thank « god » there are consultants for that now:
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Hey, everyone’s a critic!
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Obligatory:
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Seems a like a bad idea to house precious artwork in something that can capsize.
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The irony of course is Rowan Atkinson can probably afford that Whistler. Not sure if he has a yacht but knowing him, he’d tie it to one of his race cars as a hood ornament.
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Eh. If art isn’t a cultural heritage but just another commodity that rich fucks can buy and sell, then it doesn’t much matter what they do with them. If we as a society thought artworks were important, we’d keep them out of private hands and fund museums to care for them.
If Jeff Bezos wants to buy up all the available Gutenberg Bibles or Rodin sculptures and toss them into an industrial shredder, assuming he was willing to withstand the outrage from the commentariat, then he has every right to do so, and if some asshole wants to leave a Basquiat exposed to his children’s breakfast-time target practice, then ditto.
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And that post already referenced this incident, leaving me curious why it’s being brought up again separately.
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Take that Guernica.
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IT STINKS!
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Well, not really. There’s the world of art collection & speculation, of which Basquats are central to, and then there’s the world of antiquities and art museums. All of the existing known copies of the Gutenberg Bible are held by libraries and museums and works such as Rodin sculptures don’t exactly pop up at Sotheby’s for someone like Bezos to buy. The public absolutely funds massive museums to care for things like this.
When it comes to something like a Basquiat, it’s worth what someone is willing to pay for it. Rich people buy them as investments and as a visual representation of their wealth (on a mega-yacht, all the better). I imagine that if someone had paid $100 million for a painting that they hoped to sell for $200 million someday, finding that the staff had smeared milk all over it would be heart attack time, not an example of ‘disposable art’.
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