Originally published at: This will be the most expensive photograph ever sold | Boing Boing
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I just screen grabbed for free.
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I can NFT that for you for the low low price of $450,000.
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The check is in the mail.
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It really is a beautifully captured photo. I’m not one to put a pricetag on it or call it overpriced, because to me, that’s like saying “artists should make money and their works should be valuable, but not too much”.
If someone has the money to purchase this, have at it. I wish the proceeds could go somewhere socially responsible but again that sounds like I’m saying “Artists should only make works for the selfless”, which isn’t fair either.
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No doubt someone can trace the history of surrealist photomontage from Man Ray to @beschizza .
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TBH never really cared for the pic. The added design to the pic on the model’s back always bugged me. But if someone out there wants to spend the money on it then cool
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As with any big art sale, the first place my mind goes is, “Money Laundering” or “Tax Evasion”. I don’t feel that the dollar value of a piece really has much of anything to do with its artistic merit.
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Man Ray’s photography was often groundbreaking, very strange, and quite gorgeous; sometimes all at once. His portrait of a young Salvador Dalí during that artist’s first Parisian visit* is breathtaking.
Many years ago I showed this wonderful photo of Kiki of Montparnasse which is under discussion to a girlfriend, who took umbrage. She said it was a great example of the objectification of women. I disagreed, but it took decades before I could articulate why.
I eventually realized that this photograph is the exact opposite of the objectification of women: it shows that the violin imitates a woman’s shape.
*Dalí came dashing up Man Ray’s stairs, shoved a handful of francs at him, and begged him to pay his cabbie. Dalí was afraid he’d be cheated, because he wasn’t yet familiar with French money.
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Haha, “instrumental,” I see what she did there.
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I’ll send you an NFT of a check as payment. How’s that?
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Well, I cannot argue that the image is not a classic work of art.
That said, value is in the eye of the beholder and consists of more than mere monetary value.
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It’s not artistic merit so much as rarity and perceived value.
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If the artist is still kicking and in a position to benefit, then I agree. I’d never insult an artist by wasting their time low-balling them on their asking price. Collectors of art whose artist is long interred is more of a grey area for me, possibly because my impression is that so few talented artists ever achieve anything approaching the wealth or even financial security of their patrons.
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Given the head facing, maybe add some pea soup splatter around?
@GulliverFoyle
Sadly “S/he died in poverty, unappreciated in her/his time” increases the value of a work
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I guess if someone pays a price acceptable to the artist, it doesn’t matter to me if they are trying to resell it at a profit. The artist got paid an amount that they were willing to accept.
If a reseller is paying lots of artists their asking rate for a lot of pieces, that’s even better. The reseller is taking the risks, but the artists are getting paid.
But if a reseller is underpaying artists, (think record labels, publishing houses, movie studios, or other cartel-type businesses.), though, the situation flips. There’s almost no way to bypass them, because the cartels are also the gatekeepers to the only available distribution networks. Instead of a fair price, it becomes a pay-to-enter fraud, where their payment is the rights to your own products, and a contractual obligation to produce even more for virtually no money. They’ve switched from patrons to vampires, and for them I have nothing but loathing.
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