Creating jobs for dead people

Creating jobs for dead people

by digby

I love art and I think it's important. But this is obscene --- and it shows just how ridiculous it is to characterize rich people as "job creators."

Two sales, two record nights: what a week! Both Sotheby’s and Christie’s recorded “highest ever” sales for contemporary art this week, with Sotheby’s pulling in over $375 million on Tuesday only to be topped by Christie’s, which hammered down a total of $412.2 million the following night. Artists from Jeff Koons (at $33.6 million for his “Tulips,” a brilliantly-colored stainless steel sculpture) to Jean Michel Basquiat (at $25.6 million) broke new records, even as a painting by Gerhard Richter, the world’s top selling living artist (“Prag,” belonging to collector Steve Cohen), failed to sell at all.

Granted, the auctioneer was surely paid as were a few other people at Christie's and Sotheby's. But I think we can dispense with the idea that this was a big economic stimulator. This is about rich people paying each other vast sums of money without the rubes getting in the middle of the transaction.

And they have so much money they cheer when the prices go higher:

But what is also notable is a change in the way these prices are now received by the public. I recall a time when auction house audiences applauded a good deal: the painting that should have gone for more but which, for some reason or another, did not find many bidders and so one buyer got lucky. “Well done,” others would say, and pat him on the back. Meantime, by contrast, the buyers who went way beyond the estimates received stares, as lookers-on shook their heads in skeptical disbelief.

That , obviously, isn’t the case anymore. Now the higher the number, the louder the cheers. What a thrill! What a conquest! It’s like winning the Oscar, like reaching the World Series. Who cares if it’s a smart buy, as long as it’s a big one?

Just don't suggest they should "pay a little bit more in taxes," though. That's heresy. We must put old ladies on cheaper cat food because America is "going broke." And the public needs to learn a little something about fiscal responsibility.

h/t to TW
.