Last week a painting was sold at auction in London for $39.9 million or, in real money, some 5.8 billion yen. This was the highest price ever paid for a work of art. The multimillion-dollar marvel is now a commonplace of the '80s: a Turner went for $10 million in 1984, a Mantegna for $10.4 million and a Van Gogh for $9.9 million in 1985, and a Rembrandt for $10.3 million and a Manet for $11 million in 1986. Nevertheless, this one brought in more than three times the previous record established in 1983 with the sale of the 12th century illuminated Gospels of Henry the Lion for $11.9 million.
The lucky object was by Vincent van Gogh -- the largest and best known of seven paintings of sunflowers in a pot that he had done in Arles between August 1888 and January 1889. It was bought through telephone bids by an anonymous collector. It was the next to the last in the sunflowers series still left in private hands, since four are in museums and one was destroyed in Yokohama during World War II.
"He was a strange man," Christie's auctioneer Charles Allsopp said of Van Gogh amid the clamor that followed the fall of the gavel. "He wasn't very good at marketing it." Not only a deep epitaph but a modest understatement: Van Gogh sold, as everyone knows, one painting in his life, and it was not Sunflowers. If only he had had what we have today -- a million millionaires clamoring for art, corporate art advisers breeding like Gucci-shod mice in every cranny from Tokyo to Stuttgart, the whole grotesque edifice of sanctimony, hype, greed and social mummery that has been raised above bones like his. How much closer he might have come, poor strange man, to an understanding of his own value.
To discuss a reason for this price is to imply that on some level, the price was rational; perhaps it is better to speak of causes, since with this auction such convulsions at the higher end of the art market are flatly shown for what they are, symptoms of pathology. There is no rational price for a work of art. That price is solely an index of desire, and nothing is more manipulable than desire, a fact as well known to auctioneers as to hookers. All works of art are worth exactly what someone can be induced to pay for them as fictions of uniqueness.
Colossal amounts of money are afloat in the hands of a new entrepreneurial class that has fixated on "masterpieces." One cannot spend $39.9 million on houses, Ferraris or caviar without looking like an ape. Art is the saving grace by which any nasty Croesus with more money than he knows what to do with can look virtuous. It confers an oily sheen of spiritual transcendence and cultural responsibility upon individual and corporation alike. That is why even a soft-porn merchant like Bob Guccione, publisher of Penthouse magazine, is now a "major" collector.
The result of all this is that private collectors are driving museums out of the market. Even in the midst of the lunacy, some deals seem more rational than others: the Getty Museum, for instance, got a relative bargain when it bought its great David, The Farewell of Telemachus to Eucharis, for some $4 million earlier this year. But no museum in the world can compete with the private sector for paintings like Sunflowers.