'Price paid for a work. the trophy itself.'

A pile of stools for $575,000. A cabinet full of surgical instruments for a cool $2.5 million. The global economy’s in a tailspin, but among the world’s elite collectors, works are selling for record prices. Columnist Blake Gopnik (Newsweek and The Daily Beast) tries to explain the phenomenon:

“Walking around Miami Beach, taking in the 10th edition of its extravagant Art Basel art
fair, you sensed something strange in the air. Patou’s “Joy” drifting off the pashmina? Polished walnut wafting out of the Bentleys? More basic than either: the ineffable
aroma of money itself, rising from the art out for sale.

There’s scamming: The veteran New York dealer Arne Glimcher speaks of the “scuzzy” people who keep the Warhol market hot by manipulating his auctions. Some people actually prefer to pay more than makes sense. As social scientist explains that, in all walks of life, we treat the biggest sums -differently, with special respect or even awe,
than more-everyday money. “I think very often the price paid for a work is the
trophy itself,” says Glimcher.

In 2006, the crowds lining up to see a portrait by Gustav Klimt in the private Neue Galerie in New York weren’t there out of any fondness for the artist. They were there because they’d heard that the museum’s founder, cosmetics heir Ronald Lauder, had paid a record $135 million for it.

The people who are spending record amounts on art buy more than just that glow.
They’ve purchased boasting rights. “It’s, ‘You bought the $100 million Picasso!” says Glimcher. Olav Velthuis, a Dutch sociologist who wrote ‘Talking Prices’, the best study of what art spending means, compares the top of the art market to the potlatches performed by the American Indians of the Pacific Northwest, where the goal was to ostentatiously give away, even destroy, as much of your wealth as possible—to show that you could.

In the art-market equivalent, he says, prices keep mounting as collectors compete
for this ‘super-status effect’. The crowds lining up to see Lauder’s Klimt in 2006 must have figured that looking at the most expensive work in the world would also expose them to one of the greatest. They were wrong. Almost no one would say that Klimt is crucial to the history of art.

As Glimcher put it, “all you need is two people to make a market”—and he doubts that, in another 50 years, we’ll find two more Klimt fans willing to break records for his art.