What does prompt high-profile collectors to buy art?

At this critical and challenging point of time, when only the 1 percent has spare cash to burn, investing in art is more about the cultural value of money, and of art than about finance; about underlining the intrinsic Social Meaning of Money. So the dollars spent at extravagant Art Basel art fair in Miami are more of ‘cultural dollars’, explains the great Princeton sociologist, Viviana Zelizer.

This underlying perception makes them obey their own strange rules. Otherwise why would an ambitious customer spend whopping $575,000 for Ai Weiwei’s perplexing pile of battered stools converted into a nest? In spite of the big celebrity names associated with these objects - and whatever their perceived artistic worth - any curious observer would still wonder: Stools, for good half a million dollars? And three times that for a ubiquitous plain paint on canvas? So ‘why is art so damned expensive?’

This is the question posed in a thought provoking essay recently published in The Newsweek courtesy The Daily Beast. “There’s a pile of simple, and basically unsatisfying, explanations, notes the columnist Blake Gopnik, who discussed the topic with several renowned market players and analysts to dig out the answers.

When Gopnic quizzed the Phillips de Pury auction house chairman, Simon de Pury, as ‘why’s art so damned expensive?’ he emphasized that a bigger picture was always worth more than a smaller one. He pointed out you would pay a hefty premium for a work once possessed by someone famous, apart from that something shown in a museum was worth extra (premium).

“But such explanations only tell us why one object might sell for more than another. They don’t tell us why so many buyers in Miami spend more on a picture than the rest of us spend on a house,” the essayist notes.