ANDY Warhol once remarked that he liked “money on the wall”.
A man stands between Picasso's Nude, Green Leaves and Bust (right) and Matisse's Nu au coussin bleu before they were auctions bey Christie's in April. The Picasso sold for Source: AFP
“Say you were going to buy a $200,000 painting,” he said. “I think you should take that money, tie it up and hang it on the wall. Then, when someone visited you, the first thing they would see is the money on the wall.”
Warhol’s satirical notion of art as showstopping status symbol may just have reached a new peak, however, to judge by the record-breaking picture of last year’s art market that emerged yesterday.
While economies crashed and governments slashed spending, an unprecedented number of incredibly wealthy people all over the world were effectively taking Warhol at his word. What they actually hung on their walls and stood in their rooms were Picassos, Modiglianis and Giacomettis but, at the mind-bending prices that they paid for them, the effect was almost the same as if they had displayed a bunch of dollar bills, or more pertinently a bunch of Chinese yuan.
Their spending spree meant that Christie’s, the world’s largest auction house, announced yesterday sales of £3.3 billion ($5.3bn) last year, a jump of 53 per cent on its 2009 performance and the highest total in the company’s 245-year history.
Follow Us