How much???
Strange, the thoughts that went racing through my head when I heard this story. Almost every one of them was negative. The first thing that struck me was that it was an obscene amount of money to pay for a painting. Something that maybe took, what, two or three weeks of the artist's time (forgive me if I am underestimating, but even if it took a year, then so what...?) winds up having a "value" of $300m.
According to various action charities operating in famine-hit parts of the world, $5 a will feed a child for a month. So $300m would feed five million children for a year. I think that is what I find obscene about it - the fact that somewhere in this world there is someone who thinks that the best thing to spend $300m on is a painting.
My second feeling was to despise the middle man. Somewhere in the depths of this story, of course, there will be a clutch of "middle men". For a market of madness to operate - as in the tulip mania of 17th century Holland - there have to be people who stand to gain by the transaction. Something like an estate agent, but operating in a very different sphere, where the thing being bought and sold isn't a necessity. For these people, a rising market is absolutely essential, and they do everything they can to manage it, and nurture it, and push prices ever higher. The valuers and the agents, the experts and the connoisseurs, they all work together to ensure that the price of their beloved product keeps on going up. They sell exclusivity, they sell ownership, they sell an aura of the thing that money can't buy, and yet they assure you, it can. The seller is of course happy that the price is high, and yet the buyer is too, because the ability to show that they can pay that high price may well be one of the things that they are "buying" in the transaction.
The third feeling was a vicarious one of loss, of being deprived of something. From time to time, although not very often, I have put paint to canvas and come up with something that I found vaguely pleasing to behold. But to be completely honest, even if somebody offered me a huge amount of money for one (which they won't of course) then I'd really rather burn it than sell it. Because it's a bit of me, and I couldn't possibly have somebody else walking around owning a bit of me that I no longer had any right to. OK, Paul Gauguin is dead, he died long ago, and hopefully he made a few quid from this painting when he was alive, if he sold it during his lifetime, and if not, well, he may well have considered himself richer for not selling it, because it was a part of him.
It's not quite the same thing with music. If I write a song, or a piece of music, and someone wants to buy a copy, or pay to download it, that's a completely different thing. I still have the original, it's still mine. All I have done is let them have a copy of it. I am still complete, intact, whole. They have bought the right to listen to it whenever they want to, but it is still there, inside of me, and when I hear it in my head, I know that it doesn't belong to someone else. If you're an artist, and you've sold a painting, and sometime later you picture it in your head, how does that feel, knowing it isn't yours any more?
But the last, and probably the deepest feeling I had was just one of despair at the continuous monetarisation of everything. I wouldn't be surprised to find that, one day, ten foot walls had been built along the sides of roads, and every so often there would be a parking area with some stalls selling the ubiquitous global brand name refreshments at exhorbitant prices. And when you'd bought them, you could either sit in your car to eat them staring at the wall or you could pay to take them through a turnstile to a seating area with picture windows where you could look at the view.
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