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You paid how much for that?

Discussion in 'General Discussion' started by Kampf Trinker, Sep 27, 2017.

  1. Kampf Trinker

    Kampf Trinker
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    I appreciate good art. I am by no means particularly knowledgeable on the subject, but I enjoy a good painting or sculpture.

    It amazes me, no matter how rich the buyer is, how much some people will pay for the right work. Take Jackson Pollock for example. According to some his works are masterpieces, representing the finest in creativity, beauty and expression.

    These people are wrong. Seriously, look at this piece of shit.

    [​IMG]

    That went for $200 million. Yes, you read that right. It is one of the highest selling paintings of all time.

    This one also cracked the top ten.

    [​IMG]

    Granted, I am not an expert in fine art, but do you have to be? Generally speaking, if something is so nonsensical and uncoordinated, to the point that I'm fairly certain an animal could produce an equivalent product, then I'm not impressed. You have to hand it to whoever the guy's dealer was. Dude must have been the greatest bullshit artist of all time. To not only convince people that crap was worth money, but to go so far as to convince them it was the apex of fine art, just wow.

    This is the highest selling of all time, going for $300 million.

    [​IMG]

    I know people have reasons for why this messy jumbled dog shit is breathtaking fine art, I'm just saying they're stupid reasons. I don't care what the earth shattering method was, the deeper meaning, or whatever else it is supposed to be. It still needs to not look like shit to rank among the best art ever made.

    Focus: What do people pay large amounts of money for that leaves you in bewilderment. It doesn't have to only be things billionaires can afford.

    Alt Focus: What do you buy that you find hard to justify? What is the stupidest thing you've ever wasted money on?
     
  2. Juice

    Juice
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    Apparently, there is a market for Diamond HDMI cables. They're not quite made out of diamonds, but perfect silver (I guess). I just assume people buying such things are idiots.

    As for the Alt Focus - I spend a stupid amount of money on food. I'm a sucker for high-end charcuterie markets and expensive meat. There a market near me that sells ghost pepper salami for $26/lb. But god damn it is worth every penny.

    Focus^2: As for art itself, I dont really have an eye for it and I'm assuming a lot of the art market is a self-perpetuating economy, which is why the prices get so high. Its also part of the reason that some people would rather look at this:

    [​IMG]

    Than this, which is right across from it (or at least it was):

    [​IMG]

    @audreymonroe is our resident art expert, so I'd like to hear her take on it.

    Bump
     
  3. downndirty

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    I find paying for an Infiniti, Benz, etc. somewhat baffling in the age of Tesla, especially considering how ludicrous they are to maintain. A handful of pretentious twats in my gym drive Audi's, and I'm like...why? For the same dollar, you get a faster, more reliable, better looking, and safer car. Da fuq?

    I have spent THOUSANDS equipping a professional bdsm dungeon. Some of it's homemade, some of it's custom fabbed, but I'm willing to wager there's not much I can't do. We are about to put it on KinkBnb (yes, it's a real thing), because some of the folks on there charging $400/night don't have a third of the equipment/furniture we have. It's a bizarre addiction, because there's always another piece I want to add or build...and there is a perfectly good venue for public play not even 15 minutes from my house.

    Archery equipment is another one that is difficult to defend. It's paleolithic technology....why does a bow cost $2100? Because it shoots...hard? They are wildly over-engineered for a shooter of my skill level, but I salivate nonetheless. I will scour Craigslist and pick up $500 bows that originally cost upwards of $1300, and when I ask the seller what's wrong with it, they almost inevitably reply "The new model came out". Right, because caveman technology advanced so far between July and October....
     
  4. wexton

    wexton
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    Not everyone wants an electric car, and not everywhere is equipped to handle an electric car. As for the bold part, that is very subjective.
     
  5. Kubla Kahn

    Kubla Kahn
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    Focus- People who spend thousands on extended warrenties and dealer prices for car repairs. I get more and more are less mechanically inclined but there are basic maintenance and upkeep repairs that repair shops charge ungodly amounts for. My mom wanted to get her cabin air filter replaced on her Mini and the dealer quoted something retarded like 300 dollars. Its a 20 dollar item and takes 5 minutes to replace. My friend reups his extened warrenty so he gets "free" oil changes and basic repairs taken care of. Fuck, having to have a "new" car in the first place kind of baffles me when certified preowned and straight private sales can save you the thousands it cost just to drive a new car off the lot. Shit, leases? God damn.

    Also, not so much why people pay retarded prices but why they are so high in the first place is gun optics. ACOGs are stupid expensive. Yet there is no middle ground, 1,300 for an Acog or 150 for the cheapest chinese made piece of shit. Just recently have there been half decent mid price alternatives. Most of the time though it's still generally high enough prices that it only makes sense to save up a few hundred more dollars and go with ACOG or Aimpoint.

    Alt focus- Ive kind of skated by so on cheap shit because my gainful employedness has always been in flux but cooking equipment is something Id like to spend I'd be willing to drop coin on. Im not going to just hand William and Sonoma my credit card but there are some higher items I'd like to get in the near future. Ill probably pull the trigger this year on a electric powered sausage stuffer and maybe one of those auto pellat fed smokers. I'd also like to get a set of Shun knives.
     
    #5 Kubla Kahn, Sep 28, 2017
    Last edited: Sep 28, 2017
  6. audreymonroe

    audreymonroe
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    There are a lot more unromantic answers to this than romantic ones. Art didn't start being heavily commodified until the '80s, when there was a big shift from collectors who were collecting because they loved art and considered themselves to be patrons to Wall street types who understood art to be a status symbol and that was their primary drive for buying. The conflation with wealth kept pushing the prices up, and now the majority of the art market today are gazillionaires in Asia and the Middle East who are buying for the status symbol, or as an investment to turn money into more money, or shadier reasons like using it to hide and/or move around money. Then there are the reasons that are similar to why a lot of things are worth a bunch of money: a piece of art is one-of-a-kind, it's connected to a famous person/famous people, and it has historical relevance. Whether or not you or even the collector thinks Pollock, Warhol, or Picasso is good they're always going to be considered important (and therefore expensive) artists because they're known as the fathers of drip painting/action art, Pop Art/screenprinting/commercialization of art, and Cubism. I also think that since a lot of these crazy high sales happen at auctions that the whole bidding system kind of artificially inflates pricing.

    Then a lot of it also has to do with what you said, it's a bit of a self-perpetuating economy. Dealers, critics, museum administrations, historians say it's good and collectors fall in line, or collectors start being more drawn to one artist or style or period more than others and dealers fall in line with that. Like right now there's much more interest in historical female and minority artists who were largely ignored despite being just as talented as their peers, and as more attention gets paid to them, their prices follow. Who knows if Pollock would've been at all famous, especially while he was still alive, if he wasn't championed by Peggy Guggenheim and Betty Parsons, who were very respected and influential. Artists love Morandi, but collectors and museum board members and donors just don't seem to care all that much about a million iterations of a still life of vases, so Morandi is never going to be as expensive as other well-known and highly-respected artists because artists tend not to have the money to bid on and buy his work and drive the prices up that high.

    Then the romantic part is just the extremely subjective nature of art. I personally don't like de Kooning (the $300 million piece) and he's objectively not as famous or historically significant as pretty much all of the other artists that top the lists of most expensive paintings, so I like to think that at least part of the reason why stuffy old billionaire Kyle Griffin thought it was worth enough to shell out $300 million for it was because it moved him and spoke to his soul and he felt connected to what de Kooning was expressing in the moment of creating the painting, and when you have that much money you just thinks it's worth it to be able to possess whatever made you feel that way. If I turned into a billionaire tomorrow and set out to buy art, I don't think I'd buy a Pollock but I understand why people do. When you see his work in person, there's a tactile physicality to it that really connects you to him and his process. If you know how he works, and you know that he was this miserable, depressed, alcoholic, angry man, you can so easily picture him thrashing around his studio and flinging and pouring and throwing this paint all over the place. You can see how he moved around the canvas, where he stopped and let it build up, where he blew on it, where he manipulated it with his hands, where he dropped random detritus into the globs of paint. You can feel the rage, you can feel the frenzy, you can feel his frustration. It's like watching a dance and viewing art at the same time. And the scale is so large that it envelops you, it's all you can see and all you think about and all you feel. It's an entire experience, not just something you look at for a few seconds and move on from. I can see why someone would think that's worth the money to experience over and over again, a different way each time, rather than like, I don't know, a picture of flowers.
     
  7. Hoosiermess

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    I'm going to echo Kubla here with new car purchases. I need to have a 3/4 diesel pick up for my line of work (tried going gas, for cheaper maintenance, fuel, purchase price but it was killing me on mileage and power). We run a lot of miles and if I were to have bought it new my truck would have run me 65-75k depending on when I bought it. By going 2yrs old (when I bought it) I spent roughly 35k less than sticker price with only 34,000 miles on it. It already had airbags and a gooseneck hitch so I only needed to add an aux tank and a few goodies I didn't really need.

    I'm not sure I think that Tesla's are better looking or more reliable, I wouldn't want one over an Audi/BMW/MB/Lexus/ect...

    Alt: Clothes. I'm a big guy and I want nice comfortable clothes, especially for golf. It can get hot and humid (for a fat guy) here and it's hard to find deals on clothes that I like and that fit me they way I want so I get bent over ordering clothes. I would also say anything I use a ton, cooking equipment, grills, electronics and whatnot. I'll look for a good deal on the item I want but I won't cheap out on it.
     
  8. Kampf Trinker

    Kampf Trinker
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    That's not a waste of money, that's an outstanding investment.