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Leonardo Da Vinci Painting Sells for $450.3M, Shattering Auction Records

202 points by aaronbrethorst 9y ago

tomp 9y ago
Why the $0.3M?
- jonlucc 9y ago
  I didn't see a breakdown in the article, but it could have to do with the fees and or monetary conversion.
mrb 9y ago
I think the buyer probably had a net worth at least ≥ $4.5 billion (I wouldn't spend more than 10% of my wealth on a single painting.) According to https://www.forbes.com/billionaires/list/ https://www.forbes.com/billionaires/list/ there are only ~380 persons that would qualify. Any one knows who is the buyer?
- obilgic 9y ago
  doesn't have to be an individual.
- aerovistae 9y ago
  You would spend 10% of your wealth on a painting?
  - existencebox 9y ago
    Non-glib answer: Art tends to hold value very well. For someone in that wealth bracket, this is probably a very reasonable diversification + having a significant amount of sentimental value. (it's Davinci, which even for a pleb like me would be neat to have in your living room) glib answer: More money than sense. Edit: I realize you didn't have "why would you" in your question and answered something you didn't ask. Apologies. (I nontheless maintain my statements :) )
    - username223 9y ago
      > For someone in that wealth bracket, this is probably a very reasonable diversification + having a significant amount of sentimental value. I can't even pretend to understand how people in that "wealth bracket" think. Imagine if you knew, or at least knew of, every person in the world with as much or more money than you (i.e. a few hundred). Imagine if you had enough money to ensure that, barring major wars or mistakes, all of your close friends and descendants could live comfortably without ever having to work another day. What would you do with the spare hundreds of millions of dollars? Build space ships? Build islands? Buy paintings? Buy paintings, only to set them on fire to demonstrate your power? > (it's Davinci, which even for a pleb like me would be neat to have in your living room) Imagine the maintenance costs. I'd keep the thing in a Swiss vault, and sell it to the highest bidder.
  - Noxchi 9y ago
    It's not really spending. If you look at the resale values it is investing. High art is more investment than consumption (as they say, the rich get richer...)
- usaphp 9y ago
  > I wouldn't spend more than 10% of my wealth on a single painting. Well I guess it’s easier to spend 10% of your wealth if you know you still have $4 billion left.
- khazhou 9y ago
  You wouldn't spend more than 10% of your wealth on a Da Vinci?
  - username223 9y ago
    Nope. Let's say I'm worth between $10k and $10m, i.e. somewhere in the range of a normal human. I would be crushed by the maintenance costs, even if I kept it in a Swiss vault instead of on my wall where I could actually look at it. The only reason I would spend 10% of my net worth is to immediately sell it to a Russian oligarch for a fat profit.
  - megy 9y ago
    Of course not. Most people would not. I wouldn't spend that much no matter how much I had.
bwang29 9y ago
According to another source from BBC, the final bid for the work was $400m, with fees bringing the full price up to $450.3m. http://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-42000696 http://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-42000696 What's interesting from the BBC article is the image "The painting has been cleaned and restored from the image on the left to the one on the right" doesn't even look like the same person? Another anecdote - In 1958 it was sold at auction in London for $60. By then the painting was generally reckoned to be the work of a follower of Leonardo and not the work of Leonardo himself.
- nhooyr 9y ago
  50.3 million dollars in fees....
  - TylerE 9y ago
    10-15% is pretty standard in the auction world.
    - gowld 9y ago
      Still absurd to not discount when the price gets so high.
      - ryankupyn 9y ago
        I'd actually be inclined to have an escalating fee (as a % of sale price) for a higher final price (relative to an independent appraisal) if I were a seller - just to keep the incentives aligned.
      - TylerE 9y ago
        Auctioneers cost go up proportionally. What do you think insurance and security costs for something like?
- noncoml 9y ago
  > the work of a follower of Leonardo and not the work of Leonardo himself How are they certain now that it is indeed Leonardo's job. Also if the exact same painting is sold for $60 when it is thought to be work of a follower of Leonardo and $450m when it is believed to be Leonardo's work, what does this say about the collectors?
5706906c06c 9y ago
TL;DR - I'm not saying it isn't real, but I'm not saying it's fake either; http://ualrpublicradio.org/post/100-million-leonardo-da-vinci-painting-might-not-even-be-leonardo-da-vinci http://ualrpublicradio.org/post/100-million-leonardo-da-vinc...
gokvokbok 9y ago
I wonder when the world is going to have a conversation that amassing the kind of wealth this would require, to spend a (small?) portion on a painting, is absurd. I'd like to get insight into the minds of the people e.g. Gates, Murdoch et al that are so driven by profits and wealth to the detriment of so many others.
brm 9y ago
Fascinating to watch Rybolovlev move money in the open like this with the help of the art market apparatus. What a time to be alive. If you're not keeping track this was almost double the price expected for a da Vinci of questioned provenance sold by the fertilizer magnate who bought Donald Trump's Palm Beach mansion for double the estimated price and then never lived in it.
- omarchowdhury 9y ago
  Wouldn't he need someone to pay that same amount or more for the painting to effectively have moved money with this apparatus? And if the next buyer is similarly motivated, isn't the valuation akin to a Ponzi?
  - byebyetech 9y ago
    Ponzi scheme is a scam where buyer is fooled into buying something that has no value. Here if the painting is used as an apparatus to move money, it becomes sort of a currency to move $450 million dollars. As long as the big money movers honor its price it could be used for such purpose. Almost like Bitcoins!
    - jhulla 9y ago
      Some ideas are ancient. The painting doesn't have to move. The money doesn't have to move. We just all agree to assign it to someone else. "Because these stones are too large to move, buying an item with one simply involves agreeing that the ownership has changed. As long as the transaction is recorded in the oral history, it will now be owned by the person it is passed on to and no physical movement of the stone is required." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rai_stones https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rai_stones
      - wmf 9y ago
        The painting doesn't have to move. Sadly, this appears to be true. Tons of art just sits in secure warehouses like gold bars, never seen by anyone. https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-freeports-operate-margins-global-art-market https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-freeports-oper... (I've never heard of Rybolovlev before, but his name comes up in this article as well.)
Quiza12 9y ago
It will look good on the wall of a safe.
blunte 9y ago
Why is this a surprise? There's a point at which money no longer makes sense - both to the people without it as well as the people with it. There are many reasons for spending relatively incomprehensible amounts of money for something. One is to show others that you can; it's a demonstration of just how wealthy you are. Another is to try to make something special of the money that otherwise has reached a level of being useless/pointless. Think a bit in terms of a normal human lifetime. If you aspire to be rich, what amount of money defines that level? Once you reach a level where you can own and operate more properties, vehicles, and even employees than you can even remember, what does the excess money represent? Ok, this is an absurd analogy. But as technical people, imagine building a multi-petabyte storage device. Practically no private individual has such a thing. Using your intellect, experience, and perhaps ingenuity you can have such a thing. Then what? You store all the porn you have time to download. You save every movie you ever thought about watching. You take 1000 photos every time you go out. It's thrilling! But how much of it do you ever really go back and enjoy? Frankly, unless the buyer places it in a public museum, I judge it as a hollow effort to find value in excess (which will last about three months). Humans are great at acclimating to new and better, and soon we need more. What else is there?
- comboy 9y ago
  > What else is there? Storage of value. If you want to diversify, you may want something easy to move/hide for some scenarios. I'm not saying this painting works great for that purpose, just that that's one of the things that may make people want to buy it.
  - blunte 9y ago
    If you have $4bn, unless you're investing in Beanie Babies, you really don't have to struggle to find stable stores of value. At that stratosphere of wealth, an art piece is not about diversification. It's a bit like buying a 200m yacht to surpass all other private yachts. What I find amusing is that even the ultra rich people are statistically NEVER the richest people. There are perhaps 5 people in the world who could be debated as one of the richest people in the world. And their individual wealth exceeds the "poor rich" such as this person by a factor of 20+. To people outside their bubble it just looks "sad" (pardon the Trumpism).
comboy 9y ago
Marketing wins everywhere. Paintings, IT, open source projects, startups, everything. It seems to be responsible for 90%+ value in worryingly many cases. It may be getting worse. I think in the next few years we will see rise of companies that help customers make decent choices that are not solely based on advertising. We have many user review based solutions but it just doesn't work with most things (not even touching on fake reviews). Even for things where the whole value of the product is about how user feels about it, most users don't have other products to compare. Plus choice-supportive bias. For tech stuff there are reviewers out there who test many things and which you can trust. Some take them apart and can reason about used components and so on. Not so easy when you are visiting a grocery store or wondering what's the story of the organic food that you are looking at (or maybe it was just mislabled?). Some educated 3rd party could research that for you. Again, it's different from what we have today because even though it's tempting, sexy and scalable, it can't be just about letting users send opinions and info. It must be expert web of trust. Those companies may end up with a lot of power. But at least in this case if some of them try to misuse it, somebody can stumble upon it and show that they are not trustworthy.
- ktta 9y ago
  “When information is cheap, attention becomes expensive.” ― James Gleick We've come to a point where we're inundated with everyone trying to push their own agenda that it is difficult to both sort the BS out, while also becoming impossible to really appeal/reach out to the people who would appreciate and benefit from what one has to offer. >I think in the next years we will see rise of companies that help customers make decent choices that are not solely based on advertising. I'm skeptical. It all comes down to money. The big boys have a lot to spend. Sure, there will always be someone somewhere doing something, but coming out of a niche and reaching out to people is difficult. It is easier get subconsciously influenced by billboards and banners than being aware and knowing what you really want. Especially since no one seems to be aware of if they really need something. Something to watch - https://www.netflix.com/title/80114460 https://www.netflix.com/title/80114460 Case in point - is the 'undisclosed buyer' really benefiting $450.3 mil worth? Money has diminishing returns after $70k/yr/person (from the doc above) but people just want more. So we're ready to listen to what people say would be nice to have. Another part is how they've become status symbols. >For tech stuff there are reviewers out there who test many things and which you can trust I'm just going to link to a site which I think is very impartial for as long as I've known them and have excellent reviews with their methodology outlined. It was called thesweethome(.com), but I guess now it redirects to their other website, thewirecutter (was tech stuff only). It has reviews of everything from knives to dishwashing soap (the long read on that was interesting[1]). https://thewirecutter.com/ https://thewirecutter.com/ It was acquired this time a year ago by NYT and I haven't been too keen on buying stuff in general for a while (again, minimalism) so can't say if anything has changed since then. [1]: https://thewirecutter.com/reviews/best-dish-soap/#are-green-dish-detergents-really-better https://thewirecutter.com/reviews/best-dish-soap/#are-green-...
the_common_man 9y ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d7omwQLuGJQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d7omwQLuGJQ was the marketing campaign
- ktta 9y ago
  If anyone want's to know the soundtrack, it is 'On the Nature of Daylight' by Max Richter. If you think you've heard it somewhere, it was in Arrival - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2543164/ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2543164/
  - Gargoyle 9y ago
    A version of it was also the main theme in Shutter Island.
heifetz 9y ago
lol, I guess there are three or four people in the world willing to pay that price. I'll be interested to see if this ever gets sold again and at what price. I'm guessing the buyer (if it's a single person) is a royal, oligarch (could even be Putin) or someone in China.
mynegation 9y ago
"the old masters market is contracting, because of limited supply" Can someone familiar with the art market comment on how that works? That seems contrary to what I know about markets. I mean, I understand that the volume is contracting, but the context is that such "[high] price is remarkable".
- evgen 9y ago
  There are never going to be any new old masters and because shit happens the supply is slowly shrinking over time as various works leave the market due to museum acquisition, accident, war, and theft. The demand side of the equation however is growing as various new money entrants to the art market compete for this diminishing supply. The demand side is also boosted by the fact that art like this has now become something of a financial tool for capital flight, corporations, investment funds and criminal interests.
dbkelly 9y ago
For anyone paying attention, the seller of the painting is Dmitry Rybolovlev. How did Rybolovlev amass so much money? Through pollution. His company Uralkali is listed as one of the top polluters in Russia. This is how externalities work: He keeps the profits, you (literally) eat the losses. Perhaps this detail is the biggest story here.
- saiya-jin 9y ago
  Well he is a typical russian arrogant oligarch asshole. Culprit in various murders, even served some jail time for it (of course not much compared to us peasants). It would be actually strange if any common good would ever come from such a person.
- adventured 9y ago
  Even for a Russian oligarch, context is relevant. It's not his company. He hasn't owned it since 2010. The roots of Uralkali go back 80 years, he owned it for 15 years. Uralkali is 20% of the global potash market, without their mining a billion people wouldn't have food - at a minimum - given the present 7.6 billion world population. Russia has become a wheat juggernaut [1], to put it mildly; without their food production, the developing world will not develop given the population growth occuring. That doesn't defend the pollution, it does however bring some very important context to the situation that you entirely neglected. [1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-11-15/europe-is-falling-behind-russia-in-the-global-wheat-market https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-11-15/europe-is...
mars4rp 9y ago
the interesting thing to me is how the face completely changed in the restoration(more like repainting)! Jesus in color is very similar with our 21 century image of him, no mustache, eyes completely changed and ... the painting is relatively new compare to Jesus himself! and his image in the eyes of it followers changed so dramatically! I am wondering what else could have changed in 2000 years!
virtualwhys 9y ago
> The artwork has been the subject of legal disputes and amassed a price history that ranges from less than $10,000 in 2005, when it was spotted at an estate auction... The heirs of that estate are probably not thrilled with this headline.
madads 9y ago
Store of value comes to mind, a la crypto currency phenomena.
bedhead 9y ago
This is an absurdly rich guy (obviously) who is just bored out of his goddamn mind.
l33tbro 9y ago
Funny that Da Vinci remains the most bankable 50 years after he first sky-rocketed the perceived value of art. Basically, In 1962 the Mona Lisa was loaned to Metropolitan Museum of Art by the Louvre. Huge marketing campaign resulted in over a million of Americans going to see it, ushering in the new era of art as mass spectacle/consumption. Obviously there were other factors involved - but Robert Hughes made an amazing documentary about this subject called the Mona Lisa Curse, which you can watch online [1]. [1] https://vimeo.com/62973616 https://vimeo.com/62973616
sytelus 9y ago
What is interesting is that if this painting was attributed to someone unknown, its price would have fallen off the cliff even though there would have been zero material change in goods that buyer would be receiving. This says a lot about our hero worship tendencies. People are going to look very hard to see what is so special about this painting.
- megy 9y ago
  > This says a lot about our hero worship tendencies. Does it? Or does it say more about its value as being incredibly rare, and one of only a few Leonardi paintings. You understanding the value of scarcity right?
  - sytelus 9y ago
    Scarcity from hero :)
- anjc 9y ago
  > People are going to look very hard to see what is so special about this painting. Leonardo da Vinci painted it, for a start
- puranjay 9y ago
  You're implying that a painting has any inherent value (it does not). Just like everything else in the material world, it only has contextual value. Before the 1900s, aluminum was valued more than gold. Today, it is one of the cheapest metals around. Nothing changed but the context in which we were able to extract it. In the case of this painting, the context is what makes it valuable - the last known privately owned painting by a name nearly the entire western world recognizes immediately.
  - runeb 9y ago
    I would assume an increased availability of aluminum because of better or cheaper production processes makes the price drop?
myth_buster 9y ago
Some art experts pointed to the painting’s damaged condition and its questionable authenticity. This was a thumping epic triumph of branding and desire over connoisseurship and reality. Interesting quote.
thetruthseeker1 9y ago
I wonder if its a person or a corporation/org that bought the painting. Number of people who may buy such a painting is probably only a handful.
wallflower 9y ago
In the book "$12 Million Stuffed Shark: The Curious Economics of Contemporary Art", it describes the insanity of the skyrocketing auction prices with the following analogy (paraphrasing since I do no longer have a copy of the book). "If you have a $20M painting, you can imagine an equivalently priced apartment where you can display that painting in one of the world's great cities. But $150M? There is no equivalent for that. There are no apartments that expensive." And now $450.3M?! for the top. In "China's Art Factories: Van Gogh From the Sweatshop", you can see the bottom of the economic scale. About $20-$30-$50 for a good copy of a Van Gogh or other masterpiece. http://www.spiegel.de/international/0,1518,433134,00.html http://www.spiegel.de/international/0,1518,433134,00.html
olympus 9y ago
You could buy three F-22 Raptors with that kind of money. Well, Congress would never approve the sale, but this painting went for triple the per-copy price of the F-22, according to Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_Martin_F-22_Raptor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_Martin_F-22_Raptor I might be biased, but I know what I would pick if given the option, and it cruises 1,200 mph.
- hw 9y ago
  Trying to compare a piece of art, history and culture, with a weapon of destruction. Great job.
  - pageandrew 9y ago
    cmon dude. raptors are awesome
  - dingaling 9y ago
    An F-22 is, regardless of its function, one of the most complicated devices ever created by man. In that sense it is an example of the combined 'art' of the skills of many thousands of highly-skilled individuals. In past centuries cathedrals were hailed as the masterpieces of the skills of craftsmen.
    - speedplane 9y ago
      F-22s are cool, but sadly, probably won't hold their value as well as a DaVinci.
      - zxcmx 9y ago
        Yeah the F-22 really is useless without a military industrial complex behind it. And a defense use. Sort of a parable about modern products really. Self driving cars with no maps, phones with no updates, no app store. Our best products are really infrastructure products, supported by a cast of thousands. But the painting stands on its own and a decent pair of leather shoes will get you from a to b just as well as they did centuries ago. If I remember rightly the most universal item of soldier's kit throughout all history was the spoon.
Antimachides 9y ago
http://www.vulture.com/2017/11/christies-says-this-painting-is-by-leonardo-i-doubt-it.html http://www.vulture.com/2017/11/christies-says-this-painting-... >Christie’s Is Selling This Painting for $100 Million. They Say It’s by Leonardo. I Have Doubts. Big Doubts. tl;dr: The painting is an old-hat style and pose not becoming of a Renaissance artist of Leonardo's caliber. Me: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
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_nedR 9y ago
Art is supposed to inspire our inner eye for beauty. Seeing the 450 million dollar price tag, i feel an unusual amount of anger, disgust, revulsion at the ostentatiousness, excesses and brazen corruption of the rich and of the fine art world. I feel more disgust at this than i would at the usual gaudy, blingy excesses (like gold-plated cars and mansions) of the tasteless wealthy. I suppose good art can also seek to inspire these feelings, even if the price tag has only cheapened the actual artwork in my eye. I wonder how the millions of the poor, nameless, talented artists around the world feel about this. A portrait of Jesus Christ of questionable origin and authenticity being sold by a Russian fertilizer magnate for 450 million usd. Says quite a bit about the times we live in, Doesn't it? edit: Sorry for my salty tirade; Just sharing a viewpoint.
- anjc 9y ago
  > Art is supposed to inspire our inner eye for beauty These paintings were only painted because exceedingly wealthy families commissioned and collected them. If it were up to people like me and you, there'd be no art to inspire people in the first place. > I wonder how the millions of the poor, nameless, talented artists around the world feel about this. This community wouldn't exist if it weren't for the hierarchy of the art world.
  - DomreiRoam 9y ago
    > If it were up to people like me and you, there'd be no art to inspire people in the first place. Art would still exist but some master pieces wouldn't exist. I agree that patronage has allowed artist to produce magnificent art piece but is not the case for all masterpieces.
    - anjc 9y ago
      You only have to casually witness the art world - even just at a local level - to see that speculation by wealthy buyers sustains it, and also, that it costs a lot to produce art as a professional. So maybe without patronage some level of art would exist, but it wouldn't exist as a community without people ultimately paying a lot of money for work. Furry porn producers would continue to make a mint though.
tnt128 9y ago
noob question, I wonder the reasons people are spending 100m+ on paintings. is it possible that buying art is actually a great way of storing wealth? Like buying real estate but less flashy, easier to store, and easier to transport. I assume there aren't too many ways you can safely store 400m cash?
ireadfaces 9y ago
Is it too late to ask that how such art is valued? Of course I read about the theory that it depends on art dealers and a lot of things, less to do with quality of art. As quality of art is subjective after a certain point. Just thought someone could guide me.
- cepth 9y ago
  https://www.economist.com/blogs/economist-explains/2017/01/economist-explains-3 https://www.economist.com/blogs/economist-explains/2017/01/e... > About half of the market is accounted for by sales through dealers, either directly from the artist’s studio (the “primary market”) or by reselling a work that has already been bought once (the “secondary market”) and which is now being sold on, often with several commissions being paid to intermediaries along the way. The other half of the art market is made up of sales by auction, a system that claims to be open and competitive, with both artwork and potential bidders being visible to all. In reality, it can be as secretive as the dealing world, with complex financial arrangements and discounted commissions being not uncommon.
- _Codemonkeyism 9y ago
  http://aswathdamodaran.blogspot.de/2017/10/the-bitcoin-boom-asset-currency.html http://aswathdamodaran.blogspot.de/2017/10/the-bitcoin-boom-... about value vs pricing vs asset.
unixhero 9y ago
To be fair, it's a frigging good painting.
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WheelsAtLarge 9y ago
Bill Gates is a big DaVinci fan. I bet he was the final bidder. He's one of the few that can buy it. Must be nice!
Stratoscope 9y ago
Now this is freaky. I thought I was done with HN for the evening after reading about this painting and a few other things. So I opened my Kindle to read something else, and the advertising screen showed a book called Typhoon Fury (The Oregon Files). I grew up in Oregon, so I figured I would take a look. The blurb began: > Hired to search for a collection of paintings worth half a billion dollars, Juan Cabrillo and the crew of the Oregon soon find themselves in much deeper waters.
- hvidgaard 9y ago
  That is data mining and advertising networks for you.
gadders 9y ago
I wonder if the painting will end up in Geneva Free Port, "the greatest art collection no-one can see" http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-38167501 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-38167501
elmar 9y ago
This as just reminded me of another news from 2014. Stolen paintings hung on Italian factory worker's wall for almost 40 years https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2014/apr/02/stolen-paintings-italian-works-wall-40-years-gaugain-bonnard https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2014/apr/02/stolen-...
soneca 9y ago
What high art, diamonds, and bitcoin have in common? They all would have a much much much lower value if they weren't so good for money laundering.
libertine 9y ago
Is it just me that feels like this is rather a symptom of money being devaluated by the day? This may sound ridiculous, but it reminds me of a private server of Lineage 2 (RPG) when old admins returned to the game as normal players and had almost infinite currency and completely ruined the server economy by simply buying rare stuff, with limited supply, at any price. I make this analogy for the housing market, art, soccer players, cryptocurrency, and many other markets where you have limited supply - which is where you actually see how much washed money is starting to show up... It's scary and no ones talks about this. Edit: btw the solution for the private server economy disease was to wipe it - real life markets can't be wiped.

tomp 9y ago

Why the $0.3M?

jonlucc 9y ago
I didn't see a breakdown in the article, but it could have to do with the fees and or monetary conversion.

mrb 9y ago

I think the buyer probably had a net worth at least ≥ $4.5 billion (I wouldn't spend more than 10% of my wealth on a single painting.) According to https://www.forbes.com/billionaires/list/ https://www.forbes.com/billionaires/list/ there are only ~380 persons that would qualify. Any one knows who is the buyer?

obilgic 9y ago
doesn't have to be an individual.
aerovistae 9y ago
You would spend 10% of your wealth on a painting?
- existencebox 9y ago
  Non-glib answer: Art tends to hold value very well. For someone in that wealth bracket, this is probably a very reasonable diversification + having a significant amount of sentimental value. (it's Davinci, which even for a pleb like me would be neat to have in your living room) glib answer: More money than sense. Edit: I realize you didn't have "why would you" in your question and answered something you didn't ask. Apologies. (I nontheless maintain my statements :) )
  - username223 9y ago
    > For someone in that wealth bracket, this is probably a very reasonable diversification + having a significant amount of sentimental value. I can't even pretend to understand how people in that "wealth bracket" think. Imagine if you knew, or at least knew of, every person in the world with as much or more money than you (i.e. a few hundred). Imagine if you had enough money to ensure that, barring major wars or mistakes, all of your close friends and descendants could live comfortably without ever having to work another day. What would you do with the spare hundreds of millions of dollars? Build space ships? Build islands? Buy paintings? Buy paintings, only to set them on fire to demonstrate your power? > (it's Davinci, which even for a pleb like me would be neat to have in your living room) Imagine the maintenance costs. I'd keep the thing in a Swiss vault, and sell it to the highest bidder.
- Noxchi 9y ago
  It's not really spending. If you look at the resale values it is investing. High art is more investment than consumption (as they say, the rich get richer...)
usaphp 9y ago
> I wouldn't spend more than 10% of my wealth on a single painting. Well I guess it’s easier to spend 10% of your wealth if you know you still have $4 billion left.
khazhou 9y ago
You wouldn't spend more than 10% of your wealth on a Da Vinci?
- username223 9y ago
  Nope. Let's say I'm worth between $10k and $10m, i.e. somewhere in the range of a normal human. I would be crushed by the maintenance costs, even if I kept it in a Swiss vault instead of on my wall where I could actually look at it. The only reason I would spend 10% of my net worth is to immediately sell it to a Russian oligarch for a fat profit.
- megy 9y ago
  Of course not. Most people would not. I wouldn't spend that much no matter how much I had.

bwang29 9y ago

According to another source from BBC, the final bid for the work was $400m, with fees bringing the full price up to $450.3m. http://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-42000696 http://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-42000696 What's interesting from the BBC article is the image "The painting has been cleaned and restored from the image on the left to the one on the right" doesn't even look like the same person? Another anecdote - In 1958 it was sold at auction in London for $60. By then the painting was generally reckoned to be the work of a follower of Leonardo and not the work of Leonardo himself.

nhooyr 9y ago
50.3 million dollars in fees....
- TylerE 9y ago
  10-15% is pretty standard in the auction world.
  - gowld 9y ago
    Still absurd to not discount when the price gets so high.
    - ryankupyn 9y ago
      I'd actually be inclined to have an escalating fee (as a % of sale price) for a higher final price (relative to an independent appraisal) if I were a seller - just to keep the incentives aligned.
    - TylerE 9y ago
      Auctioneers cost go up proportionally. What do you think insurance and security costs for something like?
noncoml 9y ago
> the work of a follower of Leonardo and not the work of Leonardo himself How are they certain now that it is indeed Leonardo's job. Also if the exact same painting is sold for $60 when it is thought to be work of a follower of Leonardo and $450m when it is believed to be Leonardo's work, what does this say about the collectors?

5706906c06c 9y ago

TL;DR - I'm not saying it isn't real, but I'm not saying it's fake either; http://ualrpublicradio.org/post/100-million-leonardo-da-vinci-painting-might-not-even-be-leonardo-da-vinci http://ualrpublicradio.org/post/100-million-leonardo-da-vinc...

gokvokbok 9y ago

I wonder when the world is going to have a conversation that amassing the kind of wealth this would require, to spend a (small?) portion on a painting, is absurd. I'd like to get insight into the minds of the people e.g. Gates, Murdoch et al that are so driven by profits and wealth to the detriment of so many others.

brm 9y ago

Fascinating to watch Rybolovlev move money in the open like this with the help of the art market apparatus. What a time to be alive. If you're not keeping track this was almost double the price expected for a da Vinci of questioned provenance sold by the fertilizer magnate who bought Donald Trump's Palm Beach mansion for double the estimated price and then never lived in it.

omarchowdhury 9y ago
Wouldn't he need someone to pay that same amount or more for the painting to effectively have moved money with this apparatus? And if the next buyer is similarly motivated, isn't the valuation akin to a Ponzi?
- byebyetech 9y ago
  Ponzi scheme is a scam where buyer is fooled into buying something that has no value. Here if the painting is used as an apparatus to move money, it becomes sort of a currency to move $450 million dollars. As long as the big money movers honor its price it could be used for such purpose. Almost like Bitcoins!
  - jhulla 9y ago
    Some ideas are ancient. The painting doesn't have to move. The money doesn't have to move. We just all agree to assign it to someone else. "Because these stones are too large to move, buying an item with one simply involves agreeing that the ownership has changed. As long as the transaction is recorded in the oral history, it will now be owned by the person it is passed on to and no physical movement of the stone is required." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rai_stones https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rai_stones
    - wmf 9y ago
      The painting doesn't have to move. Sadly, this appears to be true. Tons of art just sits in secure warehouses like gold bars, never seen by anyone. https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-freeports-operate-margins-global-art-market https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-freeports-oper... (I've never heard of Rybolovlev before, but his name comes up in this article as well.)

Quiza12 9y ago

It will look good on the wall of a safe.

blunte 9y ago

Why is this a surprise? There's a point at which money no longer makes sense - both to the people without it as well as the people with it. There are many reasons for spending relatively incomprehensible amounts of money for something. One is to show others that you can; it's a demonstration of just how wealthy you are. Another is to try to make something special of the money that otherwise has reached a level of being useless/pointless. Think a bit in terms of a normal human lifetime. If you aspire to be rich, what amount of money defines that level? Once you reach a level where you can own and operate more properties, vehicles, and even employees than you can even remember, what does the excess money represent? Ok, this is an absurd analogy. But as technical people, imagine building a multi-petabyte storage device. Practically no private individual has such a thing. Using your intellect, experience, and perhaps ingenuity you can have such a thing. Then what? You store all the porn you have time to download. You save every movie you ever thought about watching. You take 1000 photos every time you go out. It's thrilling! But how much of it do you ever really go back and enjoy? Frankly, unless the buyer places it in a public museum, I judge it as a hollow effort to find value in excess (which will last about three months). Humans are great at acclimating to new and better, and soon we need more. What else is there?

comboy 9y ago
> What else is there? Storage of value. If you want to diversify, you may want something easy to move/hide for some scenarios. I'm not saying this painting works great for that purpose, just that that's one of the things that may make people want to buy it.
- blunte 9y ago
  If you have $4bn, unless you're investing in Beanie Babies, you really don't have to struggle to find stable stores of value. At that stratosphere of wealth, an art piece is not about diversification. It's a bit like buying a 200m yacht to surpass all other private yachts. What I find amusing is that even the ultra rich people are statistically NEVER the richest people. There are perhaps 5 people in the world who could be debated as one of the richest people in the world. And their individual wealth exceeds the "poor rich" such as this person by a factor of 20+. To people outside their bubble it just looks "sad" (pardon the Trumpism).

comboy 9y ago

Marketing wins everywhere. Paintings, IT, open source projects, startups, everything. It seems to be responsible for 90%+ value in worryingly many cases. It may be getting worse. I think in the next few years we will see rise of companies that help customers make decent choices that are not solely based on advertising. We have many user review based solutions but it just doesn't work with most things (not even touching on fake reviews). Even for things where the whole value of the product is about how user feels about it, most users don't have other products to compare. Plus choice-supportive bias. For tech stuff there are reviewers out there who test many things and which you can trust. Some take them apart and can reason about used components and so on. Not so easy when you are visiting a grocery store or wondering what's the story of the organic food that you are looking at (or maybe it was just mislabled?). Some educated 3rd party could research that for you. Again, it's different from what we have today because even though it's tempting, sexy and scalable, it can't be just about letting users send opinions and info. It must be expert web of trust. Those companies may end up with a lot of power. But at least in this case if some of them try to misuse it, somebody can stumble upon it and show that they are not trustworthy.

ktta 9y ago
“When information is cheap, attention becomes expensive.” ― James Gleick We've come to a point where we're inundated with everyone trying to push their own agenda that it is difficult to both sort the BS out, while also becoming impossible to really appeal/reach out to the people who would appreciate and benefit from what one has to offer. >I think in the next years we will see rise of companies that help customers make decent choices that are not solely based on advertising. I'm skeptical. It all comes down to money. The big boys have a lot to spend. Sure, there will always be someone somewhere doing something, but coming out of a niche and reaching out to people is difficult. It is easier get subconsciously influenced by billboards and banners than being aware and knowing what you really want. Especially since no one seems to be aware of if they really need something. Something to watch - https://www.netflix.com/title/80114460 https://www.netflix.com/title/80114460 Case in point - is the 'undisclosed buyer' really benefiting $450.3 mil worth? Money has diminishing returns after $70k/yr/person (from the doc above) but people just want more. So we're ready to listen to what people say would be nice to have. Another part is how they've become status symbols. >For tech stuff there are reviewers out there who test many things and which you can trust I'm just going to link to a site which I think is very impartial for as long as I've known them and have excellent reviews with their methodology outlined. It was called thesweethome(.com), but I guess now it redirects to their other website, thewirecutter (was tech stuff only). It has reviews of everything from knives to dishwashing soap (the long read on that was interesting[1]). https://thewirecutter.com/ https://thewirecutter.com/ It was acquired this time a year ago by NYT and I haven't been too keen on buying stuff in general for a while (again, minimalism) so can't say if anything has changed since then. [1]: https://thewirecutter.com/reviews/best-dish-soap/#are-green-dish-detergents-really-better https://thewirecutter.com/reviews/best-dish-soap/#are-green-...

the_common_man 9y ago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d7omwQLuGJQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d7omwQLuGJQ was the marketing campaign

ktta 9y ago
If anyone want's to know the soundtrack, it is 'On the Nature of Daylight' by Max Richter. If you think you've heard it somewhere, it was in Arrival - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2543164/ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2543164/
- Gargoyle 9y ago
  A version of it was also the main theme in Shutter Island.

heifetz 9y ago

lol, I guess there are three or four people in the world willing to pay that price. I'll be interested to see if this ever gets sold again and at what price. I'm guessing the buyer (if it's a single person) is a royal, oligarch (could even be Putin) or someone in China.

mynegation 9y ago

"the old masters market is contracting, because of limited supply" Can someone familiar with the art market comment on how that works? That seems contrary to what I know about markets. I mean, I understand that the volume is contracting, but the context is that such "[high] price is remarkable".

evgen 9y ago
There are never going to be any new old masters and because shit happens the supply is slowly shrinking over time as various works leave the market due to museum acquisition, accident, war, and theft. The demand side of the equation however is growing as various new money entrants to the art market compete for this diminishing supply. The demand side is also boosted by the fact that art like this has now become something of a financial tool for capital flight, corporations, investment funds and criminal interests.

dbkelly 9y ago

For anyone paying attention, the seller of the painting is Dmitry Rybolovlev. How did Rybolovlev amass so much money? Through pollution. His company Uralkali is listed as one of the top polluters in Russia. This is how externalities work: He keeps the profits, you (literally) eat the losses. Perhaps this detail is the biggest story here.

saiya-jin 9y ago
Well he is a typical russian arrogant oligarch asshole. Culprit in various murders, even served some jail time for it (of course not much compared to us peasants). It would be actually strange if any common good would ever come from such a person.
adventured 9y ago
Even for a Russian oligarch, context is relevant. It's not his company. He hasn't owned it since 2010. The roots of Uralkali go back 80 years, he owned it for 15 years. Uralkali is 20% of the global potash market, without their mining a billion people wouldn't have food - at a minimum - given the present 7.6 billion world population. Russia has become a wheat juggernaut [1], to put it mildly; without their food production, the developing world will not develop given the population growth occuring. That doesn't defend the pollution, it does however bring some very important context to the situation that you entirely neglected. [1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-11-15/europe-is-falling-behind-russia-in-the-global-wheat-market https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-11-15/europe-is...

mars4rp 9y ago

the interesting thing to me is how the face completely changed in the restoration(more like repainting)! Jesus in color is very similar with our 21 century image of him, no mustache, eyes completely changed and ... the painting is relatively new compare to Jesus himself! and his image in the eyes of it followers changed so dramatically! I am wondering what else could have changed in 2000 years!

virtualwhys 9y ago

> The artwork has been the subject of legal disputes and amassed a price history that ranges from less than $10,000 in 2005, when it was spotted at an estate auction... The heirs of that estate are probably not thrilled with this headline.

madads 9y ago

Store of value comes to mind, a la crypto currency phenomena.

bedhead 9y ago

This is an absurdly rich guy (obviously) who is just bored out of his goddamn mind.

l33tbro 9y ago

Funny that Da Vinci remains the most bankable 50 years after he first sky-rocketed the perceived value of art. Basically, In 1962 the Mona Lisa was loaned to Metropolitan Museum of Art by the Louvre. Huge marketing campaign resulted in over a million of Americans going to see it, ushering in the new era of art as mass spectacle/consumption. Obviously there were other factors involved - but Robert Hughes made an amazing documentary about this subject called the Mona Lisa Curse, which you can watch online [1]. [1] https://vimeo.com/62973616 https://vimeo.com/62973616

sytelus 9y ago

What is interesting is that if this painting was attributed to someone unknown, its price would have fallen off the cliff even though there would have been zero material change in goods that buyer would be receiving. This says a lot about our hero worship tendencies. People are going to look very hard to see what is so special about this painting.

megy 9y ago
> This says a lot about our hero worship tendencies. Does it? Or does it say more about its value as being incredibly rare, and one of only a few Leonardi paintings. You understanding the value of scarcity right?
- sytelus 9y ago
  Scarcity from hero :)
anjc 9y ago
> People are going to look very hard to see what is so special about this painting. Leonardo da Vinci painted it, for a start
puranjay 9y ago
You're implying that a painting has any inherent value (it does not). Just like everything else in the material world, it only has contextual value. Before the 1900s, aluminum was valued more than gold. Today, it is one of the cheapest metals around. Nothing changed but the context in which we were able to extract it. In the case of this painting, the context is what makes it valuable - the last known privately owned painting by a name nearly the entire western world recognizes immediately.
- runeb 9y ago
  I would assume an increased availability of aluminum because of better or cheaper production processes makes the price drop?

myth_buster 9y ago

Some art experts pointed to the painting’s damaged condition and its questionable authenticity. This was a thumping epic triumph of branding and desire over connoisseurship and reality. Interesting quote.

thetruthseeker1 9y ago

I wonder if its a person or a corporation/org that bought the painting. Number of people who may buy such a painting is probably only a handful.

wallflower 9y ago

In the book "$12 Million Stuffed Shark: The Curious Economics of Contemporary Art", it describes the insanity of the skyrocketing auction prices with the following analogy (paraphrasing since I do no longer have a copy of the book). "If you have a $20M painting, you can imagine an equivalently priced apartment where you can display that painting in one of the world's great cities. But $150M? There is no equivalent for that. There are no apartments that expensive." And now $450.3M?! for the top. In "China's Art Factories: Van Gogh From the Sweatshop", you can see the bottom of the economic scale. About $20-$30-$50 for a good copy of a Van Gogh or other masterpiece. http://www.spiegel.de/international/0,1518,433134,00.html http://www.spiegel.de/international/0,1518,433134,00.html

olympus 9y ago

You could buy three F-22 Raptors with that kind of money. Well, Congress would never approve the sale, but this painting went for triple the per-copy price of the F-22, according to Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_Martin_F-22_Raptor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_Martin_F-22_Raptor I might be biased, but I know what I would pick if given the option, and it cruises 1,200 mph.

hw 9y ago
Trying to compare a piece of art, history and culture, with a weapon of destruction. Great job.
- pageandrew 9y ago
  cmon dude. raptors are awesome
- dingaling 9y ago
  An F-22 is, regardless of its function, one of the most complicated devices ever created by man. In that sense it is an example of the combined 'art' of the skills of many thousands of highly-skilled individuals. In past centuries cathedrals were hailed as the masterpieces of the skills of craftsmen.
  - speedplane 9y ago
    F-22s are cool, but sadly, probably won't hold their value as well as a DaVinci.
    - zxcmx 9y ago
      Yeah the F-22 really is useless without a military industrial complex behind it. And a defense use. Sort of a parable about modern products really. Self driving cars with no maps, phones with no updates, no app store. Our best products are really infrastructure products, supported by a cast of thousands. But the painting stands on its own and a decent pair of leather shoes will get you from a to b just as well as they did centuries ago. If I remember rightly the most universal item of soldier's kit throughout all history was the spoon.

Antimachides 9y ago

http://www.vulture.com/2017/11/christies-says-this-painting-is-by-leonardo-i-doubt-it.html http://www.vulture.com/2017/11/christies-says-this-painting-... >Christie’s Is Selling This Painting for $100 Million. They Say It’s by Leonardo. I Have Doubts. Big Doubts. tl;dr: The painting is an old-hat style and pose not becoming of a Renaissance artist of Leonardo's caliber. Me: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

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_nedR 9y ago

Art is supposed to inspire our inner eye for beauty. Seeing the 450 million dollar price tag, i feel an unusual amount of anger, disgust, revulsion at the ostentatiousness, excesses and brazen corruption of the rich and of the fine art world. I feel more disgust at this than i would at the usual gaudy, blingy excesses (like gold-plated cars and mansions) of the tasteless wealthy. I suppose good art can also seek to inspire these feelings, even if the price tag has only cheapened the actual artwork in my eye. I wonder how the millions of the poor, nameless, talented artists around the world feel about this. A portrait of Jesus Christ of questionable origin and authenticity being sold by a Russian fertilizer magnate for 450 million usd. Says quite a bit about the times we live in, Doesn't it? edit: Sorry for my salty tirade; Just sharing a viewpoint.

anjc 9y ago
> Art is supposed to inspire our inner eye for beauty These paintings were only painted because exceedingly wealthy families commissioned and collected them. If it were up to people like me and you, there'd be no art to inspire people in the first place. > I wonder how the millions of the poor, nameless, talented artists around the world feel about this. This community wouldn't exist if it weren't for the hierarchy of the art world.
- DomreiRoam 9y ago
  > If it were up to people like me and you, there'd be no art to inspire people in the first place. Art would still exist but some master pieces wouldn't exist. I agree that patronage has allowed artist to produce magnificent art piece but is not the case for all masterpieces.
  - anjc 9y ago
    You only have to casually witness the art world - even just at a local level - to see that speculation by wealthy buyers sustains it, and also, that it costs a lot to produce art as a professional. So maybe without patronage some level of art would exist, but it wouldn't exist as a community without people ultimately paying a lot of money for work. Furry porn producers would continue to make a mint though.

tnt128 9y ago

noob question, I wonder the reasons people are spending 100m+ on paintings. is it possible that buying art is actually a great way of storing wealth? Like buying real estate but less flashy, easier to store, and easier to transport. I assume there aren't too many ways you can safely store 400m cash?

ireadfaces 9y ago

Is it too late to ask that how such art is valued? Of course I read about the theory that it depends on art dealers and a lot of things, less to do with quality of art. As quality of art is subjective after a certain point. Just thought someone could guide me.

cepth 9y ago
https://www.economist.com/blogs/economist-explains/2017/01/economist-explains-3 https://www.economist.com/blogs/economist-explains/2017/01/e... > About half of the market is accounted for by sales through dealers, either directly from the artist’s studio (the “primary market”) or by reselling a work that has already been bought once (the “secondary market”) and which is now being sold on, often with several commissions being paid to intermediaries along the way. The other half of the art market is made up of sales by auction, a system that claims to be open and competitive, with both artwork and potential bidders being visible to all. In reality, it can be as secretive as the dealing world, with complex financial arrangements and discounted commissions being not uncommon.
_Codemonkeyism 9y ago
http://aswathdamodaran.blogspot.de/2017/10/the-bitcoin-boom-asset-currency.html http://aswathdamodaran.blogspot.de/2017/10/the-bitcoin-boom-... about value vs pricing vs asset.

unixhero 9y ago

To be fair, it's a frigging good painting.

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WheelsAtLarge 9y ago

Bill Gates is a big DaVinci fan. I bet he was the final bidder. He's one of the few that can buy it. Must be nice!

Stratoscope 9y ago

Now this is freaky. I thought I was done with HN for the evening after reading about this painting and a few other things. So I opened my Kindle to read something else, and the advertising screen showed a book called Typhoon Fury (The Oregon Files). I grew up in Oregon, so I figured I would take a look. The blurb began: > Hired to search for a collection of paintings worth half a billion dollars, Juan Cabrillo and the crew of the Oregon soon find themselves in much deeper waters.

hvidgaard 9y ago
That is data mining and advertising networks for you.

gadders 9y ago

I wonder if the painting will end up in Geneva Free Port, "the greatest art collection no-one can see" http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-38167501 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-38167501

elmar 9y ago

This as just reminded me of another news from 2014. Stolen paintings hung on Italian factory worker's wall for almost 40 years https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2014/apr/02/stolen-paintings-italian-works-wall-40-years-gaugain-bonnard https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2014/apr/02/stolen-...

soneca 9y ago

What high art, diamonds, and bitcoin have in common? They all would have a much much much lower value if they weren't so good for money laundering.

libertine 9y ago

Is it just me that feels like this is rather a symptom of money being devaluated by the day? This may sound ridiculous, but it reminds me of a private server of Lineage 2 (RPG) when old admins returned to the game as normal players and had almost infinite currency and completely ruined the server economy by simply buying rare stuff, with limited supply, at any price. I make this analogy for the housing market, art, soccer players, cryptocurrency, and many other markets where you have limited supply - which is where you actually see how much washed money is starting to show up... It's scary and no ones talks about this. Edit: btw the solution for the private server economy disease was to wipe it - real life markets can't be wiped.