As IF Times

Source: $1bn painting only matter of time as art prices surge

One billion…with a B…hmm.  I suppose if the US dollar were to go through a massive devaluation and fell by let’s say…90% we could conceivably have someone pay a billion for a painting.  Barring that, the claim seems iffy.

We get it, art is unique…only one of its kind, yada yada yada.  But absent the aforementioned currency collapse or an elaborate insurance scheme, it’s hard to picture a scenario in which a painting, one painting, would be worth more than the total net output of many nation states.  It’s as if to say, the cumulative efforts of an entire country are of less value than the rarefied brushworks of a long dead painter.  Actually, at a billion dollars, the amortized value of each brushstroke competes only with the per word rate that lawyers charge in their racket.

In 2010, Pablo Picasso’s, Nude, Green Leaves and Bust (the image shown above) was bought for a cool one hundred six and a half million dollars.  This was a painting of Picasso’s lover Marie Therese Walter, thereby making this painting the most expensive piece of soft porn ever.  We could argue that the abstract work is laughably jejune, but obviously, we don’t know abstract art.  Personally, if I was the girlfriend, I’d be insulted after sitting hours upon hours for this result and would probably have made Pablo get some glasses.

If we’re not making 9 figure incomes every year, it’s hard to imagine writing a cheque on which you’d need to tape on an extra piece to accommodate the zeros.  As you can bet, the enormity of the sums paid would not work without insurance companies willing to offer coverage for the amount merely by paying them monthly premiums that look like phone numbers.  It’s a racket and has little to do with refined tastes.  There is no other explanation.

But the inherent beauty of a free market is that people are at liberty to pay whatever they feel an item is worth to them, whether it’s real estate, cars, rare coins, stamps, works of art, or even Pokémon tokens. Just remember that next time someone claims Bitcoin is a scam.  In fact, if you used Bitcoins to buy paintings…..

Source: Jailed Instagram model wants to trade secrets for freedom

Hardly a day goes by without some breathless headline about the tribulations of some ‘model’ or ‘rapper’. A detached observer will note that the ‘talent’ which these individuals purport to possess are rather marginal at best and likely delusional at worst. If every youngish woman who has ever posed with duck lips and a bikini are models then the USA must be overgrown with models.  If every black person who has ever managed to rhyme two words in verse is considered a rapper, then also, the US is filled to the brim with music talent.

That the media continues to characterize and glamorize the misadventures of very ordinary people as being somehow interesting is a reflection of the ‘look at me’ culture that has taken hold in the last decade of social  culture.  We can lay the blame partly at the feet of the explosion of media conduits that need to fill their pipelines with sensational stories, but really, the root is the proliferation of social media.  Thanks to certain infamous people with no useful skills other than to point a camera at themselves in various stages of undress, an entire generation of impressionable youth, mainly women, have been emulating that kind of narcissistic exhibitionism.

Young women are seemingly obsessed with posting images of themselves, usually in coy or provocative poses. Some are attempting to emulate the template of the Kardashians by pushing the boundaries of tastefulness in order to gain ‘followers’.  Yes, this is a real thing. As we know, much of this is clearly fake news.  A recent article exposed the resulting sad reality behind the fake world that this kind of delusion can cause.  The majority of people would never be able to emulate the kind of lifestyles portrayed by social media stars…including the social media stars.  In the linked story above, would anyone care if the headline read ‘jailed person wants to trade secrets’?  Probably not, but put the word ‘model’ in there and it captures a prurient audience.  If we want a more truthful headline, it may be, ” reasonably attractive woman wants to get out of jail by telling a story”.

Similarly with the liberal use of the label ‘rapper’. When a story emerges about the most recent criminal activity by someone who happens to be black, they are invariably characterized as rappers.  As if that would make their criminal activity less heinous.  Violence in the Black community is so rampant that reporting on it loses its impact day after day after day.  However, if the headlines somehow include ‘rapper’, it may cause some to actually click on the story.  Sensationalism and hyperbole sells and this truth has never been more evident than in today’s zeitgeist.  These days it seems as if people don’t as much make the headlines as headlines make the people.