The Markets are Mad!
Art, just like gold, has become an investment. Investors don’t even have to see what they are buying, much less like it: they ask the banks, who are counseled by experts, to buy something that is considered good; and just name it, depending on what they want to spend, the price target. Usually, for safety reasons, what is bought, just like the gold ingots, remains in the banks’ safes. In this context, it is not surprising that one small pastel, one of the several depictions of The Scream, an icon of modern existential anguish by the Norwegian Expression Artist Edvard Munch, was recently sold to an unknown collector for the sum of $120,000,000, the highest price paid for a painting at an auction. The last record was quite different: The Card Players by Paul Cézanne was sold privately, in 2011, for between $250 and $300 million.
