What Price Cannot Measure
The art market keeps an old hierarchy alive.
The most expensive photograph ever sold at auction is Man Ray’s Le Violon d’Ingres, sold for $12.4 million.
The most expensive painting sold at auction, Leonardo da Vinci’s Salvator Mundi, reached $450.3 million.
The comparison is imperfect, but the distance is difficult to ignore.
Photography has won its place in museums, books, collections, and our daily lives. It is everywhere. It shapes how we remember, desire, travel, mourn, admire, and prove that something happened.
And yet, at the very top of the market, painting still speaks louder.
Not because it is always better.
Because it carries an older weight.
A painting appears as an object made entirely by hand.
Light, skin, colour and depth all seem to remain there as evidence of the artist’s labour.
Photography begins differently.
It receives part of the world at once.
That is its miracle.
But perhaps the market has never quite known how to value that immediacy.
The Man Ray record makes this visible.
What was sold was not simply a familiar image, but an exceptional vintage print, tied to the moment of its creation.
All of that entered the price.
But a price is not a verdict.
It does not measure contemplation.
It does not measure emotion.
It does not measure the moment when a work simply stops us.
No price can measure that.
Further reading: Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.
The photographs are gathered here:
Selected Works
.jpg)
Another thoughtful journal entry. I think there is another factor that comes to play. Most people will look at a painting and think. "That's beautiful. I wish I could do that but I can't paint.". A photograph is different. People look at a great photo and think, "That's a beautiful photo. My iPhone takes great photos; I could make the same photo." The iPhone (and other phones) have instantly made everyone a photographer, no skill or training, or practice required. Everyone is a photographer now so good photography as lost its mystique and everyone (incorrectly) thinks they could do the same, so what's the big deal? Sad.
ReplyDeleteThank you, Mike. I think you are absolutely right. Photography has become so familiar and accessible that its difficulty is often invisible. A camera may be everywhere now, but seeing, choosing and making a photograph that stays with us is still something else entirely.
ReplyDelete