Giacometti sculpture fetches £65 million at Sotheby's auction
ngon master
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/arts_and_culture/8497370.stm
"A life-size bronze sculpture of a man by Alberto Giacometti has been sold at auction in London for a world record price of £65,001,250."
I'd really like to see this piece in person just to get the sense of scale. I'm surprised something that isn't very iconic or a piece of history, sold for so much. I'm not saying its not worth that, but still a lot for an artist that died in the 60's, and isn't popular in the main stream world.
Replies
See a doctor.
I find the whole 'art' sector shady these days
nowadays art makes no sence
its all about building crap, calling it art and selling it for shitloads of money, and "acting pompous and faggy"...
ahahah
I wish it was as simple as that
would be pretty easy to get rich :P
Supposedly, modern art is a test chamber to see how people react to different things. So yes, crap.
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art and money...
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00kmt51
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I hope this modern art farce goes down the toilet soon because it's terrible to even call it art when you compare to real classical and contemporary artists work.
gosh damn! how tall are you frenchy? :P
That Giacometti sculpture for example in my eyes has personality and purpose and is a great thing. Not 65million of great but the world attaches funny values to stuff!
Go to a gallery, see stuff in the flesh, take some time to look at it, ignore the artistic musings of others and don't condemn it till you see it. Yeah some modern art is tosh, some video games are tosh, some music is tosh. There's crap in every facet of creative endvour but don't write off a whole genre because of one example.
younger generations are however changing this viewpoint dramatically.
And no I am not brainwashed by art school (didnt go there). I remember seeing the replica on a crossroad in the city when I was a little kid, and remember my dad explaining to me what it is and how he likes it. Then later I saw a proper bronze cast of it at the Fondation Beyeler in Switzerland, and boy was it beautiful, contrasting with the elegant lines of the building.
Now I dont know if this is worth that amount of money but to me it doesnt matter, I just enjoy art for what it is, in museums, getting inspired then trying to kick my own arse to make my own. I don't want to give a lecture here, but guys please respect a few things, no one need to hear the kind of 'im too cool to like this' teenager chatter.
I think.
I would recognize the craft behind the spacemarine print, but that doesnt make it a striking art piece to me. If you ask an average crowd outside a modern art museum what they liked the most, they wont tell about how poor or awesome the execution of a piece was. They would likely tell you about an idea that struck them the most, or what a given piece reminded them of...
I do know art is very subjective but i think overall beauty and execution of a work should also be acknowledge.
and yes, Mueck is the man.... but beauty and execution (although his is mindblowing) is all about the intent of the artist. subjective is an understatement, but it's art.
this is taking me back to some arguments from my old art history classes.... them shits got nasty.
I also have a real tough time accepting something as art when it required little to no technical proficiency or control to create. Pollack's splashing paint on canvas or Duchamp's flipping a urinal on its side are mindless efforts passed off as some bit of perceptual cleverness. I can just barely abide what Mondrian did with his compositions, but I can at least appreciate his pioneering thinking about form and space.
On the one hand I think anything man creates or looks at can be construed as art, but as long as I'm not expected to buy it all for millions of dollars or people are going to make up dribbling nonsense about it.
Personally, I think its a pretty cool piece, though I would never spend 63 million quid on it. But I couldn't personally care less if the 63 million were spent on the piece, or a bag of crisps. I'm just happy that such a large amount of private money is shot into the market.
It's a matter of taste, there are pieces of art that are considered to be great art amongst nearly everyone who sees them, even though I detest having to follow the herd I detest lying to myself even more. As you can tell I feel very strongly about this so maybe an example is in order...
Classical sculpture...
Contemporary sculpture...
and then the one in this thread...
Now you tell me that if you learnt the basics of working with bronze that you wouldn't be able to make something like that? Imo and probably the majority of the population this guy did not have any skill to speak of, time and time again this new "art" is more about money than actual real art.
It's hard to call any art crap, someone somewhere will love it, all you can really say is you don't like it. In this case, I don't. I've got a hand carved wooden sculpture here, about 2 ft tall of an African hunter dude that I think is way better, and probably only worth about $100.
Also, comparing those sculptures is almost like comparing cinema with music.
You buy 10 paintings (from the same artist), and put 2 up for auction. Your buddy does the same. You agree with your buddy to go to the auction and buy each other's formerly worthless paintings for 1 mil each. Now you publicly have a record that the art is worth 1 million per painting. Time to donate all your paintings to a museum and take a 10 million tax write-off!
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Just because the statue looks like turds doesn't make it bad art. I actually consider that aspect a plus.
Seriously, Belias' art is so surreal it would make Salvador Dali go "Wait, wat?"
Then take pictures of it in a cave!
..profit?
Ok, putting skill aside and looking at the work of say Jackson Pollock invokes no feelings yet people bought it for ridiculous amounts of money because it was cool to do so, the same applies here as I hope to demonstrate...
To answer your second question, they are all sculptures and the last two are modern ones so how could it be possible that can they not be compared?
Out of the pics I posted;
The classical makes me think of freedom and spirituality, being blessed and escaping to a better place. It also makes me think of change, a once trapped soul being transformed in the light and released from bondages.
The second invokes less because it is more specific but it makes me feel that she is calm and meticulous, perhaps waiting to go on stage and perform elegantly.
The last one doesn't make me feel anything but I could say what it looks like and it it looks like a stick man walking in some mud. If I didn't know it was made from metal I would say that perhaps a caveman had made it with very primitive tools a long time ago. So I guess it's not true art then, right?
Art is not about craft. If all you can appreciate is realism, that's fucking depressing.
I really don't care if I'm being blunt about my thoughts on this. I don't even care if you like the piece or not, its not one of my favorites by a long shot. But it is a great work of art.
Looking at art and purchasing art a a long-term investment rather than as an appreciation for the piece is pretty upsetting.
Art is about ideas and the emotional response they can arouse. And for me this arouses an urge to go pinch a loaf. That's worth $2 at the drug store, not 65 million at Sotheby's.
I'm sure someone in the world might pay 65 million for aesthetic value alone, but that's not what this is about. This is a fancy way to invest your money.
And just as art is not all about craft, it is also definitely not about investment.
Well i guess taste vary. Just imagine l'homme qui marche 'rendered' the same way as those two examples you posted. You would get heavy whipped cream baroque cloth folds trying to flow in the wind, some twisted, overly smoothed arm pointing forward,, a spine curving in 3 different directions, and so on. Something quite heavy to look at, somehow.
The stick figure, to me, gives it more humanity, a sense of fragility that does not mean crazy stone polishing skills to be expressed. Same with the oversized feet holding the skeleton. But then again maybe it comes from experiencing the piece with my own eyes instead of through a picture from the internet.
i don't have much to say about the price ... i guess since its rare, it has value? But then again I don't need to know the trade value of a bronze for me to learn something from it's aesthetics.
The least the artist wasn't a commercial artist. Rich people buy whatever they want, cars, planes, boats, rare imported flooring, fossils, historical artifacts, etc etc.
I used to talk all kinds of shit about modern abstract art... then I caught a couple by chance in a museum when I was there to see something else. Shit's for real, dawg.
Maybe gloom and depression are part of the human experience. I'm sure seeing something that big in person, if probably is easier to relate to.
I still don't quite understand, though. I can imagine that baroque is a bit too much for some people's tastes, but neoclassicism can really be quite tame in that regard. I can imagine that it's all too smooth for you, but Rodin's work has a textural quality to it too.
L'homme qui marche, in my opinion, is so abstract that he does not have any (meaningful) body language. And without body language, what can a sculpture tell?
(as for seeing it as a picture on the internet, I must admit that I've never actually seen the works I linked for real either)
Kaskad: Caravaggio, Bouguereau, seriously, that shit is heart-warming. I like the colours in that Monet, but the wholy rough, flaky painting style is distracting at best.