Is it worth it?

Squalllionheart

Squalllionheart

Ragnarok Pilot
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Jan 16, 2012
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I was just watching a science programme and it was on about how people use technology to detect fake paintings, such as the one's from Vincent Van Gogh. Then I heard some of his work can be sold for multi-millions of pounds\dollars.

SERIOUSLY?! For painting a view from a bridge or a painting of his bedroom, and that's a masterpiece?!

Anyway with that out of the way, are you someone who can say you would pay big money for art? Do you agree that such masterpiece's such as the mona lisa are worth millions? If you do, why?

At the end of the day it's just a picture, painted with a paintbrush and some paint. Why is it allowed to be worth so much money? Why can't I pick up a paint brush, paint a beautiful night sky and say it's a masterpiece and sell it for millions?
 
If you could paint paintings worth millions of dollars you wouldn't be hanging around Finaru Fantariji Forums, I know I wouldn't. I'd be banging models right, left and centre.
There's all sorts of skill that goes into painting something, it has to be the right perspective, it has to be exactly the right colour, it needs to look three dimensional, and so and so forth.
And to put the millions into perspective, God must have more money than Bill Gates. I think there's been over a billion copies of the bible sold, and at a conservative 10 dollars a bible, God has 10 billion dollars. Not bad for someone who doesn't actually exist.
I think Michael Jackson's Thriller sold around 90 million copies and at around $20 per album that's 180 million. Neither of those guys deserve to have their stuff worth more than Van Gogh, and Michael Jackson could moonwalk at least.
Would I spend 30 million on a painting? I would if I had that kind of money. Rappers buy SUVs with massive rims and impressive sound system things, and white middleclass people buy paintings.
 
I do think the works of Da Vinci and Van Gogh are worth that much, if not priceless. They belong in public art galleries or museums and not in private collections. However, if we were to put a price on them I do not see anything wrong with having such a high price. They are classic pieces of art and a lot of them have a lot of meaning and history behind them. Da Vinci in particular is a very interesting figure himself. Even if people did not necessarily like his art and find it overrated, the man himself was still behind the brush / pencil / etc.

But contrast Da Vinci to the splashes of paint found in a lot of modern art. Personally I do not value this kind of art as being worth much. Nor do I believe an unmade bedroom or a bar of soap hanging from a piece of rope to be worth a lot of money. That might just be my opinion, and art is free to pretty much anything these days.

As for me personally… Would I pay that much? I wish I had the money to ponder over that thought. No. For me art is public and should be (bar admission prices) free for people to view. Obviously all art can not be like this. Even putting that aside I do not think that I’d want to store lots of important paintings in a private collection of my own. It would set me up for robbery and a likely horrible death. I don’t need to own the real thing if I know that the real thing is safe somewhere where it can be treated and cared for properly. If I wanted to decorate a house with art I could get either cheap copies, or even just print photographs from the internet onto a canvas. I wouldn’t dream of owning the real Mona Lisa, for example, and I’m sure that the Louvre would send assassins after me if I ever did.
 
I think they are worth every cent, for two reasons:
1. They are very old, and are a piece of history.
2. They represent a time when painting was a fine art, a stark contrast to the haphazard "dabs of paint" found in so-called "abstract" art today. You try painting the Mona Lisa and see how far you get. Some of those paintings took months, even years, to complete. The amount of time, effort and attention to detail is staggering.
 
The thing with collectibles is they're only worth as much as someone's willing to pay for them. :wacky:

A painting valued at $2 million is only worth $100,000 if that's the highest paying buyer available.

I think they're pretentiously over-priced baseball cards for rich people who have more money than they know what to do with, who need something to look at & talk about as they drink their over-priced wine telling knock knock jokes. :grin:

There's a movie about a painting forger entitled 'Incognito'. Its decently good. :ohshit:
 
It's interesting to see different points of view, thanks guys. A friend of mine made quite a good point about how if I was really rich and I saw the rarest katana in the world would I pay stupid money for it, and I thought yeah I probably would, whereas other people would think "what a waste of money it's only a sword" yet I think they are beautiful. So I can understand the principle of overpaying for art: If you love something that much you will do whatever it takes to own it as we are very materialistic and like to own things.

He also made a point about the paintings that are really rare and worth stupid amounts of money go to museums because they charge people an arm and a leg to get in and see those paintings which I didn't really understand before but now I do.

A little less ignorant today than I was a few days ago :)
 
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