Andreas Gursky's Rhein II fetched $4,338,500 at a Christie's auction last week, breaking the record for the most expensive photograph ever sold at auction.
absurd.
the buyer worked hard to get that...let him enjoy it.....
sorry I had to take that one moz
I can't speak to its market value, but that's a hell of a photo. Sayin'.
I hope the government takes it away when he dies so his kids don't get it.
I like a LOT of Gursky's work. But this photo of his doesn't really do it for me.
But as with so much of the art market - the aesthetics of the image has little to do with its value. It is 4 mil because it is a Gursky, it is a rare piece of his, and some idiot has too much money.
maybe the buyer is going to use it as toilet paper.
Booooooooooooring.
i agree. i mean i get what he did, but its not that interesting.
And I like his work, but this? Yawnsville.
That, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, is a photo of fuckall. And some stupid cunt paid millions for it.
What a fuckwit.
I actually quite like the photo. It's definitely worth a couple thousand quid.
Only because of who took the shot.
Wait a minute, it's art isn't it? When did logic, or even artistic merit, ever come into it?
Cool photo. Someone overpaid though, Gursky or not.
When you have enough money to drop $4m+ on a photo, I don't think the notion of "paying too much for something" is really going to bother you unduly.
It all depends on the person.
There are guys with 10-30mm who would buy it, and guys with 100-300mm who wouldn't touch it. I know both kinds. The guys who stay in the 10mm, which is a tremendous figure, will always be there because they aren't smart like the 100mm guy. They spend it as they get it.
Even if I was a huge fan of his work and photography in general, and I was worth, oh, 200mm, I still wouldn't pay more than 2mm.
Hey Cornbread I'm not up to snuff on the money lingo. What the hell is an 'mm' unit of currency?
He measures his money by its height in million-dollar bills.
Originally posted by Media44
Hey Cornbread I'm not up to snuff on the money lingo. What the hell is an 'mm' unit of currency?
It's what energy and finance people use to designate millions.
It's difficult to measure, from such a tiny representation of a massive large format work, any aesthetic qualities of the greens and silvery water that may be conveyed in the final print technique. However, the sale is so effective in destroying any pure intentions of the original work, other than the technical achievement of process that you have to wonder if the sale was designed as part of the work. It is a shame that Gursky is so linked to process. Process as we know has a difficult time remaining impressive. So that leaves us wondering how the image will be construed 200+ years from now when dogma is replaced and the quality of the work is left to be judged on its visual vocabulary and what it says about our relationship with nature at the start of a millenium so filled with dissonance that we desperately sought to convey harmony where ever we found it, even in a mundane, artificially maintained river bank.
This shot of Montparnasse that Gursky took conveys the same notion, much more eloquently IMO.
Nah. It's still fucking shit.
gonna have to agree. that one does nothing for me either.
Does it help that they are very large? Like 6x 10 feet large?
Personally I think I'm jaded by advertising as scale doesn't really do it for me but some people find it important.
So here's a random-ish question - if you think these suck ass, what contemporary photographers do you like that you would be willing to pay auction rates for were you an art collector?
For me, Edward Burtynsky, Robert Polidori, or Jeff Wall. I'd say Cindy Sherman but to be honest I haven't liked her work much since the early 80s so she's not really contemporary in that sense.
Burtynsky - Sudbury Tailings
Polidori - Lebanon
Wall -Soviet Afghanistan
Also, TIL that this forum resizes images - to see full size, right click and open in a new tab or window.