1/4 What makes art valuable

what would you buy if you had 100 million dollars Palazzo in Venice maybe perhaps a fleet of private jets or a personal submarine would you power it all into a single painting some of the richest people in the world have done just that think you're better at 95 million dollars what makes the super-rich splash out so much money on art is it love rivalry or just big business I want to find out more about this infamously secretive art world and the multi millionaires who populate it in what you're rubbing on my beautiful world I do apologize I'm searching for the most expensive paintings in the world to uncover the stories behind their record-breaking prices warning going this is Christie's big showroom in London and what you can see are the paintings some of the paintings that will be sold at the big evening auction in New York which is coming up in just a few weeks and this is one the highlights is a Picasso it's a series that he did in the 50s known as the women of Algiers and it's got an upper estimate 30 million dollars this is another of the star lots of money from a series he did I think in the 1890s 1891 these are poplar trees this could sell for as much as thirty million dollars and this is a Rothko that's been practically unknown to our historians blonde in a private collection let's have a look at the estimate this could sell for 22 million dollars apparently twenty-two million dollars thirty million dollars that sounds like an awful lot of money for a painting well it's not it's a bargain compared to the eye-watering amounts paid for the top ten paintings sold at auction when you think about it art is a little bit like magic because just with the wave of a brush something that has no practical purpose whatsoever just a worthless scrap of canvas covered with inexpensive pigment can become this priceless object that's designed by many of the wealthiest and most powerful people anywhere on the planet abracadabra but how exactly is it done just what is the link between art and money my story starts here in New York where the American abstract painter Mark Rothko dominated the art world in the 50s and 60s and it's perhaps a surprise to those who find abstract art hard to take that one of his paintings is number 10 on my list to find out why I've come to a billionaires skyscraper this is Rothko's white center and it would cost you more than seventy two million dollars seventy two million eight hundred and forty thousand to be precise and that put it at number ten in our list of the most expensive paintings in the world going up so we get 32 34 35 million was the painting was sold at the auctioneers Sotheby's in New York in 2007 billion dollars Melonie selling to their 64 me and when you factor in the hefty buyers premium on top of the hammer price stated by the auctioneer this made it a record-breaking amount more than three times the previous price paid for a Rothko so what's this tell us that white Center is officially the 10th best painting ever made no exactly the important thing to remember is that value isn't only linked to quality something that can send the price of a painting rocketing is what's known in the art world as provenance who has owned the painting in the past and in the case of Rothko's white center it was owned by one of the wealthiest and most powerful dynasties in America the Rockefellers who amassed their fortune from oil and banking and reshaped the New York skyline with the Rockefeller Center on the 56th floor David Rockefeller built an impressive art collection that included works by Picasso Goga and Mark Rothko in 1960 he paid less than ten thousand dollars for white Center half a century later it was worth more than 72 million dollars today the painting is even known informally as the rockefeller Rothko which says it all the name of its former owner is as important as that of the artist to find out whether white Center deserves its number 10 slot I'm on my way to New York's famous pace gallery to meet one of the world's leading art dealers Arnie glim chef Arnie was friends with Roscoe's and has been buying and selling his work for 50 years is this a really great rosco it is a wonderful painting it is a wonderful painting um what Rothko is really interested in is the idea of an almost formlessness use of color to transmit pure human emotion I mean you just have to strip away all of the prejudices that you have looking at a painting by Roth and let it flow over you like great music flows over you you know there are very few artists in the history of art that creates something that we have never seen before and Rothko is one of those artists but all kinds of things converge for a painting to bring that sum of money and such as well such as its provenance it was the Rockefeller name which you know amazed amazed me Wendy says amazed you because the whole thing of art and money is ridiculous the value of a painting at auction is not necessarily the value of a painting it's the value of two people bidding against each other because they really want the painting and the people who bid the most for white Center a rumor to be oil billionaires just like the Rockefellers the Qatari royal family who will be hosting the football World Cup in 2022 sadly though white Center hasn't been seen since the auction I can't even show you a good reproduction but my next painting couldn't be any more different here the buyer specifically wanted to show a lost masterpiece to the world at number nine in our list if Peter Paul Rubens is massacre of the innocents which sold at auction in 2002 for 76,520,000 and $58 the Flemish painter Peter Paul Rubens is considered one of the greatest artists of all time so perhaps it's unsurprising that an old master makes it onto my list actually it's rare for such a good quality painting to come to auction nearly all the finest old masters are now in museums and they're highly unlikely to ever reach the market again it's hard not to feel a little bit upset when you encounter this picture because there's just no shying away from the subject matter it tells the story of King Herod's massacre of the newborn boys of Bethlehem and it's terrifying you see muscley soldiers whipping babies from their mother's arms and dashing them to the floor the women themselves are weeping and wailing and scratching clawing at the faces of their assailants and these lifeless corpses of the infant's here down at the bottom of the the painting tossed aside like unwanted forgotten dolls and they have this distressing shade to their skin this stone-cold blue it's just too painful almost to look at and full of anguish and grief and despair and high raw full blooded emotion to be able to do that to transform something so horrendous and so complex into a curent piece of beauty is just astounding and I wondered before coming here whether it's worth paying seventy six point five million dollars for any picture at all but you come here and you see this painting and it is a total total knockout the massacre of the innocence is even more astonishing when you consider that until recently it wasn't even thought to have been a Rubens at all when it was finally identified or attributed to Rubens the paintings value increased exponentially overnight adding several noughts to its price here at the national gallery art historian David Jaffe helped reveal who really painted the massacre of the innocents by comparing it with another Rubens masterpiece Samson and Delilah do you remember when you first saw it yeah I saw it at Sotheby's up in their upper sort of so-called private room it was pretty extraordinary you know it was one of those ones where I said well we don't actually have a large discussion on this is clearly right tell me about the comparisons between Samson and Delilah and the massacre of the innocents we actually took them upstairs here where we've got decent sunlight and you can look at them very carefully and they had a lot of the same nuances just as you cross a T in a certain way and die in a certain way painters handle the brush particularly in their board Rubens often those little zigzag I mean you see it on the ankle of this painting you're looking for his handwriting in paint and if the handwriting works it's by an artist but once the massacre of the innocence was attributed to Rubens what does that do to the value of the painting well I think everyone wants to buy you know the real thing there very few great Rubens is of any period in his career now you can buy so when a great one comes up it gets an exponential frost I guess until it's on that moment of being actually fail it doesn't have any value I mean it's an absolutely arbitrary thing you know and you can't predict how in the Artic three or four people will be to try and chase the magic rabbit around the circuit when it comes up only billionaires can chase that rabbit ken Thompson was Canada's richest man he built a global media empire that once encompassed The Times and The Sunday Times he pumped millions into the Art Gallery of Ontario in his hometown of Toronto to share the glory of art in its creation as he put it with the world the Thompsons are intensely private and seldom give interviews the Ken's son David who bid for the massacre of the innocents with his father has agreed to speak to me my father began collecting in the 50s he'd mutter and sometimes he'd he'd hit me in the arm and say look at this Kim machen someone being able to carve this way I mean look at David Wow look at the spine I mean this is Howie he responded and with each object it would be a different facet to the object it would be the patination it would be the color one of the defining moments in the history of the collection of course came when you bought Rubens massacre of the innocents and paid what still is the world record for an old master painting of just north of 76 and half million dollars weekly until the auction he'd come down with the catalog and it asked me David what do you think this will fetch what would you do if you were me I'd say that I I think frankly you need to buy this picture it's something that resonates like nothing else you must have had to fend off some supremely stiff competition you must have known there was gonna be a fight mm-hmm what was your strategy to triumph to don't last them you knew you were gonna win we knew we were going to win at least I had a feeling we 45 billion man in a Cell last chance at the final price was 49 million five hundred thousand pounds or seventy six and a half million dollars after it was over there was silence it took his glasses off and he took a few deep breaths and I think he said something to the effect oh my goodness it's an enormous sum of money and on a painting you think to yourself you know it's shopping centers it's it's it's tangible but it was a marker for my father and for his collections Ken Thompson died before he could see that massacre of the innocents hang as the centerpiece of his collection at the Art Gallery of Ontario on display for everyone to see forever how do you feel when you go to the Art Gallery now look at this painting I imagine if it were me I'd want it every time I saw it just kind of punched the air that I've got this thing with my dad and given it now to the world how do you feel I feel I just feel a wild spring of emotion because it symbolized a journey for my father it symbolized a journey between father and son and it resonated for us as it resonates for so many others it's a very remarkable touchstone so what have I learned from painting number nine well that overnight the same painting can be viewed in a completely different way one day the massacre of the innocents was overlooked the next it was suddenly the most expensive old master ever sold the canvas was exactly the same but the way it was perceived was magically transformed by its attribution to a superstar artist to get more of an insight into the men

Channel: Art Documentaries

Views: 49,927

Keywords: What makes art valuable, Alastair Sook

Id: aFrERdnHibM

Length: 15min 0sec (900 seconds)

Published: Sat May 28 2016