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Photographs keep smashing auction records! $3.4 million!

Asher Kelman

OPF Owner/Editor-in-Chief
Last smash was 2007 at Sotheby's New york with Andreas Gursky's Tripych at $3.34 million


prince.jpg

© Richard Prince via Sothebys.com


Now it's again at Sotheby's but this time in London; Richard Prince surpassed that by just $67,000! Even that sliver of money would be tough for most of us to come up with. Who would even imagine that photographs of advertisements would fetch such lofty prices? Really this reminds me of Warhal and his Ketchup or Briillo boxes! How on earth do people figure that he should get credit for photographing someone else's photograph!! I wonder whether or not he had to license the picture to sell his own picture? Further, no credit seems to be given to the original artist!

Read the whole Photo District News Article here .
 
I'm supposed to make the images better not ruin them! Although, It would be an amazing algorithm that could pull detail from a photograph of a printed ad :) Does anyone know who the photographer for this Marlboro advertisement was? Was it one of Krantz's? It seems a shame that original photographer gets lost in the derivation.

-Colleen
 

Ken Tanaka

pro member
Personally, I think such a price is a damn shame for this poser's "work".

But the fact is that the art auction strata has never had a relationship with the quality of the goods. It's all about fragile male egos, fetishism, the New York / London gallery pump-and-dump circuit, and social status. Half of the time these purchases are made by private bankers managing their clients' "art and antique" portfolios.

Still, it's hard to argue with most of these purchases as investments. They generally produce better returns than nearly any other asset class.

But Prince's work is still crap in my book.
 
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