Fools and Their Money
A three-panel painting by Francis Bacon (not the philosopher, unfortunately) entitled Tryptich, 1976, has sold at auction for over $86 million. Although I certainly know what I like and what I don’t, I can’t claim to be an art expert by any means. I’d love to hear from someone who is an expert who can defend such an astonishing price for what I consider a completely underwhelming painting.
Maybe I just need more education. I recognize that the more you learn the more you can appreciate things that once appeared to make no sense. And I am apt to defend abstract music that others may call noise. Towards the end of the semester, as I was leaving a class in the Music Building, there were a hundred identical metronomes set up on a brick wall, all clicking away at different tempi. It was György Ligeti’s Poème Symphonique. There are no actual instruments, and, by its very nature the music has a huge degree of unpredictability and every “performance” will be different; the metronomes swing back and forth until they stop, at different times depending on how much they were wound. I wouldn’t compare it to the Missa Solemnis, but for what it is it’s okay.
Of course, nobody can put a price on a hundred clicking metronomes. And if they could, it wouldn’t be $86 million.
Filed under: Art, Cost of Living, Music, Musings, School on May 15th, 2008
well, it would be the cost of the metronomes, or perhaps the rental fee, plus the wage for the performers,and conductor. What i would consider a waste of money. I’d rather listen too say, cows mooing in a field. Please don’t tell me that was my hard earned tax dollars at work.