"Sunflowers" by David van Meadows
What Price Sunflowers?
Vincent van Gogh's Sunflowers. Possibly the most famous painting in the world.
Why is this painting so famous? It's just a still life. Any one of a thousand art students around the world could have painted it. Yet van Gogh's Sunflowers are auctioned for forty million dollars.
Now please don't jump to van Gogh's defence. I'm not knocking his artistic ability. I'm sure he was a fine painter. I couldn't paint the Sunflowers, so I have no right to criticise the man that did.
I can't legitimately criticise van Gogh because I'm not a painter. But I can criticise the people that pay forty million dollars for his paintings because I am an art collector. I have over 100,000 pieces of art in my collection. And I didn't have to pay forty million dollars for any of it.
So, as a collector, I have a question for those people who are willing to bid forty million dollars for the Sunflowers:
Hello??? What on earth are you thinking?
It's just a picture of Sunflowers. What's so special about it? If you really have forty million dollars that you don't have a good use for, I can recommend several worthy charities.
It's not even a unique work of art. Van Gogh actually painted ten (or eleven, depending on which "expert" you ask) versions of the Sunflowers. He gave them away for food. It's hack-work, as we say in the writing trade. It's the old masters' equivalent of a seaside postcard.
And lets be completely honest here: despite van Gogh's undoubted talents, any competent painter could paint the Sunflowers. Every so often, a Sunflowers forgery turns up. It takes minute examination by the world's top experts to determine whether it really is a forgery. At least one copy of the Sunflowers is still in dispute after years of study. That kind of suggests that his style is pretty easy to emulate. Worth forty million dollars? I don't think so.
Why do people pay so much money for something that is basically an unremarkable, and apparently easily-copied, still life? Somebody, somewhere, once decided that a van Gogh was worth a lot of money. As soon as the right person decides that, of course, it becomes true. Because rich people seem driven to show off their wealth. And the best way to show it off is to buy something that everybody "knows" is worth a lot of money. So they pay a lot of money for it and guess what? It now really is worth a lot of money.
Art, along with literature and music, is an important part of civilization. And in one respect all art is priceless. But it has no intrinsic monetary value. You can't say "good art is worth more than bad art". It's impossible to rank art on a scale of good to bad, because appreciation of art is entirely subjective. A baby's scribble is worth more to its mother than any number of Sunflowers.
The world would be a poorer place without art. But maybe it would be a bit better off without art collectors.
Art collectors. Bah. They really do have more money than sense.
© 2001 by David Meadows. All rights reserved. 9 March 2001