What Makes Art Valuable?
What makes a piece of art worth tens of millions dollars at auction? A number of things, but not always the things you'd think. BBC's The World's Most Expensive Paintings chronicles the world's ten most valuable paintings, by way of journalist Alastair Sooke's guided tour of the collectors, locales, and Christie's and Sotheby's auction houses that link these great pieces of art together.
One of the more intriguing phenomena touched on in the film is the concept of provenance, which is the added value a piece of art has above and beyond what it otherwise would be worth due to the prestige and/or wealth of its previous owners. A painting previously owned by David Rockefeller, an example covered in the lower half of the top ten list, can and does fetch considerably more than a comparable piece without the same ownership track record. Arne Glimcher, a renowned art dealer, states:
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 is the value of two people bidding against each other, because they really want the painting.