What is Art?

A few days ago, I received an email with a link to Sotheby's which showed estimate bids of some pieces of art valued at exorbitant prices. Here is the LINK. I have always been fascinated by what people are ready to pay (or not) for the sake of owning a piece of art. Most people would not even consider these works as art let alone pay those prices. Personally I am not ready to spend hundreds of thousands for an art piece for one simple reason, I do not have that kind of money. But what is exactly art? What qualifies as art and what not? This video might help to find the answer.

How much?!?!

How to price a painting? That's the million dollar question! Pricing has always been a nightmare. What's the right price? How the hell would I know. But lets not get too depressed. Apparently, it has been scientifically proven that we like expensive things more.

In an experiment conducted by Antonio Rangel at the California Institute of Technology, the brains of 20 volunteers were scanned using functional magnetic resonance imaging while they tasted five different wines costing $5 to $90 a bottle. But Rangel fibbed, telling them that the cheap wine was the most expensive, or giving the same price to two different wines. The scanner showed consistently that the flow of blood to the part of the brain that registers pleasure, the medial orbitofrontal cortex, increased when the price was declared to be high, not according to the quality of the wine. In case this got attributed simply to the ignorant palates of the volunteers, Rangel repeated the experiment with members of the Stanford University wine club and got widely similar results.

I have similar experiences when it comes to the female members of my family (especially my sister and to a lesser degree my wife) but unfortunately not my clients. So, next time i will try to price something i will keep this in mind. The more expensive it is, the more it will be liked and appreciated.