There have been some record prices achieved for works of art recently.
The Auckland International Art Centre auctioned Charles Goldie's 1892 Kawhena, a portrait of a Maori man with facial moko and wearing traditional garb, for $733,000, a record for a New Zealand painting sold at auction.
It was bought by a private buyer and surpassed the $704,000 paid for a painting by Colin McCahon, Let be, let be, at an auction in 1995.
The artists are not very similar. Goldie (1870-1947) usually painted in a meticulous academic manner and showed great skill in rendering textiles and skin texture, to the extent people have likened his work to colour photographs.
McCahon (1919-87) was an ever-evolving Modernist whose use of words and sometimes numbers as integral to his images was not only innovative but highly controversial.
Even some sophisticated connoisseurs considered it cheating. There was still resistance to his work in elevated places, I recall, in the 1980s but no longer. His reputation has continued to grow since his death and has spread overseas. I have heard of museums buying works, not at auction, for more than $1 million.
If that sounds a lot - and it is - it is dwarfed by the $NZ173.8 million ($US142.4 million) paid for Francis Bacon's 1969 triptych Three Studies of Lucian Freud at Christie's in Manhattan a few days ago. That is an all time world record for any work of art sold at auction.
The same sale saw Jeff Koons' sculpture Balloon Dog (Orange) sell for $US58,405,000, a record for a single work by a living artist. It easily surpassed $US37.1 million paid for a painting, Domplatz Mailand, by Gerhard Richter established only in May.
Koons has been described as a ''Pop art provocateur'' and his work is sometimes comic, sometimes lewd and always provocative. He is about as far away from Goldie, or Colin McCahon for that matter, as it is possible to get.
Koons was really only establishing his reputation in the early 1980s and McCahon became incapacitated about 1984, so I'm not sure the New Zealander was acquainted with the American's work. But it would be interesting to know what he made of it.
Perhaps not much, because art for McCahon was a very serious business while Koons' stock-in-trade is humour and the deployment of kitsch. Which is all his work is, in the opinion of about half the art world. (I believe he's a very considerable talent.)
The buyer of Bacon's triptych turned out to be Sheikha Mayassa bint Hamad al-Thani, sister of the Emir of Qatar.
Obviously, it had to be someone with a great deal of money and that ruling family has plenty. Bacon specialised in paintings expressive of violence and anger. It will puzzle some why so much money is paid for a picture of such anguish and fury.
The short answer is that Bacon was a great painter and this is a substantial work from a high point in his career. It is also significant that the subject, Lucian Freud, is another great painter and for a long time a friend of Bacon's. The friendship cooled in the later 1970s but was still warm in 1969.
It has been pointed out prices like these don't really reflect inflation or the value of the work's materials and can scarcely be justified as an investment, or certainly not in the short term.
Mark Hudson, of the British newspaper The Daily Telegraph, said (13.11.13) they ''are, of course, beyond rationality''. He went on to ask ''if you did have bottomless coffers and the desire to dispense some of their contents on a single object, why wouldn't you go for something that embodies a chunk of what we sometimes still call 'civilisation', which sums up some of the things we think of as ennobling humankind as a species?''
I gather Mr Hudson believes Bacon is a great artist who later grew stale and repeated himself, but would probably consider the record-setting work to be among his best. But he is really wondering why his reputation has outperformed Henry Moore's, the British sculptor who celebrated humanity and the family and for a while was better regarded than Bacon.
It's a good question but there's another: why is it that nowadays it is recent and contemporary works which make top prices, rather than old masters? Forty years ago it was the latter which consistently out-performed the former.
What has changed?
I think it is a reflection of a greater engagement with contemporary art in the Western world. I don't think this has happened much in places like China and India and I suspect Qatar's Sheikha is a fairly westernised woman.
But if that is so, why is Goldie outperforming McCahon? I think there's a good local answer but more generally all these prices are signs of a slow Western economic recovery.
Peter Entwisle is a Dunedin curator, historian and writer.
