Tag: art

Decoding Insane Prices in the Art Market | November 20 2025, 19:03

Let’s be honest about the art market (and why the prices there are insane).

Actually, there’s no mystery to it. It works somewhat like NFTs, only with a longer history and a better reputation.

The scheme is simple:

You take an item that hasn’t been on the market in this form yet (a painting, sculpture, installation — doesn’t matter). You call it an “important artifact”. It helps if you have connections — galleries, auction houses, billionaire collectors. If you don’t have connections, then find someone who does and sell the cow to them. Since uniqueness is required, there will be no paintings of bears in a pine forest, no matter how brilliantly they are done. There will be something distinct.

The very notion of “this is a painting/sculpture” — is just a convenient formality. The main thing is that the object can be incorporated into the already established art trading system.

Art is such — one of the most convenient ways to “optimize” taxes and move large sums of money. Paid 18 million euros for someone else’s work, and then someone “on your side” bought some of your work for the same 18 million. Virtually no money was really lost (just taxes), and now in catalogs and rankings, two works are each priced at 18 million. The price can be pushed up by selling them cascadingly. Win-win. Auctions are just in on the deal. Further, if you donate this work to a museum for charity, you can even cut more taxes. But it can also be sold. And here’s why.

Currently, there are simply too many free funds in the world. The number of billionaires and their wealth is growing faster than the availability of truly rare assets (real estate, companies, gold, etc. have all been divided already).

Art is one of the few markets where “scarcity” can still be created literally out of nowhere.

If you have access to a hundred such wealthy simpletons and you can tell stories (“this is an investment for 20-30 years, it will only increase”), then selling is purely a technical matter. Two or three interested parties = bidding already starts, and already you see +50-100% to the price.

Over time, real cases appear: someone bought in 2000 for 2 million, sold in 2024 for 80 million.

These cases are used to convince the next buyers. New buyers with their money confirm and amplify these cases. The cycle is closed.

Result: the rise in prices in the top segment of art is directly tied to the increase in the number of super-rich and their capital. As soon as a serious global crisis occurs and the extra trillions stop being printed/earned, and the pyramid collapses, the market will very quickly show where there was real cultural value, and where it was just a beautiful financial scheme.

P.S. This doesn’t mean at all that all contemporary art is a bubble. There are works that are really important historically and culturally. It’s just that at the very top of the price pie, cultural value has long ceased to be the main driver.

But at the summit of Olympus of the most expensive paintings of classic genius solitaries, there will never be, because galleries and dealers need artists who can produce 20-50 works a year to satisfy demand, organize exhibitions in five capitals simultaneously, and maintain turnover. Artists like Lopez Garcia, Odd Nerdrum, or Ron Mueck make unique pieces that will become especially valuable only after the artist dies.

Lost in Translation: Modernizing Opera Subtitles | November 19 2025, 02:31

This must be about my tenth staging of Le Nozze di Figaro. And I still can’t understand why no one ever bothers to make modern, well-constructed subtitles instead of something that resembles a product of prehistoric “Google translate”. Every single line is translated from Italian in such a barbaric way that it’s about to make one’s eyes bleed. And for what reason? The Italian is certainly not modern either, but if you undertake to translate, then do so in a way that the meaning can be grasped within those tens of milliseconds when your eyes dart to the screen. Now, you land on a text that takes a minute to chew over… Every woman makes me change colour… Instead of make me blush or make me pale… If you are fain to dance… And all that stuff.

Samuel Morse: From Painter to Telegraph Pioneer | October 28 2025, 15:00

At the “Rzhipopisi” exhibition, a painting titled “Paris through the Eyes of Samuel Morse” was showcased. Essentially, dots and dashes—it sparked the idea for this post. Few know that Samuel Morse was actually an artist, and quite a decent one—check out a couple of his paintings attached to this post. But he was only “decent” by our standards—surrounded by many equally skilled artists, he considered himself a failure in this realm and devoted the second half of his life, 35 years, solely to the telegraph. (By the way, Hitler was also an artist, amateurishly decent, but more mediocre compared to Morse amidst his contemporaries, yet he ventured into politics). In the attached photos, there’s a painting with paintings. Its actual size is about two meters and among the paintings hanging there is even the Mona Lisa (La Joconde) by Leonardo da Vinci, which wasn’t valued back then as it is now. It mainly became famous after it was stolen from the Louvre, and then fervently searched for and found by the entire world.

By the way, Morse Code was not invented by Morse, but by Alfred Vail, his colleague—a fact Morse later repeatedly denied (while also attributing the invention of the telegraph itself to himself). In 1848, the Vail/Morse code was refined by the German Friedrich Gerke. The code, improved by Gerke, was used until new technologies came along.

(By the way, I don’t understand why it’s Morse and not Morz. He was American, and nobody ever called him Morse.)

Indeed, among people who were artists, about whom everyone has forgotten that they were artists because they remembered something else, it is worth mentioning besides Hitler, also Winston Churchill and George W. Bush Jr.

Revisiting the Sun: A New Invention in Art? | October 19 2025, 18:15

Interestingly, depicting the sun in a painting is a very recent invention. I haven’t seen a single painting in any museum where the sun is depicted above the horizon. Well, maybe with the exception of the Impressionists, Monet’s is very symbolic. In modern works, it appears more often. But in half, it’s a trace from a photograph.

Update: Turns out Aivazovsky has a lot of this. But he produced so many paintings in the studio with his students that it seems you can find any combination of little ships, waves, and sun.

Exploring the Chaos Game: Creating Fractals From Randomness | October 04 2025, 15:32

I read something interesting today. About fractals. If you take any three points that form a triangle, and then a fourth point anywhere, and subsequently throw a dice, the faces of which are assigned to the first three points. Next, you move from the current point towards the point corresponding to the result on the dice and place a new point halfway; this becomes the new current point. After many iterations, the points start to form the Sierpinski triangle – the one shown in the attached picture. Intuitively, you would think the triangle should be fully filled because it involves random movements in three directions from a randomly chosen point, but no. Moreover, it works even if the starting point is inside the future empty triangle (yes, a few points will disrupt the picture, but that’s it). If you start our experiment with five or six points instead of three, different shapes will form – see the attached picture. This graphical method is called the Chaos Game.

By the way, it may seem obvious, but in case you wondered — all the presented figures have zero area.

If you take two triangles and with a probability p move towards random vertices of the first, and with (1-p) towards random vertices of the second, you end up forming a Barnsley fern (picture №2).

I love such things because they seem like magic at first glance 🙂

(It’s a kind of problem from the same class as the synchronization of metronomes)

Celebrating Marcia Klioze at the Arts Club of Washington | October 03 2025, 22:42

Friends, I am currently at the opening of Marcia Klioze’s exhibit at the Arts Club Of Washington and I am absolutely thrilled! I am so happy for my wonderful mentor, from whom I have been learning oil painting for two and a half years. Today her solo exhibition is here, and the atmosphere is simply magical.

I am proud to be learning from her invaluable experience and learning to see the world anew. Next Tuesday is another class😉 I’ve wanted to post her works for a long time, and today I finally have the opportunity to share (I asked for permission, so it’s all official)!

Almost all works are for sale, for those who are interested, do drop by

Understanding Jerusalem Syndrome and Its Global Counterparts | October 01 2025, 16:10

Listening to Sapolsky in the background, he mentioned Jerusalem Syndrome. It’s when a deeply religious American Baptist from the southern USA, having saved money and prepared, arrives in the Holy Land and sees that Jerusalem is just another city: traffic jams, smog, noise, pickpockets, McDonald’s—everything like that. And then—an interesting feature—in all cases, the person tears up sheets, takes off their clothes, and suddenly finds themselves on the streets of Jerusalem, dressed as if in a toga, begins to preach on the streets, calling for a simpler life and all that.

A psychiatric team arrives, takes the person to the hospital for a few days, everything becomes clear, they send him back home, and he never encounters this syndrome again.

Each year in Jerusalem, about up to many dozens of cases are recorded. It’s a recognized syndrome, about which scientific articles are published.

Sapolsky says that if hotels in Jerusalem always had, for example, checkered sheets instead of white ones, which seem to “invite” one to don a toga, it would help prevent the crisis.

But amusingly, there’s a twin brother of this disorder, the Paris Syndrome, which for some reason mainly affects the Japanese. Japanese tourists come to Paris because they are attracted by the culture, language, literature, and history of France, as well as the landmarks of Paris. However, once there, they encounter difficulties such as a language barrier (surprise surprise!), differences in mentality, and disappointment from the reality of Paris not meeting their expectations.

There’s also a milder version called the “Florentine Syndrome.” This often happens during a visit to one of the 50 museums in Florence, the cradle of the Renaissance. Suddenly, a visitor is overwhelmed by the depth of feeling the artist has imbued in the artwork. At this point, they acutely perceive all emotions, as if transported into the space of the image. Victims’ reactions vary up to hysteria or attempts to destroy the painting. Despite the syndrome’s relative rarity, guards in Florentine museums are specially trained on how to deal with its victims.

Overall, be careful with syndromes when you’re traveling.

PS. This image was made for me by google. In the second image, a guy in a tie tells a tearful girl 脆培, which seems just a meaningless set of characters, something like fragile culture. But when I asked ChatGPT, it told me it resembles 脱げ (nugu) — undress 🙂 if you ask Google Gemini to redo it, Google gives the same picture, where he’s also shouting 暁は, but at the same time, he has already taken off his shirt. But that’s also unclear what 暁 – it’s dawn. Generally, with Japanese, LLM is bad. I’ll leave the second image in the comments. By the way, there are several differences there, you can play a game to find ten differences. They are amusing