The Art Of Opulence

This week, “Chariot,” a sculpture by Alberto Giacometti, sold for $100,965,000. Felix Salmon marvels that, because “Chariot” comes from an edition of six, “when Giacometti made this sculpture, he didn’t create a hundred million dollars in present-day value; he created six hundred million dollars“:

It’s entirely rational to think that value goes down as edition size goes up—that if a sculpture is in an edition of six, then it will be worth less than if it were unique or in an edition of two. But the art market is weird, and doesn’t work like that—or, at least, it doesn’t work like that anymore, since it has become an extension of the luxury-goods market. In order for an artist to have value as a brand, he has to have a certain level of recognizability—and for that he needs a critical mass of work. Artists with low levels of output (Morandi, say) generally sell for lower prices than artists with high levels of output—the prime example being Andy Warhol. The more squeegee paintings that Gerhard Richter makes, the more they’re worth.

In the case of “Chariot,” the other versions of the sculpture don’t dilute the value of the art so much as ratify it. Just look at the list of institutions that own a copy: the Nelson-Atkins Museum in Kansas City, the National Gallery in Washington, the (wonderful) Giacometti Museum in Zurich, and MoMA. (The other two copies, including the one Sotheby’s just auctioned, remain in private hands.) You might want to own the “Desmoiselles d’Avignon,” but you can’t, because it’s in MoMA. With “Chariot,” however, you can own a sculpture that is treasured, and owned, by the world’s greatest museums. That makes it more valuable, not less. At the margin, increasing an edition size can increase the value of a work, so long as the other versions end up in high-prestige collections.

(Image of “Chariot” in Washington, D.C. via Flickr user Jerk Alert Productions)