Picasso painting’s price tag the real symbol of status

The pictures for which headline-making prices are paid are not even enjoyed by their buyers.

Pablo Picasso’s "Les femmes d'Alger (Version O)"

It’s a striking painting, a substantial piece over which Picasso has taken a lot of trouble — unlike some of the rather careless works thrown off in a single day that were included in the recent Picasso exhibition at the Art Gallery of NSW.

This is a serious picture because Picasso is setting himself in contention — in admiring emulation — with his friend and rival Matisse, who had recently died, and with their common predecessor Eugene Delacroix, the greatest of the French romantic painters. It was Delacroix who, together with his neoclassical contemporary Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, created the subgenre of the orientalist nude just as a crisis in narrative painting was threatening to leave the human figure without employment.

The orientalist nude was taken up and renewed in the 20th century by Matisse. After his friend’s death Picasso, with his usual irrepressible energy, took over the subject and produced a series of 15 further variations. The whole set was purchased at the time by Victor and Sally Ganz, though they later sold all but five; the picture sold this week, Version O, was one of those five, sold from their estate to an anonymous purchaser in 1997. Its price at the time was $US32m, and the unknown collector has just made a fabulous profit on his investment.

So this is a picture imbued with a sense of history, with depth of tradition and memory, but is it worth almost $US180m ($227m)? Apart from the question of quality, one could cite scarcity, originality and so on, but they are in a sense beside the point because the real problem is that there is no objective equivalence between aesthetic value and price. When we say that a masterpiece is priceless, we mean not only that it is worth a lot of money but really that its value cannot be defined in monetary terms at all.

It is easy to dismiss the art market as deluded, hysterical and inflated, but the truth is actually worse than that. The pictures for which headline-making prices are paid are not even enjoyed by their buyers but locked in secure vaults provided by several specialist corporations around the world.

And the price paid is not a cost that must be borne to have privileged or exclusive access to aesthetic pleasure or even the prestige of owning exceptional works of art.

The equation is reversed and the price is itself the fetish; the work becomes merely a bearer of a price tag, and it is not owning the picture but paying the price that becomes the symbol of status.

At the same time — unless the music stops at some point — the purchase remains a plausible investment, for some other rich buyer will soon yearn to demonstrate his capacity to pay a higher price yet.

Christopher Allen is The Australian’s National art critic