How should we estimate the worth of the objects we pay for?
What gives this 1960 work by Mark Rothko, estimated at $60,000,000, such staggering value?
What happens to the viewer when one’s favorite picture takes permanent residence in the home?
The Rothko is one of a kind. It falls into the category of abstract expressionism, which the painter, along with a few other artists, is credited with originating.
Some might consider it an investment, something purchased that will increase in value. Others might be taken with the image or wish to gain stature within the wealthy collectors and wannabes community.
An art critic friend added this: If you place an expensive artwork on the wall of your residence, you should be prepared to live with it day after day.
Many of us who admire an object’s presence over time discover that it gradually blends into the background. Think of it as the smell of a new car or a small child’s Christmas gift after a few days.
Time works a disappearing act on our senses, reducing or erasing intensity and interest in many material things.
Years ago, I enjoyed spending an afternoon with a retired Chicago Symphony player and his wife. They lived in a high-rise whose enormous windows revealed a breathtaking view of Lake Michigan and the curvature of the Earth in the distance.
I was stunned. I complimented the couple on the wonder of their daily vision.
The kind lady thanked me, of course, but then said their experience of living each day with such breathtaking work of nature had become routine. The impact I enjoyed for the first time had long since departed for them until a visitor reminded them of it.
We tend to think of the owners of a painting of staggering beauty or a home in an enchanting natural setting as possessing an abundant advantage over us. No matter the value of these properties in dollars and cents, we imagine they remain a godsend or blessing—enormous good fortune at the least.
Envy of their luck isn’t surprising.
There is an irony here, however.
If the gift of ownership results in familiarity to the point of erosion of the joy that first attracted them to the object, are they so lucky?
Is it possible that a portion of what we enjoy in a mural or a landscape is its flabbergasting unfamiliarity—the astonishment and emotional flood that overtakes us? Is it like an embrace only repeated when lovers reunite after a long absence?
How much do we revel in vacations to new places because they are new?
Perhaps we should consider the owners of paintings by Rembrandt or van Gogh as less fortunate than we are; and of ourselves, upon visiting a museum or the Grand Canyon, as the lucky ones.
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The painting is Gray, Orange on Maroon, Number 8. It is the property of the Boijmans Van Beuningen Museum in Rotterdam.
