They say good art captivates you, but great art can transform your life. But like with any sales pitch, the real question is: how much is the premium of going from good to great really going to cost me?!

Value vs. price, the eternal struggle. Take the 700€ impressionist landscape that really looks nice or the 5000€ blotchy thing the seller said “would transform my living room into a heaven of the sublime?” Shopping for art is always a hassle.

In the end it’s like buying a new car; you could get the cheaper and reliable kind that gets you from A to B safely and efficiently or get one of the performance boosted, racing varieties with pineapple leather seats and an engine that guzzles more than a German on Oktoberfest while looking and feeling like a 3-piece Valentino suit on wheels.

But unlike cars, where you do get what you pay for — a Renault Clio does not and could not cost as much as a Lamborghini, no matter how many R’s and S’ you may stick on it — art is just a bit more tricky. 

If in fact cars were priced as art pieces, Ferraris would cost about as much as Honda Civics, the German automotive industry would probably cease existing, overthrown by the demand for the exciting and unpredictable “moodiness” of Italian cars and the Fiat Multipla would be by far the most expensive car you could own.

The main point of any art piece’s price is that it is calculated more on a whim than on actual facts — unless it’s the last available painting by Da Vinci or some other rarity, where price is calculated more or less by everybody interested maxing out their credit cards and seeing who wins.

No matter how much the materials cost, unless it’s something Koons or Murakami made, it probably has a 10,000% margin on material costs and labour — a number even Apple executives wouldn’t dare to dream of.

The intellectual value and the level of skill also aren’t that high to be honest. I’m not saying any 5 year-old could paint something by Cy Twombly, but if they had functioning hands, the average attention span of a child and some crayons, everything is possible.

Value creation in art is a mystery akin the the legend of the gordian knot, but unlike the knot that got solved by Alexandre the Great by just slashing through it, we saw in the last blog that doing the same with art only makes more valuable. But hopefully we will get some answers in by tomorrow.