Pas sur la Lune

A Sudden Gust of Wind, Jeff Wall, 1993

The commercial arena has also registered photography’s elevated status. Last year, an Edward Steichen moonlit pond from 1904 set a record for a photograph at auction when it fetched $2.9 million at a Sotheby’s sale. Even in the context of the art-world bubble, that was eye-popping. Denise Bethel points out that in 1990, when she came to the Sotheby’s photographs department she now runs, the record at auction for a painting was held by a van Gogh portrait of Dr. Gachet, which sold that year for $82.5 million, and for a photograph by an Edward Weston study of a nautilus shell, which brought $115,000 in 1989. What has occurred since? “The record for a painting at auction today is Picasso’s ‘Boy With a Pipe,’ for $104 million,” she says. “Over 15 years, you have gone from $82.5 million to $104 million, which could just be inflation. In photographs, the record was set here at Sotheby’s with $2.9 million for a Steichen photograph. In 15 years, from $115,000 to $2.9 million — that’s not inflation. That gives you some idea of the explosion in photography.” The explosion continues: Earlier this month, Sotheby’s London set a new record by selling Andreas Gursky’s giant diptych of a 99-cent discount store for $3.3 million.

– LUBOW, Arthur (2007). «The Luminist», The New York Times, 25 février.

Ce billet a été publié le 22 octobre 2008, 13:47, et rangé dans les catégories suivantes: Extra-mondanités. Vous pouvez suivre les commentaires pour ce billet en vous abonnant à son flux RSS. Both comments and pings are currently closed.