My friend, Jack Forster, editor of Revolution magazine, recommended this article in the New York Times -- Art Is Hard to See Through the Clutter of Dollar Signs

Much of this seems to hold true in the world of vintage and collectible watches, only there are fewer digits after the dollar sign, in our little world.

Jeff

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Art Is Hard to See Through the Clutter of Dollar Signs, By ROBERTA SMITH, November 13, 2013

As our troubled age becomes ever more gilded, art auction prices soar with bone-numbing regularity. A new high-water mark was reached on Tuesday, when a 1969 triptych by the British painter Francis Bacon sold for $142 million while the Christie’s auction in which it was featured took in $692 million. Both figures exceeded recent highs: One arrived in spring 2012, when Edvard Munch’s “The Scream” sold for $119 million at Sotheby’s; the other came last spring, when a Christie’s auction total reached $492 million. It seems that people really, really like art these days.

Auctions have become the leading indicator of ultra-conspicuous consumption, pieces of public, male-dominated theater in which collectors, art dealers and auction houses flex their monetary clout, mostly for one another. The spectacle of watching these privileged few (mostly hedge fund managers and investment-hungry consortiums, it seems) tossing around huge amounts of money has become a rarefied spectator sport. These events are painful to watch yet impossible to ignore and deeply alienating if you actually love art for its own sake.

More than ever, the glittery auction-house/blue-chip gallery sphere is spinning out of control far above the regular workaday sphere where artists, dealers and everyone else struggle to get by. It is a kind of fiction that has almost nothing to do with anything real — not new art, museums or historical importance. It is becoming almost as irrelevant as the work, reputation and market of the kitsch painter Thomas Kinkade.

Some have tried to put things into perspective, lamenting that the Bacon price almost equaled the $154 million that President Obama requested for the National Endowment for the Arts for fiscal year 2013 — and more than the $138 million that the endowment actually received, with cuts.

Others have pointed out that the price would have paid, twice, for the renovated Queens Museum, which cost a modest $69 million. It has been noted once more that such figures make it impossible to see the art for the money, that works costing this much are, at least temporarily, damaged goods.

But here’s another perspective. Prices for postwar art began to rise in 1980, when the Whitney Museum of American Art paid $1 million for Jasper Johns’s “Three Flags.” The art world was shocked. Adjusted for inflation, the $1 million spent on the Johns painting would be roughly $2.8 million in today’s dollars. Now, this would seem a drop in the bucket.

And the system seems greased to go even higher. In a postsale news conference on Wednesday, Brett Gorvy, worldwide head of postwar and contemporary art at Christie’s, seemed to be in gung-ho mode. “This isn’t a bubble,” he said. “It’s the beginning of something new.”

Yet it seems obvious that the Bacon — three portraits of the artist’s friend, the British painter Lucian Freud — is a special case and a guaranteed money magnet. It is a portrait of one of Britain’s two most famous modern artists painted by the other one, both of whom led flamboyant and well-documented lives. More skeptically, the triptych, “Three Studies of Lucian Freud,” might also be termed a portrait of a middlebrow artist by another middlebrow artist. Yes, the work is beautifully painted with a fetching yellow background, yet if its subject were someone else, or if it simply had an unfamiliar name in its title, it probably would have gone for quite a bit less.

In the meantime, it helps to remember that today most people look at Mr. Johns’s “Three Flags” at the Whitney without seeing a million dollar signs. It may be hard to look at this Bacon without thinking of its extraordinary price. But since the buyer is currently a mystery, it’s anyone’s guess whether we will see it again anytime soon.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: November 18, 2013

A critic’s notebook article on Thursday about the $142.4 million sale of Francis Bacon’s “Three Studies of Lucian Freud” at Christie’s auction house misstated the year of an earlier notable art transaction, the Whitney Museum of American Art’s purchase of Jasper Johns’s painting “Three Flags.” The Johns painting was bought for $1 million in 1980, not in 1977. And because of that error, the article gave an incorrect cost for the Johns painting in today’s dollars. Adjusted for inflation, the $1 million sales price would be roughly $2.8 million now, not $3.85 million.