Evidence receipt / evaluation
Published · transcript-backedPaul Graham: evaluation
9 Aug 2023 Conversations with Tyler Paul Graham on Ambition, Art, and Evaluating Talent
“It sounds weird, but if you look at where the money’s spent at auction, it’s almost all fashionable contemporary crap because if you think about how prices in very high-end art are set, they’re auction prices.”
Source trail
Everything needed to verify it.
- Speaker
- Paul Graham
- Attribution
- Verified speaker
- Claim type
- evaluation
- Recorded
- 9 Aug 2023
- Publisher
- Conversations with Tyler
Transcript context
…I agree. It sounds weird, but if you look at where the money’s spent at auction, it’s almost all fashionable contemporary crap because if you think about how prices in very high-end art are set, they’re auction prices. How many people does it take to generate an auction price? Two. Just two. So, you have boneheaded Russians who want to have a Picasso on their wall so people will think they’re legit, or hedge fund managers’ wives who’ve been told to buy impressive art to hang in their loft so when people come over, they’ll say, “Oh, look, they’ve got a Damien Hirst.” The way art prices at the very high end are set is almost entirely by deeply bogus people, [laughs] which is great, actually. When I was an artist, I used to be annoyed by this. Now that I buy a lot of art at auction, I’m delighted because it means there’s all this money. You see Andy Warhol’s screen prints selling for $90 million. Yes. Old masters can be, I wouldn’t say cheap, but I would say radically underpriced.…
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