Word: vel
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...inflation inevitably becomes a hedge against perception. Its price has made the painting different, of an order other than art. Museums, which should resist this syndrome, tend to exploit it. Thus the Metropolitan got untold mileage out of the fact that it paid $5,544,000 for its new Velásquez, which therefore became more "interesting" than other and greater paintings in its collection. The picture becomes a tourist object to be gawked at rather than an experience to be enjoyed in all its complexity...
Thus it was with Velásquez's portrait of his mulatto assistant, Juan de Pareja, which brought $5,544,000 at Christie's last November-the highest price ever paid for a work of art at public auction. The winning bid belonged to Wildenstein & Co., and young Alec Wildenstein explained at the time, with a straight face, that the family gallery had bought it because his great-grandfather had been in love with it and left instructions to snap it up if it ever came on the market. But last week the Metropolitan Museum of Art announced...
...million in 1961 for Rembrandt's Aristotle Contemplating the Bust of Homer, and the record for a private sale, an estimated $5,000,000 that was paid in 1967 for Leonardo's Ginevra dei Bend, by Washington's National Gallery of Art. The buyer of the Velásquez, Alec Wildenstein, 30, vice president of the New York firm of Wildenstein, firmly denied that he was acting on behalf of any art collector. Said he: "To buy this painting at that price is no risk. This is really cheap." Still, the expansive price staggered most art experts...
Juan de Pareja is a remarkable painting, but it is not the best Velásquez. His Rokeby Venus at Britain's National Gallery, for instance, is far more important. Similarly, the Met's Aristotle is not the best Rembrandt. The dazzling prices such paintings fetch are merely reflections of the fact that there are few Old Masters left outside museums...
...Velásquez sale was an economic event, not an aesthetic one. Said one dealer: "It's not so much that art prices rise, it's more that the value of money keeps falling...