re: This painting from Cy Twombly sold for 41.6 million last year

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One could say that any child could make a drawing like Twombly only in the sense that any fool with a hammer could fragment sculptures as Rodin did, or any house painter could spatter paint as well as Pollock. In none of these cases would it be true. In each case the art lies not so much in the finesse of the individual mark, but in the orchestration of a previously uncodified set of personal "rules" about where to act and where not, how far to go and when to stop, in such a way as the cumulative courtship of seeming chaos defines an original, hybrid kind of order, which in turn illuminates a complex sense of human experience not voiced or left marginal in previous art.

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What a load of horseshite

My 4 year old just turned into daddy's retirement plan!

Buy art for cheap. Get a friend of a friend to appraise it for big money. Donate it to a museum. Boom, you just turned a $5k purchase into a $5M tax write off.

Once one particular artist gets appraised like this, suddenly all his work starts to go up in value. Then the artist dies, and the value really kicks up because suddenly no more of it is being made.

If you want to make your art worth something, die. If you want your art to become really valuable, commit suicide.

They put the money in the frame.

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Explain to me how this works, in your opinion? If I have 42 million dollars of drug money and I spend it on a painting, that's not laundering it, that's spending it.

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You took money earned through illicit means, then purchased a "clean" asset worth the same $ amount. Sell that asset for the same or more amount of money, and suddenly you possess $42M that has a paper trail of where it came, an art sale. Do this enough times or through enough intermediaries and it gets very hard to track the original source of the cash.

Google Freeports in art

I assume the title of this detailed piece is "Cleaning out my brush"

Yes, the will often to do it at ultra inflated prices, sometimes even buying and selling effectively "to themselves" through all kinds of shell corps.

Hellen Keller got drunk

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One could say that any child could make a drawing like Twombly only in the sense that any fool with a hammer could fragment sculptures as Rodin did, or any house painter could spatter paint as well as Pollock. In none of these cases would it be true. In each case the art lies not so much in the finesse of the individual mark, but in the orchestration of a previously uncodified set of personal "rules" about where to act and where not, how far to go and when to stop, in such a way as the cumulative courtship of seeming chaos defines an original, hybrid kind of order, which in turn illuminates a complex sense of human experience not voiced or left marginal in previous art.

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