A digitally altered photo of a river worth more than $4 million?
Yahoo and the Daily Mail reports
A photo of an “accurate image of a modern river” has been sold for $4.38 million, earning the highest ever price for a photograph at an auction.
The photo, which depicts a bland scene of a river, was digitally altered by artist Andreas Gursky to remove pesky distractions such as dog walkers, cyclists and factory building to focus on the river itself, the Daily Mail reported.
The picture, called “Rhine It”, fetched the mammoth auction price at Christie’s in New York.
It was described by the auction house as “a dramatic and profound reflection on human existence and our relationship to nature on the cusp of the 21st century”.
The purchaser of the expensive print is not currently known. The previous record for a photo at an auction was Cindy Sherman’s 1981 print ‘Untitled’, which earned $3.7 million.
To which I say: this is a nonsense. The photo is little more than a happy snap, with some simple photoshopping. Millions of people do the same every day on their home PCs.
What’s more, it’s not merely bland, it’s utterly meaningless, tedious and boring. And secondly, and much more importantly, did the investor (he/she could hardly be called an art lover) consider what that $4.38 million might have done feeding children in the Horn of Africa? Or, indeed, how it might have impacted upon any other worthy cause?
Did they pause for one moment, in their rush to acquire something which they hope will increase in value, to consider how many lives they could have changed for the better, perhaps utterly and profoundly, before buying a print to sit, presumably, in a temperature-controlled vault, somewhere?
Well may the occupy movement cry “Tax the 1%, we are the 99%”. No wonder the purchaser is unknown. His house would be the next place with a tent city springing up on the front lawn.
Well, This Is What I Think 