Cindy Sherman Print Sells For $3.9 Million At Auction, The Highest Ever For A Photogr

[paulr]

Crap. I wish I recognized its importance. What makes it more than a common snapshot? That it was staged? It's not like cubism, where we see the subject from all angles at once. (And that easily stated a point is perhaps why Paul wants us to eschew modernism with respect to this work.) Like Warhol, this seems to me famous for being famous.

If you're looking at it out of context there wouldn't be anything remarkable. It needs the context of the rest of the series (the untitled film stills) in order to make sense, and that needs the context of what came before and after for its broader importance.

As far as what "importance" means, we're not comparing it to a cure for HIV. This is about its influence on artists who came after. Sherman's work exerted tons.

[Mike Anderson]

...
I used to get all bent out of shape about Cindy Sherman. But I read some interviews with her, and realized she was just an artist doing her thing. When the world surprised her by lionizing her and throwing all kinds of money at her bank account, she respond the way I think any of us would have: gratefully.

Yeah, I was kind of intimated by her feminist anger (the twisted mannequin phase) until I saw "Guest of Cindy Sherman" (OK movie) and realized she's just a regular person whose work is art. And in that weird (NY art) context.

I don't often use 1980's vernacular but I say "you go girl" (I'm sure she'd appreciate that).

...Mike

[Brian C. Miller]

Where is Robspierre when we need him?

Dead! That psycho is dead, and good riddance! Because an art dealer buys a banal photograph for an absurd amount of money you want to summarily execute stock traders, lawyer, and bankers? Robspierre "passed" a "law" to execute "counter-revolutionaries." Sham accusations and sham trials, to lead to real death. We don't need it.

Better to photograph the poor and downtrodden, and then print it 30 feet high and put that on Wall Street, with the message, "You don't give a f***!" Photograph their houses, and put it side by side with that.

[Greg Miller]

At least its better than a photo of a photo of a cowboy...

[paulr]

I don't often use 1980's vernacular but I say "you go girl" (I'm sure she'd appreciate that).

Ha. Why do I doubt that someone who just sold a print for $3 million needs approval from the likes of us?

[Drew Wiley]

Real death? That happens all the time when people lose their jobs and their health insurance, and the fat cats just keep getting richer and richer. But lighten up ... after all, Robspierre finally got a deserved dose of his own medicine. These things go in cycles. Apparently some of the Romanticist French paintings of the Napoleon III era
which were the rave at the time still haven't recovered the value folks paid for them way back then. Someone will probably find a missing nose from Michael Jackson and then a collector will pay millions for it; then their nephew will inherit it and throw it out with the cat litter where it really belongs. Why is one idiotic baseball card worth thousands, but a whole stack of others only good for clothepinning to bicycle spokes? They're all the same to me; but frankly, I can't even figure out why they pay ball players what they do to hit something with a stick and spit chaw, when it takes more
skill and hygiene to be a mimimum-wage pizza tosser.

[Mike Anderson]

Ha. Why do I doubt that someone who just sold a print for $3 million needs approval from the likes of us?

I'm just showing my support. I'm there for her if she needs me.

...Mike

[Drew Wiley]

"Likes of us"??? What does that imply? ... that someone is better because they got more loot than you or I? Or that their art if better because they got paid more for it?
By that standard, Van Gogh was an inferior artist to any of us.

[matthew klos]

I am not a huge fan of her work, but i will admit that she has certainly changed 20th century photography in a very positive light. Good for her, i would rather buy Sugimoto, or Vermeer for money like that.

[Brian Ellis]

I am not a huge fan of her work, but i will admit that she has certainly changed 20th century photography in a very positive light. Good for her, i would rather buy Sugimoto, or Vermeer for money like that.

For $3.9 million you might get to keep a Vermeer in your house for a few weeks but it wouldn't get you anywhere near buying one. The last sale of a Vermeer that I remember was for something like $40 million. Cindy Sherman is peanuts compared to Vermeer. But I get your point. There's a whole lot of things I'd rather have for $3.9 million too. But I don't go around ranting and raving about the NYC art scene just because someone makes a different choice than I would make when it comes to deciding how to spend their money.