The revival of Yasmina Reza’s play Art on Broadway this fall comes at an interesting moment for the art world.
In the play, three men—played by Neil Patrick Harris, James Corden, and Bobby Cannavale in the new production—stand in front of what looks an awful lot like a blank canvas. In fact, it’s an avant-garde painting by a famous artist. One of the three has just bought the painting for a steep price; another thinks it’s awful and can’t believe his friend paid so much for it. Over the course of a wild and comic 90-minute conversation, Art raises age-old questions about human relationships—how brutally honest you can be with your friends and still keep them. It also, of course, asks some fundamental questions about art. As Michael Billington put it in the Guardian in 2016, “Reza … asks whether aesthetics is now inextricably confused with market value: when we read that a painting has been sold for countless millions in the auction room, do we somehow rate it more highly?” In the aftermath of an overheated run on young artists, collectors today are assessing the purchases that confusion may have led them to.
When the play was first performed, in Paris in 1994, the art market was in a similar place: in the hangover from the go-go 1980s, with a headache brought on by the confusion of aesthetics with market value. The ’80s saw numerous headlines about unprecedentedly pricey paintings splashed across the front pages of newspapers: Ryoei Saito paying $82.5 million for Van Gogh’s Dr. Gachet! Pace’s Arne Glimcher selling a painting by Jasper Johns (a living artist!) to the Whitney for a million. Those headlines were attended by hand-wringing that aesthetics was indeed being confused with market value.
Things have only ramped up in the intervening decades. We’ve seen the boom of the early 2000s, the even bigger boom from 2011 to 2023 with a painting attributed to Leonardo going for $450 million, and the rise of speculation on wet-paint artists. No one’s worries back in the ’80s and ’90s were anywhere near as intense as, to take a random example from the litany of such complaints we hear these days, critic Jason Farago’s in the New York Times in 2022. Under the headline “Catch a Rising Star at the Auction House,” Farago wrote that watching young artists’ works go for millions at the marquee spring evening sales “was … like anaphylactic shock. Even after years of being inured to artistic price tags as arbitrary as Social Security numbers (one tries, as a critic forming a judgment, to pay them no mind), I watched the total, and possibly permanent, supersedure of the old establishment by speculative hype as if I were no longer alive at all.”
In Art, the two men’s heated argument ultimate leads to—spoiler alert—an act of (complicated) vandalism. So, how much was that expensive painting? In the original script, Reza wrote that the piece cost 200,000 francs (less than $60,000 today). According to Vogue, for the new production director Scott Ellis consulted with a curator at the Met to come up with an updated price—one that would seem expensive in today’s terms, and ultimately arrived at $300,000. That’s around how much you would have paid last December for, say [consults list of sales at Art Basel Miami] a Lesley Vance painting. Is $300,000 a lot for a work of contemporary art? A little? In today’s market, where some collectors are calling primary prices “irrational,” who knows!
“It’s a big number and it feels horribly correct,” Vogue writer Adrienne Miller observes of that $300,000 her article on “Art”. “In an era where everything is hyperbolic and inflated—cost, expertise, ego, outrage—the price had to rise accordingly.”
