Modern art. Discount retailers. Huh?
February 18th, 2008, 8:40 pm · Post a Comment · posted by Aaron
We can add modern art to the list of things I don’t really understand.
I was working on an article today about the 99 Cents Only store that’s going into the Barstow Shopping Center at the 1300 block of East Main Street. Henry Chu, the corporation’s vice-president of marketing was trying to impress upon me how clean and orderly the company keeps its stores. He told me that the stores are so clean that German photographer Andreas Gursky took a photo, “99 Cent,” of the company’s store on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood.
The photo sold for $2,256,000 at a Sotheby’s auction in 2006, then the highest price ever paid for a photo at auction, according to Photo District News Online.
The painting can be seen at the 99 Cents Only Store Web site.
Don’t get me wrong. It’s a nice looking photo. It’s a nice looking store. There’s wide aisles and good lighting. Bright packages. The brightly colored packages of candy make me want to hit the office vending machine (for the fifth time today.) That’s all well and good, I’m just not sure a photo of a discount store is worth more than what I’ll probably make in a lifetime.
Of course, “99 cent” is a deal, pun intended, compared to Gursky’s “99 cent II, Diptych,” sold to an unnamed private collector for $2.48 million in 2006, according to Photo District News Online.
A March 2007 article found at Popphoto.com, theorized that the photos may have been priced higher because they were sold at a contemporary art sale, and not with other photographs. The article cited the Sotheby’s catalogue entry for the photo sale and compared Gursky’s work to Jackson Pollock, Donald Judd and Andy Warhol.
Here’s what the catalogue entry said:
“Andreas Gursky’s powerful large scale photographs have quickly informed the way that we view the ‘the fetishism of our material world’ and have immediately become a part of established artistic vocabulary … Executed on a grand scale, his photographs survey the post-Capitalist landscape, searching for the signifiers which define our daily lives.”
Please don’t ask me what any of that means, I’m going to go read a comic book. Possibly Spiderman or maybe the Green Hornet if I’m feeling uber-sophisticated.
Jason Smith
Desert Dispatch, Staff Writer
