It's Picasso...No, It's Giacometti...No, It's Picasso...Ehhhh, What's on Animal Planet?

I don't always agree with Holland Cotter's take on the art market. After all, I depend upon it being healthy, and he doesn't. I want it to be strong; he cheered when it stumbled. But when the man is right, he's right. In his take on the ---yawn---record-setting auction result last night, he echoed my sentiments exactly:

Whatever the state of the global economy, there’s always a ton of discretionary cash floating around looking for some place to land. Last night at Christie’s a chunk of it — $106.5 million to be exact – landed on a Picasso painting called “Nude, Green Leaves and Bust,” setting the record for any art sold anywhere at auction up till now.

Despite the high figure, the event feels a bit ho-hum. The sales price is, relatively speaking, just a notch up from the $104.5 million that Sotheby’s got for a Giacometti sculpture in London in February, which was in turn only a smidge more expensive than an earlier record-setting Picasso. These days, there’s so much money in so many hands, and so many of those hands are after trophy art, that record-breaking has become routine, de rigueur.

Two, three, four million extra? More? Worth it. After all, if you’re the evening’s big spender, you not only suddenly own some fantastically valuable object, but your extravagance gets a mention in the news. Lay out the same bucks for a hospital wing, and who cares?

Of course, the conventional wisdom is that this rise in the tide will raise all boats, so I should be encouraged. But ask just about any dealer in Chelsea, and they'll tell you that while the bluest of the market's chips are selling at a fast clip, the rest of the market is still just trudging along. Things are better than a year ago (when it felt as if we'd entered the Twilight Zone), for sure, but it's still hard out there.

But that doesn't explain to me why this record seems so "so what." It is, as Mr. Cotter notes, "just a notch up" on the previous record, and good news is good news (and these days, I'll take it). I guess I have this sense that setting the record was the goal here. Someone decided that they wanted to own not just "Nude, Green Leaves and Bust" (a perfectly fine painting from what I can tell by jpeg), but "the most expensive work of art ever sold at auction." And once it had been bid up past the old record, well...been there, done that.

It all just seems so 2007.