O/T Da Vinci painting.

[ramAnag]

Apart from being completely bonkers, can it be justified for anyone to spend around $450m on a painting when there is so much poverty and hardship in the world today?
The irony of it being a portrait of Christ should not go unnoticed but...utterly immoral or the freedom to do to do what you want with your money...thoughts?

[AdiSalisbury]

I don't know how many £'s I've burned up over the years on football, music, golf, cinema tickets, kit kats and xmas cards, so I don't really feel in a good position to judge the morality in a negative standing.

What's your take, or are you not really sure?

[Andy_Faber]

Apart from being completely bonkers, can it be justified for anyone to spend around $450m on a painting when there is so much poverty and hardship in the world today?
The irony of it being a portrait of Christ should not go unnoticed but...utterly immoral or the freedom to do to do what you want with your money...thoughts?

At face value it may appear immoral

BUT, do you have a pension? Who's to say that it hasn't been bought by your pension fund's investment manager?

[roger_ramjet]

Apart from being completely bonkers, can it be justified for anyone to spend around $450m on a painting when there is so much poverty and hardship in the world today?
The irony of it being a portrait of Christ should not go unnoticed but...utterly immoral or the freedom to do to do what you want with your money...thoughts?

Do you own a house despite there being many homeless people? Do you travel on airlines simply for the pleasure of travel when the declining fuel resources so used could be better utilised elsewhere? Let the immoralist in the greenhouse cast the first stone....

[StensonRam]

I bet the person who bought it for 45 quid back in the day isn't that bothered either!

[Andy_Faber]

I bet the person who bought it for 45 quid back in the day isn't that bothered either!

yes there's inflation for you. Jesus should have registered his image rights back in the day

[Andy_Faber]

Apart from being completely bonkers, can it be justified for anyone to spend around $450m on a painting when there is so much poverty and hardship in the world today?
The irony of it being a portrait of Christ should not go unnoticed but...utterly immoral or the freedom to do to do what you want with your money...thoughts?

In fact RA, the transaction as such is irrelevant to your stance on wealth distribution because the cash has just gone from one very deep pocket to another, and if, as I suspect, the painting has been bought for investment, I doubt it will move away from the strongroom it was being kept in.

More immoral to me is giving almost exactly the same amount (£300m) per year to 'relieve poverty' in a country which has its own space/nuclear programme.

[ramAnag]

Do you own a house despite there being many homeless people? Do you travel on airlines simply for the pleasure of travel when the declining fuel resources so used could be better utilised elsewhere? Let the immoralist in the greenhouse cast the first stone....

Not entirely sure it wouldn’t be setting a dangerous precedent to dictate to people what they can buy Manx but I don’t think it’s got much to do with me being a house owner or enjoying a certain amount of travel Rog.
Guess it’s all part of the ‘haves and have nots’ argument. There will always be people who earn and deserve to earn more than others, I accept that, but this is an extreme example and can it be right that people have such great wealth to spend so frivolously while others are literally starving and homeless?
As a World society we seem to have lost all notion of balance and proportion imo, and then there is the question of whether it is morally right for an individual to be able to purchase great art and possibly lock it away for ever, which may or may not be the case. I think I feel such artefacts should only be for sale to ********* where they may in turn be put on public display and in turn raise money for the public good but I know that will be way too idealistic for some.

[Romanis]

Damn. I had placed a bid of 1 billion rejected. Bloody unfair.
It was genuine Zimbabwean currency.

[roger_ramjet]

Idealism to the point of self parody maybe.

What has to be taken into account is that, for all its artistic merit, this is not a piece of art being sold really. Its an investment as Andy alluded to earlier. Would you get on the same moral high horse if you had read that one investment company had paid $ 1 billion for some US Treasury stock? If so you will end up with a very sore arse as these sort of deals go on every day and that horse has a hard saddle.

No value has been "stolen" from the poor and needy - simply two investors have exchanged a piece of art for a notional value that has no relationship with its intrinsic worth. If you want to get indignant,consider Christie's position: a $ 50.3 million buyers premium and no doubt a percentage of the actual $ 400 million sale price. They maybe earned $ 100 million plus for being a market maker facilitating the exchange of an asset between to investors.

As for a gallery buying it - get real: it has an investment value way in excess of what any gallery could afford to pay - let alone make money on for your "public good". Besides which, its not a remotely interesting piece of work: a portrait of a bloke painted some 1500 years after he had died. The only interest in seeing it lies in fact in its alleged value.

Stenson: you are not far wrong. The painting was sold for less than $ 10,000 as recently as 2005. It was bought by a group of art dealers as a painting by one of Leonardo's students: they restored it and then magically authenticated it as a genuine LDV ! The kings new clothes fade into insignificance in comparison to that level of chicanery.

So we have something traded at an artificial value between parties. Claude Davies anyone?