Art in the Age of Consumption: Has the Painting Lost Its Meaning?

The artist once stood alone before the canvas asking what he was trying to say, and this book follows the moment another question entered, the question of what a painting is worth. It opens in a Christie's auction room in New York, where Salvator Mundi, attributed to Leonardo da Vinci, turned into a theatrical performance of rising numbers, then turns to Van Gogh, who painted fields, chairs and shoes through pain and never saw the market built around his name, and to Picasso, whose signature alone slows footsteps. Basquiat carries the street onto canvas, Warhol brings the supermarket into the museum, a Banksy shreds itself after the sale and only grows more famous, and Maurizio Cattelan's banana taped to a wall reopens the question of what counts as art. The auction room appears as a modern Colosseum, yet the book refuses the easy opposition of art and money, holding that price neither proves beauty nor disproves it, and sets beside a millionaire who knows a painting's price and feels nothing a child who asks why the eye in it is sad. After weighing the artist as a brand and the algorithm that has made images abundant, it ends with art's greatest value as what happens inside a person who looks, falls silent and changes.