woman's tear in picasso slashes value by $65 million. first of all, that's ridiculous, and we won't know until the met sells it, as well it should. and second, the whole way we treat art is completely insane, or merely stupid. look, you arbitrarily appoint picasso to the status of superhuman genius, and the infinite cash is an index of the bizarre ascension to godhead, which renders the man and his work incomprehensible and worse than useless. that painting is something a human being made, in a context, for the same basic reasons in the same basic ways that people make things. it's worth $8,000, or i guess 4, now. really i seriously propose that we get rid of the idiotic idea of genius, pricelessness (=extreme expensiveness), etc and just try to craft useful or beautiful or critical objects as best we can.

plus picasso has a bit of a sucking problem, as that particular painting well illustrates, and i say that people more often pretend to be blown away or even to like the stuff or to want to go see it than actually appreciate it. it's more about peer pressure and structures of (aesthetic) authority than any intrinsic merit.