“Art is a Lie that Tells the Truth” (Picasso)

“All art is quite useless,” quipped Oscar Wilde; still it may be unbelievably expensive.

A Picasso portrait, “Dora Maar With Cat,” sold for $95.2 million at Sotheby’s recently, the second-highest price ever paid for a painting at auction.

The image of Maar, one of Picasso’s mistresses, was sold on the second night of the important spring auctions. “Boy With a Pipe” (1905) holds the record price for a Picasso. That painting sold for $104.2 million in May 2004.

How does something that has no real monetary value (oil paint, canvas etc.) achieve the economic equivalent of enriched uranium; at what stage does a work of art go nuclear? When the subjective rises up and totally eclipses the objective.

Aging, deteriorating Picassos; their subjective worth, wildly increasing in the world of perception, unleashed inordinate objective value. The recent auction caused a buyer’s frenzy, as avatars of bidders, descended from around the world, betraying beauty’s power to possess and play one like a doll.

Affluent cognoscenti, connoisseurs of consciousness, pride themselves on being autonomous free agents moving within the plane of exploitation with immunity. Guided by good taste, poised to procure the priceless, inevitably they become slaves of art—at last only to be possessed by the higher power of descended beauty.

B. R. Sridhar Dev-Goswami observes in Reality the Beautiful: “Generally, whenever we see beauty, we think that beauty is to be exploited, but beauty is the exploiter, beauty is the master, and beauty is the ultimate controlling principle.”

How to convert matter into something valuable is not merely a capitalist’s trick; it requires consciousness to move over it. Without consciousness matter has got no value. Gold is of no value amongst the jackals and tigers. Matter is valued according to the demand of the subjective world.

Converting the abstract into the tangible—the subjective into the objective—means someone’s subjective realization is expressed objectively as art. As we come nearer to spirit proper concept is substance.

Ayn Rand Quote: “Now ask yourself: if you are not interested in abstract ideas, why does everyone feel compelled to use them? The fact is that abstract ideas are conceptual integrations that subsume an incalculable number of concretes—and that without abstract ideas you would not be able to deal with concrete, particular, real-life problems. You would be in the position of a newborn infant, to whom every object is a unique, unprecedented phenomenon. The difference between his mental state and yours lies in the number of conceptual integrations your mind has performed.”

The conceptual integration of the Infinite to the finite is a function of the Infinite. What is intangible, beyond sensory observation and verification—reveals itself. As beauty reveals itself the Infinite makes itself known to the finite through subjective agency—divine inspiration.