What Price? $6.50, not $6.5 million

As you can tell from my previous post, the article by Jonathan Jones about Peter Lik’s Phantom in The Guardian ticked me off, especially with its phantom price. Then I started thinking about all the paint-by-number “paintings” and how they were not art, and by extension, no painting would be art. Makes sense, no?

If this line of “thinking” is good for photography, written in a world-class publication, then it must be good and it must apply to other venues of art. Why stop there, everybody with their mobile phones is making movies, so the cinema is out. Even the kids are making silly putty sculptures, there goes sculpture. This is, of course, nonsense, but fun to think about.

Photographs, $6.50 Each

Then I decided to offer several photographs for sale at a bargain price of $6.50 (no additional zeros). Unlike Peter Lik’s Phantom, I guarantee the uniqueness of each photograph. They were taken from a commercial flight plane window somewhere over the USA, using an infrared camera. Since weather conditions, flight paths, the presence of infrared cameras on board, and interest to photograph during the flight are the determinants of the photographs you see, I doubt very much you will find anything resembling these photographs.

Furthermore, they convey my vision, my tools, my “technology”, and my processing, so the result is the unique photographs you see below. Each is priced at $6.50 just to make a point, one-millionth of the price, and a better value to boot! Now, this is a spoof and I do not expect you to buy them, but in terms of uniqueness and photographic qualities, they surpass the $6.5 million Phantom by 30,000 feet!

These are Unique Photographs, Well Worth $6.50

You can Google them and search for the images. You will not find anything like them elsewhere. Here is a link for an image search. What a bargain! if you want to offer me $6.5 million for all four, I will be grateful and find a law firm to represent me and talk to the law firm representing you; we will all have fun reading the news in the papers.

The warning to future buyers of photography, check the provenance of the work you are getting, at least do a simple Google search to see how many more almost identical photographs are out there and look into the future value of your investment, before paying $6.5 million. What were you thinking?

Who knows, maybe I will sell more than one million and lick my chops while some of you will be talking about my record-breaking sales. Ho-ho-ho…

Click on the images to see them larger, uncropped, and read their titles.