“The western art market emphasizes originality and authenticity, with the result that everybody wants to buy a relatively small number of important works and important artists. If a work is a fake, then it’s worthless, no matter how beautiful it might be.
“In China, by contrast, there’s much less of a premium paid on originality, and many masters came up through the ranks by copying the works of their predecessors. That Qi Baishi painting [a painting that may, or may not, have been sold for $65 million in the recent past], for instance, dates only to 1946, but could have been painted at any time in the past few hundred years: its style is timeless. On top of that, art is a manufactured commodity in China, where workshops with hundreds of employees churn out copies of the work of the masters. This makes perfect sense, if what you’re doing is creating something aesthetic to go on the wall. The problems start to arise when the art objects rise in value, according to whether or not someone believes them to be authentic.”
Yet Felix goes exactly the opposite way in a recent column about something else he likes to write about, expensive wine. Shockingly, Felix, who is a pretty unabashed oenophile, never happier than when guzzling a “great” wine, boldly takes the bull by the horns and admits that, in blind tastings, everyone, but everyone, prefers cheap wine over expensive. People prefer expensive wines only when they know the price. “Fine wine” is entirely a status good—the pleasures spring from the psyche rather than the senses. So buy cheap and laugh all the way to the bank, right?
Well, no, says Felix. Expensive is better, really: “when you really pay attention to the wine that you’re drinking — something which you’re much more likely to do when you know that it’s expensive — you’re going to be able to discover beauty and nuance which you might otherwise miss.” The beauty and nuance that, Felix just got finished telling us, don’t exist. Or, rather, if they do exist, exist in the cheap wines rather than the “great.”
So, as I understand him, Felix is telling us that, in an ideal world, we’d hang our walls with superb, hand-painted, $10,000 copies of Velasquez, Vermeer, and Rembrandt, while sipping $1,000 first-growth Bordeaux.
Afterwords
Felix even gives a shout out to Grey Goose for marketing if not inventing very, very expensive diluted alcohol— “The genius of Grey Goose was that it created a whole new category above what always used to be the high end of the vodka market — and in doing so, managed to create genuine happiness among vodka drinkers who spent billions of dollars buying up the super-premium branding.” Because who wants to escape reality on a budget?
