Picasso Record

Behold the most expensive daub ever sold at auction. Pablo Picasso’s Women of Algiers (Version O, 1954-55) fetched $179,365,000 at Christie’s New York sale yesterday. A garish, badly designed painting of the interior of a brothel strikes me as an insult to the Women of Algiers, but every oil-rich sheikh must have a Picasso. In the same sale Alberto Giacometti’s pipe-cleaner bronze Pointing Man went under the hammer for $141,000,000, making it the most expensive sculpture ever sold at auction (CLICK).