How much to purchase all Monet paintings?

As you may know, one of the “Haystack” series of Claude Monet sold this week at Sotheby's for $110 million. This is the highest price to date for a Monet. Cool price, huh?

I decided to estimate the total value of Monet’s corpus of work. Here's how. First, there are about 2500 paintings and drawings out there. (Greater numbers are estimated and some are certainly lost.) The cheapest one I could find was sold recently for $10,000. I used two mathematical models for the total cost, one an exponential model, and the other a power model.

Anyway, for these models, I estimate the total value of Monet’s work to be between $530 and $540 million. Both models exhibit a very high drop off rate in pricing. For example, the fourth most expensive Monet is estimated to cost about $25 million, with the estimated average cost of the four to be about $45 million. This has much to do with the model, but probably as much due to the available clientele with such deep pockets.

If we had more data, we could apply standard nonlinear regression methods. But it is interesting to note the value of Monet’s output, and that of many other great artists exceed by far the values of fairly substantial corporations.

Comments

Human Simulation is Possible - by Humans

Human Simulation: Agent-Based Modeling and the Computational Case for Our Reality 1. Introduction In the essay, we introduce the notion that humanity could be a deliberate simulation based on an extremely simple single-celled organism, hardly anything more complex than that. This will allow an (apparently) new interpretation of the notion that humanity is simulated, but that there is no master engineer at a massive number of dials and switches, responsible for every twist and turn of our universe and lives. We begin with the notion that the universe exists and operates under its own laws. So, given the Earth [2] , when and where life first began, it was infused with a living agent, self-actualized, reproductive, and with other basic rules for its operations, interactions, and much of what single-celled organisms do today. The idea from this occurred some years back when writing code in ActionScript (formerly Flash), I was able to create...

The Calculus of Ideas and Patterns

Introduction. When dealing with ideas, patterns, intuition, and brainstorming, we need operations or rules not unlike those of arithmetic. The goal is not proof, a finished device, or a fait accompli , but rather a foundation for further investigation and study. In some cases, these operations may yield a proposition, that is, something capable of being proved. In this sense, they form a practical logic of intuition. The article concludes with a few select examples from a variety of venues. Setting. We are working with a given idea, problem, or project, or simply just thinking. Our aim is to discover pathways, patterns, or conceptual connections that may be useful. The following operations describe ways in which ideas and patterns can be generated, transformed, or refined. These also work toward understanding the imagination. Yet, this framework is distinguished from formal logic and proof. We are tempted to call them as “soft logic” because while nothing is proved, reasons...

Hugging your pet.

There are two kinds of pet people: Those who love their pet and hug it to show affection, and those who hug themselves with their pet. By the way, in the photo below, you see a baby echidna. They are called puggles.

First Blog

Search This Blog