Really Expensive Art.

Nothing represents the passion, the price, and the confusion over modern art
quite like a Rothko.
This one sold for just over $46M.

Some really expensive (and really great) artwork sold for some MASSIVE prices this year...take a look at the top 18...
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/12/17/most-expensive-art-2013_n_4454930.html?utm_hp_ref=arts

And in case you're a person who reacts to this stuff with "Who does this help? How is it worth this much? or Why don't they spend it on something more useful?" I've outlined a few of my thoughts on that below...

It's an investment, not a donation. Considering that art, historically, can appreciate over time, it's a fantastic investment if you know what you're doing. For example, Eric Clapton originally bought a Gerhard Richter piece for something like $3M in 2001 and recently sold it for $34M. That's a pretty good return in just over a decade! (he's got a second richter rumored to be entering the auction world too! That's an estimated $70M return on $6M in spending...)

Also, people act as if this money, if not spent on these paintings, would automatically be put into something "more useful" or "positive" like education or some general public fund...but these billionaires aren't spenidng it because they're nice...they are buying an investment. If they didn't spend it here they'd just go to the stock market or buy another mansion which also wouldn't really help anyone more than buying a painting anyway.

On the "use it for more useful things like education" note...do you really think that would be money well spent? We already spend billions in public money on education yearly...I'm not sure 30-140 million extra would, all-of-the-sudden, make any kind of big impact. It's not like our education system is only 30M short of succeeding...in fact, many would say the problem is not that we don't have enough money, it's that we don't know what we are doing with it and what we are doing isn't effective. That's the type of problem that doesn't simply require an influx of money, but a better use of it. An extra 30-140M would do next to nothing in the grand scheme...

I get it...it's a lot of money. But when people across the world are spending 100M on their 5th house, 500K on their 20th car and hundreds of millions buying stock into companies that haven't yet created any product, 140 million on a "one-of-a-kind innovation in culture and history" doesn't really seem that crazy to me.

This is our culture. It's extremely valuable whether or not you can think of things that could use some of the cash....and frankly, art getting high prices is rather inspiring to me. In a culture that has so much become about industrialization, efficiency and mass-production, a unique human creation made by hand is deemed just as valuable as some of the brands that dominate the corporate world.

Could the money be spent on something that helps people more directly? Yes. But I think we could say that about pretty much anything (why did you just spend $500 on the new iPhone when there's starving kids in Africa and you have an iPhone 4?)...besides, as the saying always goes, money doesn't buy happiness....so why do we always think someone else's will fix our problems?