One of the good things about the way art is priced is that big paintings (although strangely enough not very big paintings) cost more than small paintings. This means you can often get important and beautiful small works for less than the cost of a large average work by the same artist. One artist who totally understood this dynamic was Andy Warhol. To double the prices of his paintings he often included a second blank or monochrome canvas as part of the deal. Double the size, double the profit. We saw a great example of these kind of paintings in Basel: a classic disaster painting cunningly doubled up with a black side-kick.
Image: Andy Warhol’s Black and white disaster #4 [5 deaths 17 times in black and white] 1963, collection Kunst Museum Basel
