Porn From The Year 1888 Just Sold At Auction For $149 Million As Paul Allen's Whole Collection Goes For $1.5B

NEW YORK (AP) — Works by artists including Cézanne, Seurat, and van Gogh sold for a record-breaking $1.5 billion during the first part of Christie’s two-day auction of the late Microsoft co-founder Paul G. Allen’s masterpiece-heavy collection.

All 60 of the artworks put up for auction Wednesday night in New York sold, and five paintings sold for prices above $100 million.

Georges Seurat’s pointillist “Les Poseuses, Ensemble (Petite version)” sold for $149.2 million, the evening’s highest price. The larger version of “Les Poseuses” is at the Barnes Collection in Philadelphia.

I bet if you told 19th century painters that one day, people would pay MILLIONS for their paintings so they could use them as a tax shelter and fake philanthropy marvel at their beauty they'd be astounded. The fine art game is absolutely bananas to me. We've probably all heard about the "Lost Leonardo" and other priceless pieces that aren't actually priceless because auction houses and accountants put prices on them at their convenience, but you get my point. $500M for a Da Vinci makes some level of sense to me. $149.2M for a piece of porn by a guy named Georges Seurat blows my mind. And make no mistake, this is porn

Guy Bell. Shutterstock Images.

There's the famous Supreme Court statement about porn that "you can't really define it but you know it when you see it". Well by 1888 standards this painting is downright salacious. First of all this is the "petite" version of this painting. A painting that could easily be rolled up and hidden in your pantaloons or tucked away behind the washboard. The painting is also very pervy. A tell tale sign of porn. This isn't some madonna breast feeding her young child. This looks like it some peeping Tom snuck his way into the ladies changing room as they were getting ready to watch their best beaus play croquet. Amateur voyeurism. You post a picture like this in the year 2022 and you're getting up to three years in jail and paying $25,000 in fines for revenge porn. The people handling the painting with white gloves is probably to prevent them from catching industrial revolution era STI. $149M for a painting by a horny, creepy, French guy from the 1880s seems like a bit much. I could see paying $150M for 1880s porn if it was realism, but impressionism? Fuck outta here. Might as well be using pixelated late night cinemax as a visual. 

Eddie and I did an episode on how exactly the fine art trade is used as a tax shelter. It'll make your skin crawl