QATAR FAMILY SENDS A ROYAL MESSAGE: THE ART WORLD IS THRIVING

TAKING STOCK OF THE ART MARKET:

QATAR ROYAL FAMILY RECORD ART PURCHASE

Paul Cezanne’s ‘The Card Players’ sold for a record $250 million (£158 million), making it the highest sum ever paid for artwork according to The Telegraph (The highest being 88.7 million paid for Jackson Pollock’s ‘No 5, 1948’ in 2006.　

This recent purchase brings about two important topics in the realms of culture: It shows that the art market is still a economic sector that is hurdling past the interruption of the global recession and proving that Qatar is making waves in the art world.

Art appraisers and historians see Cezanne’s piece as one of the major pieces in the art cannon, almost every art course makes a point of referencing the classis painting. Some art historians believe that the sale of this piece will catalyze an ever bigger movement of art in the market there is no doubt that it will be used as a point of departure for any significant piece.

Qatar has recently been making an impression on the art world, as The Art Newspaper ranked Qatar as the biggest art buyer last year and pinpointing the king’s daughter Sheikha Al Mayassa as "a driving force behind the attempt to turn the oil-rich desert state into an art capital that would rival Paris and New York".

This is the case, seeing that in the last year alone, Qatar has recently purchased works by Mark Rothko, Damien Hirst as well as exhibited the works of Richard Serra and the more recently popular Takashi Murakami exhibition that took place in Versailles.

Regardless of the participation of Qatar in the art world, most people are celebrating the lucrative economic power of the art world and beginning to participate in the action.