I went to the grocery store earlier today as the impact of the blizzard began to thaw out. Among the items I needed to pick up from the grocery store was a pound of potatoes. It cost me just under $3.00 for a pound bag of potatoes. Thank goodness I didn’t need a photograph of a potato, because that might have cost me considerably more than I have access to.
Photographer Kevin Abosch, who is known for his photography of celebrities, sold a photograph of a potato for $1.5 million Australian.
Let that sink in for a minute. $1.5 million for a photo of a potato. Apparently, as you might imagine at this point, alcohol was involved in the transaction’s development.
“We had two glasses of wine and he [the businessman] said, ‘I really like that.’ Two more glasses of wine and he said: ‘I really want that,’ ” Abosch said in a story published by The Sunday Times. “We set the price two weeks later. It is the most I have been paid for a piece of work that has been bought [rather than commissioned].”
This was not any ordinary potato, at least. The image was of an organic Irish potato, and it was photographed in 2010. The print was also one of three created, so now we are starting to get why any wealthy businessperson with an eye for art might be interested in purchasing such an image at a high price. One print is currently residing in the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Serbia. One other is kept in Abosch’s personal collection.
This has inspired me to open up my pound bag of potatoes, whip out my Nikon, and do a quick Photoshop and see how much I can make off of it. Or, maybe I’ll run to McDonald’s and order some French fries off the value menu and take a couple of quick shots and sell them to double my investment.
After all, art is in the eye of the beholder, and everybody has their own tastes. You just have to find the person crazy enough to think your image of a spud is worth the right price.
[smh]
