A Dead Man's Triptych

Last week Christie of New York auction off a Francis Bacon triptych for a record $142 million to an unknown bidder. The rich and even more rich were ecstatic with the result, since the high-altitude sale reinforces all recent purchases of trophy art by dead painters. The Guardian wrote, "There can be no doubt the night belonged to Freud as well as Bacon. When he sat for Three Studies of Lucian Freud in 1969, this painter of harshly real faces and bodies in sparse London rooms was ever so slightly in Bacon's shadow. Now they orbit one another as the two great British artists of the 20th century, and probably will always be grouped in art history as blunt individualists who defied the supposed inevitable progress of the readymade to paint like modern reincarnations of Velázquez."

Everyone in the Art world awaits the next grand coup, as the ultra-wealthy spend money like it was going out of fashion, however the masses of the world was working too hard to rejoice in the triumph of capital over labor.

$142 million could pay the monthly wages of the tens of thousands of Nepalis constructing the 2022 World Cup stadiums in Qatar for several years. Most of them are exploited for nothing. Hundreds have died in miserable conditions verging on slavery.

All to scrimp and save dinaris for the Qatari Museum of Art, which purchased the Francis Bacon work.

Sheikha Mayassa bint Hamad al-Thani, the sister of Qatar's emir, is dedicating her family's fortune to establish her country as an international cultural power.

Here's another triptych.

The Nepali man is holding a photo of his dead friend.

That is the price of Art.

Dead people.

The days never belong to them in Qatar.