making it the most expensive work of art ever auctioned.
My question : Do you think some people have too much money ? Feel free to elaborate.
are the new owners admiring their latest acquisition whilst straining their pasta through a cheese grater?
I doubt it
Josh ...and life just rolls on like a river.
I’m not sure anyone has too much money, but I think people often make poor choices with their money. There is nothing wrong with having a nice life, doing fun things, or having nice things (though I think having too many things can be cumbersome sometimes), but I think the primary focus of life should be about helping others and making the world a better place, and I think most people should spend more time and money towards that.
BeautifulDay I wasn't older yet, I wasn't wise I guess
Obviously, yes. I don’t think buying art is the best example. I think I have too much money. I waste too much, I cause industry to produce unnecessary things for me, which I then throw out like it’s going to disappear once it hits the curb. I think that’s the problem with money.
Aloha50 I trust the universe!
what you have (materially), then you have too much money.
Sometimes I think that my financial aspirations are too low (because I don’t want to be greedy) maybe that’s why I don’t have enough, but I sure do appreciate what I have.
dragonfly35 Hangin' in there.
but more than that, I think most people have too much stuff. Even when they don’t have too much money. Or even enough money.
I guess I’m sort of agreeing with BeautifulDay. Art and its value is another sort of argument, but I’m thinking of the pure wastage of a more everyday sort.
I’m thinking, what would happen if we moved into a tiny house and got rid of most of our stuff? My fiance brought it up. I’m kind of fascinated.
EDIT: I can’t find the other video I was watching. But some of these things have nicer kitchens or various other features, depending on your priorities. I think they’re pretty cool…
and they usually don’t even given much to charities if any.
If i ever win big sure I'll buy some nice things but i will donate to charities and give some to family and friends , not everyone, but people who care about me and i care about them.I saw this on the internet today and I thought I must post something about my disgust on 43T. Can you imagine having a piece of art this famous in your living room??/ It doesn’t seem fair to deprive the world of it (even though there are three other versions apparently) How rich must this person be to be able to afford to spend this on an indulgence item??
mrcreed memento mori
unless the money was gained through criminal activity…
otherwise i couldn’t care less
because something is legal doesn’t necessarily mean it’s good. That some people have a thousand times more money than others will earn in ten lifetimes is indeed legal, but is it justified ?
I believe in freedom etc and am not necessarily for an all-powerful state, but a lot of people seem to interpret freedom as “being free to become the strongest”, while to me, it’s more about being free to live without being eaten by the strongest. Whether that means everything should be regulated by law, I don’t know, laws will never solve everything, if anything, when they’re bad, they’re dangerous. I guess it’s ethics we lack : the big problem to me is not that it’s legally okay to be that individualistic so much as that it is culturally okay.
gottawonder Loves her tortoise!
I’m not sure what the solution is to poverty. It isn’t a lack of resources, because there is enough food to meet everyone’s needs, but it never seems to be distributed to the poor.
War is often the real culprit in poverty, because it drives people off of their land, armies often steal food, burn farms, and kill livestock, and drive farm families into refugee camps where they can’t grow food for themselves or others. Then the armies make sure that food doesn’t reach the refugees.
There is poverty in countries like Canada, but it is often RELATIVE poverty. They often still have a place to live, food, water, access to health care, but they don’t have any money for a car, nicer clothes, etc.
A lot of people in Canada who live below the poverty line would still be considered fortunate by a lot of people in, say, India.
My husband and I likely do have a thousand times more money than a lot of people in the world. I’m not willing to give up my money to equalise things. I could give some of it, but how does one decide how much I should give?
Isn’t that what taxes is? A fairly large chunk of our income goes towards paying for roads, schools, hospitals and so on, that people who live below the poverty line (and don’t pay taxes) may use.
Communism tries to answer such questions, but people just aren’t good enough to make real communism work. Real communism (each according to his needs and abilities, and public ownership of property) would require that people would still strive to be things like doctors, but without getting more pay than say, a farmer or a laboror. It would also mean that people really worked to their full potential, and as hard as they normally would, with only the valorous belief that they were helping the common good.
There would have to be no exploitation of public property by individuals (for example, one farmer grazing a thousand cattle on a public pasture and driving away the other farmers), and so on.
I don’t like any kind of extreme and as I said, I believe in freedom and the state not owning everything. But where there are no laws or loose laws, there should be basic principles. I think there’s a fair distance between being disgusted by the excesses of a liberal economy and being a communist. Sure, a doctor who studied hard (and has a tough job involving life and death) should earn a decent living, sure, an employer has more responsibilities than an employee and should therefore earn more, but merit is often used as the justification for all kinds of crazy incomes with nothing to do with merit.
Reminds me of this story from last week : a guy at my work joked in the elevator that he earns 4000 euros in two weeks (not that there’s anything wrong with that). He then realised that everyone in the same elevator earned about a thousand a month and must have gotten uncomfortable, so as to justify it he said “well, we (= the receptionists) work very hard”. Which actually was a worse thing to say, go tell someone who cleans other people’s poo for a living that they don’t work hard. My repartee was an easy one, President Sarkozy had infamously said on the same week that he wanted to do a parallel celebration on workers day for “the real workers”, so I could not not kid him saying : “so I guess that means on may 1, you’re going to that other party ?”. Which reminds me I must get dressed and go vote today ;)
gottawonder Loves her tortoise!
why some jobs are so incredibly over valued. Why a plastic surgeon makes so much more money than a family doctor. Why the person who works as a receptionist for a law firm makes more money than a librarian, or why everyone in the world makes more money than a stock clerk or a janitor.
I realise that some jobs are just more high profile, and even if your actual job isn’t really harder, the amount of money involved in your decision is much larger, and in some cases safety is an issue (like designing a safe building or road, or a safe car).
I used to be a janitor though, and I made minimum wage for a physically strenous job, with a surprising amount of accountability, and access to a lot of important things. It should have paid MINIMUM of twice what I was making, considering that I had to work nights, often alone, and the work was exhausting.
La Femme Flâneuse (aka BeeQ)
the majority of us lived within a society that experienced a more equal distribution of wealth. I would rather abject poverty did not exist AT ALL in wealthy nations. It’s unconscionable. Especially when children are victimized by it thru no fault of their own.
We ARE our brothers and sisters keepers, people. It DOES take a village to raise children. But I also believe in the adage “Give a man a fish and he’ll eat for a day, teach a man to fish and he’ll eat forever.” I am both philanthropic and practical, a nurturer, but one who will expect that there are those things you will do for yourself; I am a nurturer but not an enabler.
We are all in this together. I hope whoever and wherever you are, you regularly give back to your community in some way, whether financial, or by donation of other things including goods or time. Your people need you. Spread the love…...
gottawonder Loves her tortoise!
I’ve never been able to figure out how someone values a work of art, except by how much other paintings have sold for.
It’s not like you’re MAKING money by owning it, unless you charge museums money to rent it for an installment (which does happen).
I have a better grasp of how much something is worth if you look at the value of the materials it is made of, and how much labor it took, and so on.
Art is just so subjective. So is money.
None of us can say for sure whether we`d ever spend 119 million on a painting, because we don`t have that kind of money. I think that some things become very fluid once you are stupendously rich. It doesn`t mean anything anymore.
When you think of someone like Bill Gates, with multi-billions, there is likely almost nothing he can`t buy, maybe even a space ship. So what`s a measly 119 million to him?
When I was dirt-broke, I would never spend $100 on a pair of shoes, but I would spend that when I have the money.
It doesn`t seem FAIR that some people have so much money that art just becomes a little game, but then the world isn`t fair.
You can tell me that this guy is a genuine art amateur and it may be true, still, I very much doubt that person’s buying just a painting here, they’re buying its fame, period, it’s nothing more than a plain ego trip. They might fool themselves into believing they have a true eye for beauty or whatever when they pensively contemplate the Scream on their wall before going to bed with a 5000$ bottle of brandy, the fact to me is that they didn’t buy the painting for its beauty, they bought it because it’s the Scream by Munch and it’s famous and they have too much money.
I lurve the Scream, I think it’s a cool painting, naive and disturbing at the same time, but there’s no way in hell anything’s worth that much money, a couple of centuries ago, that painting would have most likely been laughed at and ended up in a dump. There are thousands and thousands of amazing works of art out there that will never get famous, there’s a huge portion of chance, arbitrary and mystery in which ones make it through history and which ones don’t.
I understand wanting to own nice things, I agree with Josh on that. Most of what makes life beautiful is arguably useless. I like buying flowers even though I don’t need them, I like having nice clothes on my back, and were I rich I may want to have more nice things, to a certain extent anyway. But I believe there’s a point where the indecency is just too high, where you don’t want to own per se so much as show off how rich you are.
I saw a guy on TV who bought an airliner and got rid of all the seats to make it his private jet. In the middle, he put a pool table… Not too bright by the way, you can’t play pool in a moving plane, can you ? Another guy had the biggest yatch in the world built for himself. He can’t sail it because there’s hardly a harbor in the world that’s big enough to welcome it. Not too bright either.
In case it wasn’t clear, I kind of think some people have too much money :], or at least don’t use it in quite a noble way.
gottawonder Loves her tortoise!
Don’t most of us have a fair amount of money that we don’t use in a noble way?
After all, if we all chose to live in a modest, single room dwelling, with only what we needed ( two or three changes of clothes, no electronics, no fridge, stove, or shower, hot water, etc.) and only ate simple foods like beans and rice, our monetary needs would be very low.
Then, if we chose to still work as hard as we do now, but donated all of the money above our bare basic needs, each one of us average wage earners could likely support several families in India.
Every $5 coffee from Starbuck’s could provide a vaccination for a child somewhere. Every movie we saw in a theatre could buy a flock of chickens for a village. Every pair of jeans we paid $50 for could provide textbooks for a village school.
Most of us really do have “too much money”. We really spend most of it in a way that isn’t noble.
For every multi-millionaire out there with big yachts and four houses, there are thousands of us who are still living, by many people’s standards, an opulant and greedy lifestyle. Most of us eat meat every day, many of us have cars, we don’t share our homes with all of our relatives, we have computers, televisions, cell phones, a bathroom in every dwellling, and so on.
I even spend some money on art.
gottawonder Loves her tortoise!
Is it possible that this person is also a philanthropist, and gives millions of dollars every year to a just cause?
Let’s ponder: if a person has 100 million dollars, how much of it should they keep, and how much should they donate to just causes?
If they give away half of their money, that still leaves 50 million. Should they be allowed to spend 1 million on art? 3 million on a house?
Should they give 90% away? That still leaves $10 million. Should they still live in a modest house of about $400,000, or is that too much?
If a person makes $150.000, should they live in a cheap $500 rental suite, eat beans and donate $120,000 to charity, or are they okay because their wealth isn’t opulant?
Why should we be telling people what to do with their money?
If we set taxes high enough for people above a certain point, then that should be it. Otherwise, why would anyone bother to have ambition to earn more than what is required for their basic needs? A person would say, why do I need to become an engineer, when I won’t be allowed to live a wealthier life? I might as well not bother going to school for ten extra years, and just work as a part time store clerk.
You play the Devil’s advocate very well :]
I guess, yes, we’re all selfish to some extent, and I’m not saying I’m opposed to richness or private property. It’s just a matter of proportions to me, i think there should be a point where it becomes obvious to one that they’re very well off and that maybe they don’t need the biggest yacht in the world, an airliner as their private jet, the Scream in their living-room, or like certain rappers and sports champions a several thousand dollars champagne bottle that they don’t even drink but proceed to empty on their friends to celebrate. We’re all terrible and I’m no exception. But it’s hard to me not to find people like that extra terrible.
gottawonder Loves her tortoise!
I happen to agree with you.
I don’t really understand how some people can live with themselves, having such an extravagant lifestyle.
I read magazines about architecture and design, because the homes are truly wonderful, and sometimes I find inspiration for my craft projects. However, I end up sometimes feeling disgust at how obviously expensive in a totally unneccessary way most of these homes are.
Some of them are lovely without making you only aware of how much money was spent, but sometimes I think “that guy’s sofa is worth more than my car” or ” the silk drapes in that living room likely cost more than I make in a year” or “that kitchen renovation likely cost more than everything I own put together”.
Yes, I wonder why these people haven’t noticed exactly how over the top their lifestyle is, except they are likely surrounded by people whose homes cost just as much, if not more. So everything seems relative to them.
It’s really hard to imagine people picking out a $50,000 piece of marble for their new counter top, and not a twinge of guilt.
Although I don’t want to make laws, or even honestly to have society telling people where to draw the line, you do wonder how some people manage to just be complete idiots with their money, and why they can’t come up with some meaningful way to spend it.
Collectorofcats can hardly wait for the asparagus to pop up so it will be truly Spring
I don’t think anyone should be criticized just for being financially successful. I don’t begrudge a doctor or other professionals of making comfortable livings beyond what the rest of the population does considering the amount of education they have. Why else would anyone attend years of schooling and incur tremendous amounts of debt borrowing money to complete their education then to monetarially rewarded for their dedication. Loving what they do is a plus. Everyone who chooses teaching as a vocation knows there isn’t as much money there as other professions unless they are willing to leave the classroom and get promoted to Principal or other lofty positions in the education industry.
Bill Gates and his wife give away a huge amount of their fortune to worthwhile charities every year. Who can find fault in how they live otherwise?
What I find fault with is politicians living large, accepting the perks of being in government, creating golden parachutes for their retirement, setting up health benefit packages for themselves and their families yet leaving the rest of us out in the cold all the while criticizing big business and anyone in the upper income brackets of doing the same.
gottawonder Loves her tortoise!
so what you are saying is that there is a difference between money honestly earned, and money effectively swindled.
I also agree that wealth in the hands of someone like Bill Gates seems more like good stewardship of money that in someone else’s hands, would all just be spent on plastic surgery, diamond grills for their teeth, and hot tubs full of Cristal champagne.
akimbo hasn't been around.
Sometimes I think yes, other times it’s a no, it depends how they use it I suppose.
My parents always complain at me for not saving my money. The way I see it is, I have enough money to do the things in life that I want to do. I don’t think this makes me selfish or stupid. While I don’t give a lot of my money to charities, I do give in other ways, supporting by doing a bit of charity and voluntary work here and there and I’ve done a lot of sponsored events. I like to think I have a balanced life and if that includes spending my money on the things I enjoy and appreciate then so be it.
At the end of the day, regardless of what you believe about when we die, reincarnation, heaven, hell, some sort of afterlife, or none of the above… you can’t take it with you, can you?
gottawonder Loves her tortoise!
about people who amass vast fortunes, and have so much of everything.
How can they possibly be getting their full use/appreciation of everything they own, and what is the point of chasing after the almighty dollar, once you’ve got a few million socked away?
Unless I loved the job, after awhile I would help my family out, and save a bunch of money for retirement, and so on. Then, all I could think about is to never have to work again, and spend my life travelling or pursuing other interests.
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ComicMedal wants to drink less alcohol
be a vegetarian for a week
stop being lazy
get up on time
Learn to cook
Do NaNoWriMo
play sims online
learn to pick a lock
Let go of the past
Design and build my own house
KatyLove wants to Grow in Christ
be a good daughter
go green
grow my own vegetables
Learn to play keyboard
run with the bulls in Pamplona
stop eating fast food
learn fencing
learn to sail a sailboat
do yoga
visit every MLB stadium
See Pearl Jam live
