The Scream, Icon for Our Era

Edvard Munch's The Scream, or the last privately owned version of it, sold for $119,922, 500.00 yesterday, or just a hair under $120 million, at Sotheby's auction. It is the most expensive painting ever, since the previous priciest, a Picasso, Nude Green Leaves and Bust, sold for "only" $106.5 million in 2010. As someone commented, several of the world's billionaires (there are now 1,226 of them) must have been competing for the canvas. The buyer, so far, remains anonymous.

The Scream is iconic and it is also emblematic of the era. While the US economy grew at an anemic rate, while unemployment is still above 8% (8.1 in April, 2012), the money paid for Munch's canvas beats the world record.

The fastest growing crop of billionaires come from the fast-growing economies of the BRIC countries, not surprisingly, but the US still leads with the most (425) and both China's and Russia's shares slipped from over 100 last year to 95 and 96 respectively, this year, due to the world's slowing economy. The world's richest man, by about a 9 billion dollar margin, is Carlos Slim from Mexico.

So, there are 1226 billionaires in the world, but most people in the world's richest nation, the US, are economically insecure and getting poorer, while Europe is sliding back into recession and has reached depression levels of unemployment in Greece, Spain and Ireland.

The price for The Scream is therefore symbolic of the huge inequalities growing in the world economy, not just the US's. Some people can spend that kind of money on a piece of painted canvas, while the majority of humanity is struggling. I could think of a lot of other uses for $120 million (like jobs for 2400 people), but the painting in question is also emblematic of what's wrong with this picture.

The Scream is disturbing; it doesn't impart good feeling, at all. It may have its own kind of beauty, in its evocation of anguish, but it ain't warm and fuzzy. I don't think I'd want to display it on my living room wall, nor even in an office dedicated to psychological counseling. Its seller, Petter Olson, a Norwegian businessman, said of it:

"For me, (it) shows the horrifying moment when man realizes his impact on nature, and the irreversible changes that he has initiated, making the planet increasingly uninhabitable."

Certainly, the colors of the painting evoke both the anxiety of the figure, and the irreversible damage we are causing to the planet, but it is the power of the figure itself that expresses what humans are beginning to realize: the horrible future that seems to await us.

It's likely the 1200+ billionaires believe they will escape the worst of these changes, but then the Fifth Century Roman Senatorial class assumed that Rome would be eternal, and their exalted place in it would always be secure: obviously, they were wrong.