The $495 million art auction — "a new era in the art market."

"The sale included works by Jackson Pollock, Roy Lichtenstein and Jean-Michel Basquiat. The sale established 16 new world auction records, with nine works selling for more than $10m (£6.6m) and 23 for more than $5m (£3.2m)."

These works really are valuable, because they are the last great works in the history of painting — if we are to understand the history of painting as the era when people paid attention to and cared about what painters were painting.

Here's the NYT 1988 obituary for Basquiat:

Michel Basquiat, a Brooklyn-born artist whose brief career leaped from graffiti scrawled on SoHo foundations to one-man shows in galleries around the world, died Friday at his home in the East Village. He was 27 years old....

His paintings sold for $25,000 to $50,000....

Who knows what his work would sell for if he hadn't died young, but his "Dustheads" just sold for $48.8 million. Dust to dust.

Ah! I just had a flashback to the 1970s when — at least in some quarters of NYC — "dust" was slang for money. Urban Dictionary fails to show this meaning. (The favored definition is: "pcp," and that's what the painting title "Dustheads" invites us to assume is the meaning, but maybe the artist hoped we'd see layers of meaning (like layers of paint).)  Here's a nice long list of money-related slang and it includes "dust," but it doesn't mean money. It means lack of money:

Dust -- As in "nothing but." Let me borrow 5 bucks. I got dust.

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"'Ashes to ashes, dust to dust,' a phrase from the Anglican burial service, used sometimes to denote total finality. It is based on scriptural texts such as 'Dust thou art, and unto dust thou shalt return' (Genesis 3:19), and 'I will bring thee to ashes upon the earth in the sight of all them that behold thee' (Ezekiel 28:18)."