Last week, the art world marked a dubious milestone: someone paid $104.3 million for a Giacometti sculpture, the highest amount ever paid for a piece of art at auction.

You see the piece in the photo above. Stop yourself if you were about to say “I could do that” because I once heard a wise person say that you can copy many things, but the challenge is to be the first. And with that, you can now more peacefully look at Jackson Pollack’s works.

It just so happens that the day before the auction, my three year-old and I were sculpting some masterpieces of our own out of clay. My son said he didn’t know what to make so I told him to just squish it and start forming and see what happens. That’s probably what Giacometti’s mama said to encourage him, right?

But when he said “make a horse for me, mommy” I panicked. I couldn’t say “I don’t know how” because I’m always preaching that art is about the process, not the result. And so, I started to form a nose, some ears, the body and, lo and behold, a horse magically appeared...or at least one that could pass as a horse in the eyes of a three year-old. It also could have passed as a huskie.

My son was delighted even though the legs of the horse looked ridiculous and couldn’t support the horse. I quickly fixed the leg situation by removing them, placing a “hay bale” (rectangular piece of clay) in front of the leg-less horse and calling this piece “horse resting behind hay.” Here are the pieces we made (in the foreground are my son’s “houses”):




Maybe Giacometti couldn’t really do legs either and that’s why he elongated the figures in his sculptures. Regardless, someone with a big checkbook loved those skinny legs 104 million times over.

It made me think about the idea that with $104 million you could claim one sculpture OR you could invest in the future by sharing it with a bunch of different cultural organizations to keep the arts alive generation after generation. In the Twin Cities, for instance, you could:

• Pay for the $14 million addition to the Frank Gehry-designed Weisman Art Museum.
• Give $40 million to The Minnesota Orchestra’s Orchestra Hall for their proposed facelift
• Donate $37 million to The Shubert Theater for their remodel

Grand Total to help maintain all those great organizations for our kids and their kids: $91 million...and with the remaining $13 mil we could pay for Brett Favre’s 2010 Vikings season (because maybe this would lead to Prince writing another Vikings fight song! And yes, also bring back that elusive Superbowl trophy...is the price for pride ever too high?)