For over 100 years, a large oil painting with a medical theme hung in the front of the lobby of Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia. Five generations of staff and students passed the painting without stopping, much less noticing its fine qualities. Year after year, the lobby doors swung open to the street. In the dry winter, people stomped the snow from their shoes on the rubber mat at the entrance. In summer, moist air blew into the lobby a hundred times a day. Last year, this same painting—’The Gross Clinic’ by Thomas Eakins—sold for $68MM. Considered by some the greatest masterpiece by a 19th century American painter—based mainly on a review written in the New York art media in the late 1980s—a group of philanthropists and bankers purchased it on behalf of the citizens of Philadelphia, to whom it will be displayed at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. That’s a large sum for an interesting narrative painting that used to hang in the lobby of a local med school. A lot of daycare centers, charter schools, community gardens, and basketball courts in Philadelphia could have been built with $68MM.

A work by famous “drip” action painting pioneer, Jackson Pollock, fetched $140MM in a private sale last year. An oil painting by Picasso of his girlfriend was recently estimated at $139MM. A professional appraisal of $200MM was made on Renoir’s renowned ‘Luncheon of the Boating Party’. Another famous painting, Goya’s ‘The Nude Maja’ was estimated by an art historian in Architectural Digest last winter at probably between $200MM and $350MM, and perhaps even as high as $500MM. Indeed, it is a fantastic and unforgettable painting that I was fortunate to see in the Prado. But a portrait of someone’s mistress in her birthday suit costs a half billion dollars?

The Louvre, France’s esteemed art museum, recently leased its name, as well as a group of paintings from its vault, for an undetermined length of time (probably about 30 years), to the nation of Abu Dhabi—which has to build and operate the museum at their own expense—for a billion dollars.

On another front, in 2006, the Rolling Stones made $150MM in revenue from their most recent globe-trotting concert tour. At 45 performances, this reaps “England’s Newest Hitmakers” well over $3 million per night. Scarred old slavers, indeed. Similarly, Bon Jovi, a rock group from New Jersey whose music few adults have ever heard, made $65MM from their 2006 world tour.

I mention these stratospheric valuations of fine art and popular music not only to underscore the absurdity of art historians and drunken baby boomers, but also to contrast them with the fantastically low estimates recently discussed in the press for world-class botanical gardens, such as Heronswood. People speak of rare plant collections in terms of “land values”, as if a beloved fine garden and “regional treasure” was of no more value than an abandoned trailer park.

What kind of society celebrates loud music about sex and drugs, and dismisses the importance of a flourishing 20-year-old collection of 14,000 rare plants from all seven continents, enshrined in a 5-acre work of art? What kind of society speculates on the values of paintings they neither understand nor enjoy, if in fact they have ever seen them?

When the owner of the above-mentioned Picasso, Las Vegas casino owner Steve Wynn, slipped and fell against it, tearing six inches of canvas with his elbow, he reduced its value by almost half, for which he sued his insurance company. He gave up trying to sell it. Now worth only $75MM, the painting hangs in his office.

Oh well. At least Keith Richards fell out of a palm tree. Maybe he was looking for seeds. Perhaps Ron Wood is an arborist.

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