If I Knew Picasso...

...I would buy myself a grey guitar and play. A Picasso painting named Boy With a Pipe is expected to sell at Sotheby's for anywhere from $70 to 100 million, and may eclipse the world record set in 1990 by the sale of Van Gogh's Portrait of Dr. Gachet ($82.5 M).

At first glance, those numbers seem both shallow and ill-timed, don't they? Prices under 10 digits seem reasonable, but much art you see is considered priceless, so the best of that which is bought and sold isn't the same as the best or highest-valued art. As far as the investment is concerned, the art market, like the housing market, tends to reflect crashes and spikes some time after the fact. Art sales are buoyant since people only recently stopped making oodles of money off the Internet (as far as the market is concerned). Paintings, less ephemeral than photography or other contemporary media, tend to endure the market better; and really, extraordinary paintings like this one will always fetch big money. Too rich for my blood, though.