Perhaps I'm a complete ignoramus, but what makes that photograph special (i.e., price). Seems quite mundane actually. But then again, I never sold a photograph for over a thousand dollars.
Personally, I couldn't begin to explain what the buyer was thinking when he paid over $4 million for that particular photograph.
Ok, I guess I'll take a stab at it anyway...
The answer, IMHO, goes to the what Andy Warhol and Andreas Gursky have in common. Warhol understood, perhaps better than anyone before him, the power of pop culture and its ability to elevate the mundane. His entire life was a continuous act of performance art. He understood that by creating a
persona, he was creating art.
Gursky, while far less flamboyant, has been elevated by something similar to the pop culture that elevated Warhol.
Rhine II, produced by anyone else, would not stand out. But by the time Gursky produced it, he had already established a reputation in the modern art community, and it all just sort of metastasized from there.
One thing that helps
Rhine II stand out is that the print is simply enormous: Roughly 6' x 13'. The pure scale of the print helps establish exclusivity, since to reproduce it would be quite an undertaking.
I'm curious how it was produced. It is described as a "chromogenic colour print" mounted on acrylic glass. How does one go about creating a chromogenic print of that size?
