Maybe the author of this Guardian piece might realize that the price people pay for an image has less to do with the notion of objective artistic quality and more to do with misunderstood forces that shape motivation and the real world of psychology, sociology and economics. Probably, the purchaser was a drug lord monetizing and legitimizing a laundering operation. As an outlier, the price of the photo is a forgery hiding another reality. That is not to say beauty cannot be made iconic by purchasing an ordinary photo for millions. Someone has started the contest and ended it in one operation to deceive bureaucrats that think value is always a realized price, yet fail to see the transaction as a slight of hand intended to hide real purposes and values unaccounted for in the imagination of the government official. Such rule breaking leads to absurdities in a modern world where normal events bear little relationship to realities hidden below the surface.
