Media Moguls Own the Best Art

Some of the most commercial minds of the age are also our biggest aesthetes

That the most important works of art in the world—from the highest-priced Old Master to the most valuable contemporary paintings—should have been collected, traded, and bequeathed by the world’s most successful media moguls (almost always men, whose fortunes depend on the image), is an obvious but little noted market synchronicity.

On the other hand, media people specialize in the ephemeral and trivial—not to mention commercial. Fine art, and its voracious consumption by media billionaires, might actually be an antidote to the superficial.

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