It s sad to think that this will probably be locked up in someone's home and others won't enjoy it. I hope the buyer puts it in a museum...
I think that if you've added $8 million cash into the real economy, which will probably get spent by the seller on house upgrades, cars, restaurants and any end of goods that employ ordinary people, you've paid a more than reasonable
price to the community to be allowed to enjoy looking at that
bust at
home for a few years.
Money is somehow a measure of value and has alternative practical uses. Were the
bust worth more to mankind in a museum, in terms of learning and enjoyment, then I suppose any national government might have offered $9 million for it, and taken the
money from the schools and arts budgets. So I guess the
bust has ended up in the right
hands, those of the person who values it most.
That would be nice to have in a museum. Many private collectors do loan them out. Some do not.
Indeed that would be wonderful, but I suspect it's not so often as you might imagine. I think if you pay the
price, you're entitled to keep it in the kitchen if you wish. Michael Winckless is a
rare example of a collector who paid the
price for a coin that's not at
home but now visible in the British museum. The coin below:
The whole issue of collectors, long-term loans and donations to museums is of course very complex. Whatever the object, it almost always has to have a long
provenance for a museum to accept it. The Winckless
EID MAR has a very old
provenance, before 1950s at least, as an article was written about the coin around then.
