How Valuable Is Your Value?

One side effect of a world slushing with fake news, alt truth and exaggerations is that even when one becomes unsure of the real value of anything, one starts wondering what ‘value’ is. Is it something that comes with the goods, or is it something you invest in the goodies? The real subject of a new documentary film by Andreas Koefoed, The Lost Leonardo, is the mythmaking capabilities of capitalism. Specifically, it traces the journey of a painting, Salvator Mundi (Saviour of the World) — the world’s most expensive one — attributed to Leonardo da Vinci that popped up in 2011 and has confounded experts about its veracity since.

The veracity — the quality of being true — of the painting being a Leonardo overwhelmingly determined its sale price of ₹3,306 crore (320 million). If at the time of sale in 2017, as Koefoed’s film suggests, the painting’s creator was not deemed to be da Vinci, the price of the pacific portrait of a Christ with a dark background, pointing a finger upwards, would have been significantly lower. In fact, when the painting first surfaced in around 1900, it was sold as the work of Bernardino Luini, a Leonardo protégé, for 120 or about ₹12,000, cheap even by 1900 standards. Perhaps the lesson of Salvator Mundi — no one knows where it is now — is that an object is valued as much as its acceptable value.