What happens when an artist decides to stop asking permission?
Throughout the history of art, there have been moments when someone looked at the established rules and decided to challenge them.
Sometimes the challenge was to what art could be.
Sometimes it was to what art could be worth.
And sometimes it was simply a challenge to who gets to decide.
The Billion Dollar Painting is my attempt to do all three.
I created a 54 × 54 inch abstract oil painting in 2020. I have given it a stated valuation of $1 billion and created an entirely unconventional ownership experiment around it.
I know how ambitious that sounds.
That is precisely the point.
What Is a Painting Worth?
The art world has produced some extraordinary examples of how difficult it can be to separate the physical object from the idea, history, reputation and cultural significance surrounding it.
Consider Maurizio Cattelan’s Comedian—the now-famous banana attached to a wall with duct tape.
At first glance, it sounds almost absurd. Yet when Sotheby’s offered the work in 2024, it sold for $6.24 million.
The banana itself obviously wasn’t worth millions of dollars.
The idea was.
The artist was.
The story was.
The cultural conversation surrounding it was.
The artwork became something much larger than the physical materials used to construct it.
And that raises an interesting question:
If a banana can become a multimillion-dollar artwork, what actually determines the potential value of a painting?
History provides even more extraordinary examples.
Willem de Kooning’s Interchange, painted in 1955, was sold privately in 2015 for approximately $300 million, according to Guinness World Records.
A canvas created decades earlier for a relatively modest amount ultimately became one of the most valuable paintings ever traded.
Then there is Leonardo da Vinci’s Salvator Mundi.
In 2017, the painting sold at Christie’s for $450,312,500, establishing the auction record for any work of art.
But the story becomes even more fascinating because the painting’s attribution has been debated.
Some Leonardo scholars have defended the attribution. Others have questioned how much of the painting was actually executed by Leonardo himself. In 2019, Leonardo specialist Carmen Bambach publicly said she believed Leonardo’s contribution was limited to small retouchings and attributed most of the picture to his assistant Giovanni Antonio Boltraffio. Other experts have continued to defend the Leonardo attribution.
And yet the painting sold for more than $450 million.
That is not simply a story about paint on wood.
It is a story about belief, attribution, history, scarcity, reputation and collective perception.
And Then There Is the Mona Lisa
Few paintings have ever achieved the cultural recognition of Leonardo’s Mona Lisa.
The painting is owned by the French state and housed at the Louvre. It is not realistically available for purchase, so there is no current market price attached to it.
But its potential value has fascinated people for decades.
In 1962, the Mona Lisa received an insurance valuation of $100 million for a planned international exhibition—a figure that Guinness World Records identifies as the highest known insurance valuation for a painting at that time. The insurance was ultimately not purchased because security costs were lower than the premiums.
What would the Mona Lisa be worth if it were ever legitimately offered for sale today?
Nobody knows.
Perhaps there is no meaningful answer.
Its cultural value may simply be beyond anything a conventional auction could measure.
And that is where my experiment begins.
What If Someone Actually Tried?
I had never seen another artist attempt something quite like this.
There are artists who have challenged the art establishment.
There are artists who have challenged conventional ideas about value.
There are artists who have created provocative conceptual works.
There are artists who have pursued enormous valuations.
But I had never seen an artist attempt to create a global, collective experiment around the ownership and future of a single contemporary painting on this scale.
And I thought:
Why not try?
I don’t have a major gallery behind me.
I don’t have an international auction house representing the project.
I don’t have an established art-world institution telling me what the painting should be worth.
So, in a sense, I have something unusual:
I am free to experiment.
Instead of waiting for the establishment to decide whether this is an interesting idea, I decided to create the experiment myself.
The Billion Dollar Painting
The painting is a 54 × 54 inch abstract oil painting created in 2020.
Its title is The Billion Dollar Painting.
The stated valuation is $1 billion.
But the project isn’t simply about trying to sell a painting for a billion dollars.
That would be interesting enough.
What interests me more is what happens after people become involved.
I have divided the concept into 1,000,000 fractional ownership interests, with 999,999 interests made available at $1,000 each.
I have retained one interest myself.
The idea is that each participant becomes part of something much larger than simply purchasing a piece of artwork.
They become part of an experiment.
An experiment involving art.
An experiment involving value.
An experiment involving collective ownership.
And ultimately, an experiment involving what happens when thousands—or potentially hundreds of thousands—of people become connected to a single physical work of art.
One Painting. One Million Interests. One Collective Experiment.
The physical painting remains one physical painting.
It isn’t cut apart.
There aren’t a million tiny pieces hanging in a million homes.
The painting remains intact.
Instead, the ownership interests represent participation in the collective ownership experiment surrounding the physical work.
And that creates another unusual question:
Who gets to decide what happens to the painting?
My vision is that the community of owners can ultimately become part of that decision-making process.
Where should the painting be exhibited?
Should it travel?
Should it be displayed in galleries?
Museums?
Universities?
Corporate collections?
Public institutions?
Special exhibitions?
How long should it remain in one location?
Where should it go next?
And what happens if, someday, the collective ownership community decides the painting should be resold?
I don’t know.
And that is exactly why I find the experiment interesting.
What Happens When the Artist Gives Up Some Control?
Most artworks have a fairly straightforward relationship between artist and owner.
The artist creates the work.
Someone purchases it.
The artist moves on.
The owner controls the physical artwork.
The Billion Dollar Painting attempts something different.
The painting becomes the center of a community.
Every owner has a vested interest in what happens to it.
The individual ownership interest may be only one-millionth of the project, but collectively those interests could represent a very large community of people who all have a reason to follow the painting’s journey.
The artwork’s future therefore becomes part of the artwork itself.
Its exhibitions become part of its history.
Its owners become part of its history.
The decisions made by the community become part of its history.
The controversy becomes part of its history.
The successes become part of its history.
And even the failures become part of its history.
Could an Unknown Artist Create a Famous Painting?
This may be the most ambitious question of all.
Can a contemporary painting created by a relatively unknown artist become globally recognized?
Could an artist without major gallery representation create a work that eventually becomes more culturally famous than paintings that have been considered untouchable for centuries?
Could an artwork’s story become as important as its physical appearance?
Could an experiment itself become part of art history?
I don’t know.
Nobody knows.
And I don’t think anyone can know until somebody actually tries.
The Mona Lisa became the Mona Lisa through centuries of history, cultural transformation, scholarship, preservation and public fascination.
The Billion Dollar Painting obviously cannot recreate that history.
But perhaps it can create a different kind of history.
A history that begins now.
Someone Had to Try
Maybe the project succeeds.
Maybe it doesn’t.
Maybe thousands of people eventually participate.
Maybe only a small community ever becomes involved.
Maybe the painting travels around the world.
Maybe it spends years in one collection.
Maybe a museum eventually wants it.
Maybe an institution wants to study the experiment.
Maybe the ownership community grows into something nobody anticipated.
Maybe the painting is eventually resold.
Maybe it becomes an important contemporary artwork.
Or maybe it simply becomes an unusual footnote in the history of the art market.
I genuinely don’t know.
But I do know one thing:
Someone had to try.
I have always found the art world fascinating because it operates at the intersection of creativity, commerce, history, psychology, culture and belief.
A canvas can contain oil and pigment.
But an artwork can contain an idea.
A banana can become a cultural phenomenon.
An abstract painting can sell for $300 million.
A painting whose attribution has been debated can sell for more than $450 million.
And a painting that has never been offered for sale can become effectively priceless.
So I decided to take the question one step further.
What happens if an artist creates the experiment himself?
No gallery telling me what the project should be.
No institution defining its boundaries.
No auction house deciding when the experiment begins or ends.
Just a painting, an idea, a global community of potential owners and an enormous unanswered question.
How far can this go?
I have no idea.
And perhaps that is the most exciting part.
The Billion Dollar Painting isn’t simply an attempt to create a valuable painting.
It is an attempt to create a living experiment about how value, ownership, fame and cultural significance are created in the first place.
The painting exists.
The experiment has begun.
Now the world gets to decide what happens next.
