How much did the most expensive painting ever sold go for?

How to get close to this number

Anchor on the previous record and note that it nearly doubled. Top art prices had been climbing through the hundreds of millions; a work attributed to one of the handful of names that defines Western art, coming to market once, is where the ceiling gets tested.

The attribution caveat in the explanation is the part that makes this genuinely interesting: some scholars dispute that it is by the artist at all. Nearly half a billion dollars was paid for a work whose authorship is contested, which means the price reflects the possibility of authorship rather than a settled fact.

The aftermath sharpens that: the painting has not been publicly exhibited since. An object bought for a record sum and then withdrawn from view stops being an artwork in any public sense and becomes an asset, which is the standard and frequently criticised endpoint of the top of this market.