Amazon aspires to sell everything, and that includes fine art. Most Amazon Art offers are more modest than this, but their current listings include a $1.4 million painting by famed French impressionist Claude Monet titled L’Enfant a la tasse, portrait de Jean Monet.
The customer reviews are rather funny. My favorites.
spicytofu: I paid my $79/year and for $1.45 million, I don’t get prime shipping? Bummer, I was hoping to enjoy this beauty tomorrow, but first I will need to contact my unobtainium credit card company so they don’t get a credit attack.
Stephen M. Walls: For as much as I paid I’m a little upset that this isn’t a new painting. You can see OBVIOUS cracks and I’m worried that the artwork has had several owners before me. I might return to Amazon if I can’t get in touch with the seller. 1 out of 5 stars.
Chris Georges: I ordered this product back in June for $1.4 million, but in July I found a similar painting by Van Gogh on sale at Target for only $800k, so I returned this one and had to pay a $14.99 restocking fee, ridiculous!!!
Christopher Kenny: Who would pay over a million dollars for a painting that’s in French? Well, I guess if you got it…
Jason Zhao: This piece of art is a fantastic addition to the collection decorating my living room. My only complaint (and why I gave it only 4 stars) was that I could not figure out how to change the item quantity in my shopping cart as I wanted another one for my bathroom. Once Amazon fixes this small error I will be happy to amend my rating back to 5 stars that this product deserves.
This is probably not going to work for seriously high-end art, where things Amazon is great at, like shipping and customer reviews, aren’t very important. That said, I wouldn’t be quite as down on this as Tyler Cowen. My feeling is that there’s a real business opportunity in the four-to-five-figure range selling stuff that art snobs would look down on to people whom art snobs would look down on.
