Because he's worth it ... the restoration of David. Photograph: Marco Bucco/AFP
The Las Vegas casino mogul Steve Wynn owns many dozens of masterpieces, from Manet and Monet to Seurat and Cezanne, but the artist he loves the most - or at least bets on the most - is that surefire money-spinner Pablo Picasso. Until recently the crowning glory of The Wynn Collection, aka Picasso Palace, was indeed a 1932 post-cubist work by the Spaniard - Le Reve, a fantastically upbeat portrait of Picasso's then mistress, Marie-Therese Walters seductively dreaming in an armchair.
Last September, alas, Wynn accidentally knocked a hole in the painting - and just the day before he was about to sell it to Steve Cohen, the reclusive hedge-fund manager who recently purchased Damien Hirst's shark. One witness to the catastrophe, the writer Nora Ephron, gleefully reported Wynn's words on damaging the canvas. "Oh shit, look what I've done!"
If the story sounds unlikely, bear in mind that Wynn suffers from a severe eye condition that blanks out his peripheral vision. More implausible, in fact, is his suit this week against his insurers, Lloyd's of London, for almost £28m, the amount the painting's value has apparently dropped following the accident.
A £28m hole? Damage to paintings is not especially hard to repair these days and hasn't been for over a century. Restorers are more adept than cosmetic surgeons. Acid and slashing, gouging and tearing - the Old Masters have endured every kind of assault. Paintings cut in two can be put back together (Degas' double-portrait of Mr and Mrs Manet from which Manet scissored his wife; Manet's Execution of Emperor Maximilian). Paintings that have had the eyes scratched out (Durer's great self-portrait in the Munich Alte Pinakothek) have even had their sight restored.
So on what does the value of a painting depend if it can be so reduced by a mere hole? The reputation of the artist? His or her stock market rating or investment potential? Or the intrinsic worth of the work itself? Which might even depend upon being damaged... Lucio Fontana's razored canvases would be worth nothing without those slashes. Nor Gustav Metzger's torched paintings.
The case of the silver-dollar-sized hole, as Wynn has described it, is utterly baffling. It is incredible to think that the experts, who include the restorer himself, actually believe the painting to be worth so many millions less because there has been some interference with the surface of the canvas. What can one conclude? That intrinsic worth can be compromised by extrinsic damage? That the restorer, et al, have got some very odd ideas? That Wynn is taking the mickey?
Or that among hedge-fund managers state of repair is more important than art per se - for Cohen, of course, had Hirst replace that tattered old shark with an immaculate new one.
