High-Priced Anxiety

HighPriced Anxiety

A version of Edvard Munch’s “The Scream” goes on the auction block at Sotheby’s today. It’s one of four versions that Munch created, and the only one that you can purchase, provided you’ve got eighty million dollars of purchasing power. [Update: “The Scream” sold at Sotheby’s on Wednesday night for 119.9 million dollars.]

If your Powerball number didn’t come up, J. C. Duffy suggests other options:

Still, it’s always wise to be on the lookout for obvious forgeries:

The agonized figure at the center of Munch’s masterpiece

has become the pop-culture poster boy for despair and paranoia. And Munch’s frankly cartoon-like rendering has lent itself to the manipulations that gag cartooning thrives on.

In this Sam Gross cartoon, Mr. Angst has made a very unfortunate choice of riding shotgun with the cartoon trope for disaster, the invariably ill-fated crash-test dummy.

He’s justifiably worried that he will soon be toast, which turns out to be his literal fate in this Jack Ziegler cartoon.

Munch’s Mr. Angst is in good company with many other iconic figures from famous art works that have appeared in New Yorker cartoons.

But, even when he’s actually in their company, Mr. Angst is as distraught as ever.

Maybe he’ll feel better today, when all that money comes his way at auction. But probably not. Well, then, as Tom Cheney suggests, there’s always therapy available from his antithesis.