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The thing about conceptual art is that you can sell it for however much you can get for it, reason notwithstanding. So when Cindy Sherman's Untitled #96, an enigmatic, dichromatic photograph shot in 1981, sold at Christie's for $3.89 million—making it the world's priciest, and therefore most valuable, photograph—the richly-talented global photography community couldn't believe its eyes. Sherman's somewhat anodyne work broke, by a hefty margin, the record of $3.35 million set in 2006 by Andrea Gursky's stunning 99 Cent II Diptychon. But Sherman is clearly on a roll: in late 2010, her Untitled #153, a six-feet-tall self-portrait as a mud-caked corpse shot in 1985, was sold for $2.7 million. Not many, except auctioneers, obviously, had seen much sense in that sale, either.
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