If I had $29 million, I would fly to London and go to next week's Sotheby's auction and buy Picasso's "La Lecture," the 1932 painting that first depicted the face of his young muse Marie-Therese Walter, and take it home and hang it on the wall and just stare at it and stare at it until it struck me that I could make something so beautiful, too, and I would. And if I was in London already, I would go to the place and just snap a quick pic with my cellphone and do it that way.

Last night, Pablo Picasso's Nu au Plateau de Sculpteur (1932) fetched more at auction than any artwork in history ($106.5 million!) for the same reason that my whiskey chocolate chili never wins the annual firehouse cook off: popularity, whether measured in US dollars or cayenne-smudged secret ballots, has everything to do with the lowest common denominator.