Sue Tilley spent time in Lucian Freud’s studio. She remembers champagne lunches. She remembers his workspace looking like someone had declared war on organization. She remembers a Rodin sculpture propping open a door like a £2 million doorstop.
Then the art world did what it does best: it took all of that and assigned a number so large it stopped meaning anything. Twenty-five million pounds. For a painting of Sue Tilley. The same Sue Tilley who was there when Freud used actual fine art as hardware.
This is the only joke the contemporary art market knows how to tell anymore. A woman sits. A man paints. Decades pass. Suddenly the painting is worth more than most people will earn in five hundred lifetimes, and everyone pretends this is a natural law of physics rather than collective delusion with a good PR team.
What’s remarkable isn’t that Freud painted well—he did. What’s remarkable is that the art world’s entire business model depends on convincing people that a portrait gains value the moment its subject stops being alive to correct the record. Sue Tilley can tell you about the champagne and the chaos. The market doesn’t care. The market only cares that she can’t paint another Sue Tilley.
Somewhere in a climate-controlled vault, that Rodin doorstop is probably worth more now too. Just for being nearby when something expensive happened.