A painting by van Gogh, Gauguin or Cezanne sells for millions and a still life by an unknown artist goes for thousands. What makes one painting worth so much more than another? For some reason all eyes turn to an art expert to answer this question. But when it comes to the value of famous artists, the only people who really know are the auctioneers, who have been buying and selling art since before most of the experts were born.

What makes one work of art go for more than another? The experts will tell you that it is all about the provenance, or history of ownership of the work. This sounds very mysterious, but it is not hard to understand. When a great artist dies his or her paintings are usually owned by their children and friends. These people can be thought of as being part of the same generation as the artist. They would like to see their work appreciated, which means they want to sell them at a price that will enable them to make money on their investment while avoiding looking foolish by asking too high a price.

Do we need an expert to tell us this? Of course not; in fact we don’t even need to know much about art history to figure this out by ourselves. It is just common sense

The $82.5 million painting by van Gogh sold for a record price yesterday, toppling the artist’s own “Sunflowers” from the No. 1 spot on the list of most expensive paintings.

But the bidding war wasn’t even over yet, and already some art experts were sizing up another van Gogh as an even better deal, and one that might be easier to get for a museum’s collection.

That would be “Patch of Grass,” one of his last paintings, which he painted in 1889 in Auvers-sur-Oise, France — just before he shot himself there, dying two days later. It was bought in 1965 by the Kröller-Müller Museum in Otterlo, Netherlands, a small museum devoted to the work of Vincent van Gogh and his contemporaries. It remains there today — and its price is barely more than a rounding error on the $82.5 million paid for “Portrait of Dr. Gachet.”

The question of why one van Gogh costs so much more than another is a complicated one — and it goes far beyond just how much paint is on the canvas or how big it is.*

This is not to say that the pricing of art objects is arbitrary. For example, a van Gogh painting is more expensive than a Monet because it has a higher utility. The fact that it costs $90 million instead of $10 million doesn’t change its utility (for the buyer) any more than does going from $10 million to $100 million.

This is easy to understand for “investment” art; the more expensive things get, the fewer people can afford them. But this is only part of the story – there are many prices for which supply and demand curves don’t come into play at all: I don’t care how many paintings by Monet are available, I still want one more, and I’m willing to pay up to something like infinity for it.

The fact that prices get so high tells you something interesting about pricing art works: If you know what you’re doing, you can make your money back. This is not true of most things we buy in our day-to-day lives. If I buy an expensive car, I can recover the price difference between my car and an ordinary car by using my car to carry me places where ordinary cars are too cheap (or too uncomfortable) to go; but with art there are

Everyone knows the Mona Lisa is a great painting. But why are some paintings worth millions of dollars, while others sit on the wall in your basement?

It’s not just that there are more Mona Lisa’s than paintings by van Gogh. In fact, there are almost five times as many van Gogh paintings in existence as there are Mona Lisa’s. And van Gogh’s paintings sell for more than 50 times what the average painting sells for.

Art is just like any other market, with each work of art having a supply and demand curve that determines its price. But the criteria used to determine which art gets to be expensive, and which doesn’t, isn’t quite as straightforward.

In fact, it’s easy to argue that art isn’t just like any other market: it’s unlike any other market on earth.

The most expensive painting ever sold at auction was Modigliani’s “Nu Couché” in 2015. The painting was bought by the Qatari royal family for $170.4 million.

The second most expensive painting ever sold at auction is Van Gogh’s “Portrait of Dr. Gachet,” which was auctioned for a total of $149,4 million in New York on May 15, 2011.

Other paintings that have sold for more than $100 million include Francis Bacon’s “Three Studies of Lucian Freud” and Andy Warhol’s “Silver Car Crash (Double Disaster),” both of which were sold for $106,4 million each.

Titian’s “Diana and Callisto” was purchased by the National Gallery in London for $95 million in 2012, while Picasso’s “Les Femmes d’Alger (Version ‘O’)” was bought in 2015 by the same gallery for $179,4 million.

Some other famous paintings to have sold for more than $80 million are Gustav Klimt’s “Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I,” which sold at Christie’s New York in 2006; Leonardo Da Vinci’s “Salvator Mundi,” which was bought by

There are thousands of different art works in the world, but only a small number of artists. This is partly because artists tend to paint things that they think they can sell, and partly because people who buy art tend to buy work by artists they know. Both these factors lead us to expect there to be clusters of similar art, created by similar individuals.

The most expensive paintings cluster around two artists, van Gogh and Picasso, who both painted in the early years of the 20th century.

To put it another way, the most expensive paintings in the world are those that most successfully capture the imagination. They’re not just beautiful to look at—they create a universe of their own. And, like great literature and great music and great film, they can be enjoyed over and over again.

The following are the ten most expensive paintings ever sold: