Picasso is in the news. His “Women of Algiers” from the Fifties set a new world record at Christie’s, where it sold for more than a hundred-million pounds. In this painting, Picasso was fooling around with Delacroix’s “Women of Algiers” (1834) that hangs in the Louvre. The buyer remains anonymous, it goes without saying. Many art critics are pretty angry about the price for the late Picasso, which they do not believe is worth it. They call it splurging, no less. What they forget is that the world is now crawling with the turbo rich, whose wealth goes into many billions of pounds. In the years to come, they will splurge over and over again. Thorstein Veblen’s conspicuous consumption is at work again, but it is only for those in the know. The turbo rich surely know who has splurged last and why. And they will respond in kind when they get a chance. This has nothing whatsoever to do with the value of a work of art. Rather, it has to do with the value of a nose thumbed at one of your presumed equals. A hundred-million pounds is peanuts among them, anyway.