Not so fast, David Choe—you can no longer call your Facebook murals the most expensive work of art, because Qatar has come to the rescue. The oil-rich country has bought Paul Cezanne's painting The Card Players for more than $250 million, making it by far the highest price ever paid for a work of art. Up until this point, the most expensive painting ever sold was a Jackson Pollock for $140 million in the frenzied pre-recession year of 2006, and in recent days the graffiti artist David Choe was reportedly given Facebook stock options for decorating the company's murals in 2005 that cost mere thousands then but will now be worth some $200 million after the social-network giant goes public. But Cezanne's small, quietly somber work beats them all—there are four other Card Players in the world, and they are at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, the Courtauld in London, and the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia.
