Might we get it right this time around? - Managing our recovery

THIS week’s sale of Picasso’s 1955 painting Les Femmes D’Alger for $179.4m may be a temporary high water mark in two of the age’s defining characteristics — consumerism and materialism. It also points to an increasing concentration of wealth.

The piece’s cultural and artistic merit may be beyond question but when so many have so little, the transaction seems to epitomise how unequal and cruel our world can be. It may go too far to suggest that the moral integrity of the work is diminished by its inaccessibility, by the fact that it has become a plutocrat’s plaything, but it seems at least a reasonable question to raise.

The indulgences of the über rich have always needled at the idea of social equity and how the spoils of this world’s production are divided. However, the Irish consumer spending index — published by Visa Europe — suggests that after an exceptionally long hibernation we are growing in confidence and have started spending money again. Retail therapy is once again the default cure of choice for the Irish.