In the trading market,

even if it’s the same great artist’s work created around the same period, and the dimensions are similar, theoretically, the selling prices should be similar as well.

In fact, counterintuitively, there are often price differences of several million US Dollars or more between these different individual pieces.

The reasons for these fluctuations, excluding the different historical contexts of creation, the public’s perception of notoriety, and variations in exhibition records.

The biggest influencing factor is the artist’s state of creation.

Some paintings are poorly executed, which may be due to the artist experimenting with new techniques they’re unfamiliar with, or suffering from a professional ailment like an occasional bout of wrist arthritis.

And some... they just didn’t really put effort into them.

Even in Picasso’s forties or fifties, when his artistic style was quite mature, and he was one of the most renowned great painters internationally at the time.

But it’s still easy to find some poorly executed pieces.

Gu Weijing thinks that the level of brushwork in these paintings might not be much better than his at present.

Those works that obviously look extremely perfunctory, he speculates, might have been made on occasions when he was short of money, quickly painted and tossed to art dealers.

All signed by Picasso,

whether they’re the worst type of works, ordinary pieces, masterpieces, or super famous paintings like "War and Peace."

The difference in perception they bring to collectors might be even bigger than the distance difference between Guo Degang and Liu Yifei in front of people’s eyes.

The price range can vary from as low as ten thousand US Dollars to more than two hundred million US Dollars, differing by over twenty thousand times at random.

Usually,

in the forties, buying Picasso’s works blindly with eyes closed, and then selling them off half a century later, the average rate of return could be over ten thousand percent, almost every piece doubling a hundredfold.

But if one’s eye for art is extremely poor, and luck is equally terrible, ending up buying Picasso’s more ’poor’ paintings only.

Then the increases would be minimal,

taking into account inflation and US Dollar depreciation, one might even end up at a loss.

This kind of situation is quite common in the arts and cultural world, whether in the fields of calligraphy, painting, or literary creation.

In the early Qing Dynasty, artists like Eight Great Mountains and other aloof artists, when a high-ranking official came to commission a painting or a calligraphy work, if they felt the person was a country bumpkin and couldn’t refuse, they would deliberately create a poor-quality work.

These pieces could not reflect the original level of the creator.

On the contrary,

those pieces that make an artist exclaim after completion—"Damn awesome! To create this, I’m truly a fucking genius, it’s incredibly amazing, no regrets in this life!"

would be far superior to his normally expected level.

Fitzgerald spent half a lifetime in the early years working on second-rate scripts and wrote countless bad plays in later years, but just because he squeezed out "The Great Gatsby," he became one of the greatest writers in American history, praised even by the Old European literary circle, which always considered Americans as ignorant bumpkins, almost reaching the status of Mark Twain.

It’s similar in painting,

in the field of painting, there are many examples of painters who gain high status by creating just one famous painting in their lifetime.

This Muse Goddess’s Blessed Small Candle skill card, after being obtained,

Gu Weijing found that the system automatically displayed an unlit candle icon next to the Hundred Arts Tree on the virtual panel.

Gu Weijing tried clicking on this small candle.

And then,

the candle icon extended out several branches like a tree diagram, with a plus sign behind each branch:

[Painting Techniques——]

[Sketching Technique: Lv.4 Tier One Professional Painter (2367/5000)]+

[Chinese Painting Techniques: Lv.4 Tier One Professional Painter (1156/5000)]+

[Oil Painting Technique: Lv.5 Tier Two Professional Painter (39/10000)]+

[Watercolor Painting Technique...]

Gu Weijing tried clicking on the plus sign behind the Sketching Technique, and the system immediately popped up a corresponding prompt.

"Would you like to activate the Muse Goddess’s small candle, upgrading the Sketching Technique to: Tier Two Professional Painter (1/10000)? [Note: For the current option, the skill can last for (857) seconds, exceeding the time limit costs 1.5 free experience points per second.]"

seconds.

Around ten minutes? It’s certainly not enough to do a proper sketch, but maybe if he moves quickly, he could finish a simple quick sketch.

Gu Weijing canceled the interface and tried switching to Chinese Painting Techniques.

"Would you like to activate the Muse Goddess’s small candle, upgrading the Chinese Painting Techniques to: Tier Two Professional Painter (1/10000)? [Note: For the current option, the skill can last for (728) seconds, exceeding the time limit costs 1.5 free experience points per second.]"

The duration for the skill is slightly shorter than for sketching despite both being Tier One skills.

It’s probably because his Chinese Painting has slightly less by several hundred experience points compared to sketching.

He thought for a moment and tried choosing the freshly upgraded Tier Two Oil Painting.

"Would you like to...upgrade the Oil Painting Technique to: Tier Three Professional Painter (1/30000)? [Note: For the current option, the skill can last for (551) seconds, exceeding the time limit costs 2 free experience points per second.]"

The higher the level upgrade, the shorter the skill’s duration.

This time it’s a full two hundred seconds less.

The cost of extending the burning of the small candle beyond the time limit also grows exponentially.

"Then should I try upgrading the system skills?"

After playing around for a while, Gu Weijing was ultimately curious to see the effects of using this small candle on the skills previously given by the system.