Giacometti - Safe as the Rock of Gibraltar

What happened here? How did a Giacometti sculpture looking like all the others, only bigger, fetch the largest price ever paid for an auctioned work of art? Is Giacometti even a great artist, in the sense that, say, Titian or Rembrandt are? He always seemed to me a one-trick pony who, once he'd found his style, just carried on imitating himself (as many artists do). The record-breaking sculpture is big, instantly recognisable and has scarcity value - even though it would be possible to mass-produce exact replicas that would fool anyone. It is also - and this, I suspect, is the clincher - perfect Corporate Art, the kind of thing that would look good, and impressive, and expensive, and instantly recognisable, in the vast foyer of some mighty finance corporation. Poor Giacometti - that it should come to this, the tortured products of his existential angst now (in the words of Godfrey Barker yesterday) 'safe as the Rock of Gibraltar'. He meant in investment terms, but...