NEW YORK—Whether as a symbol of status or a token of love, diamonds scintillate and titillate. And lately, some of the most talked about are appearing not on the hands of socialites and movie stars but in the contemporary art market. In August, Damien Hirst’s diamond-encrusted skull sold for a staggering $100 million in a controversial sale, and coming up on November 13, Christie’s in New York is scheduled to offer Jeff Koons’s Blue Diamond (2005), a seven-foot-wide stainless-steel sculpture of a diamond ring, for an estimated $12 million.

Part of the artist’s “Celebration” series devised to satirize superficial consumer products, Blue Diamond is one of five similarly cartoonish sculpture-jewels, each in a different color. Amy Cappellazzo, international co-head of postwar and contemporary art at Christie’s, told the New York Times that the work is “a universal image that needs no translation.” But just in case Koons’s message isn’t crystal clear, ARTINFO will illuminate the value of the piece’s gigantic price tag, more than twice the record price for a work by Koons.

For the estimated $12 million price of Koons’s Blue Diamond, you could:  

1. Hire singer/songwriter Neil Diamond to perform at least 12 times! Diamond played at the Stockton Arena in Stockton, Calif., for $1 million in January 2006. The show lost nearly $400,000 of the city’s money, prompting the Stockton City Council to dismiss city manager Mark Lewis.

2. Win the hand of 6,000 ladies. A full circle of Tiffany round-brilliant diamonds channel-set in 18-carat gold costs only about $2,050. Say “I love you” over and over and over again.    

3. Build hospitals in Africa. After their divorce in 1978, Elizabeth Taylor sold Richard Burton’s 70-carat diamond present for $5 million. A cut of the proceeds funded the construction of a hospital in Botswana. Perhaps Liz is the undisclosed seller of Blue Diamond, and the $12 million will go toward some new charitable construction?

4. Buy half an Elizabeth Taylor. At a 2001 Sotheby’s auction actor Hugh Grant purchased Andy Warhol's Liz (1963) for $3.5 million. But Christie’s, which will sell the work this November, now appraises the Warhol between $25 and 35 million, so you’d be lucky to get a single Liz today.

5. Provide treatment for 24,950 HIV/AIDS patients in Zambia, a nation rife with diamond smugglers. According to a report funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development, a first-line retroviral regimen costs $488 a year in the southern African nation.

6. Buy one million bleacher seats ($12) at Yankee Stadium, home of the most famous baseball diamond in the world.

7. Purchase five of Lo Scheggia’s Triumph of Fate, a 1449 circular painting that commemorates the birth of Lorenzo de’ Medici, the magnificent art patron/benevolent dictator whose family used a design of three interlocking diamond rings to symbolize their wealth and power. The Met acquired the painting for $2.2 million in 1995.

8. Own 9.8% of the Ritz. A hefty $118 million was the price when the brokerage firm Ellerman Investments Ltd. bought the Ritz Hotel in London in 1995.