Art4August

Today’s art collecting tidbit: Do NOT purchase art at art fairs, any, ever. Demand steeply exceeds supply (or so you are led to believe) and one is bound to get caught up in the irrational exuberance and impulse of unconsidered buying. The same applies for auctions; simply don’t. Ditto buying at commercial galleries during what is considered high season—for me that is eleven months a year. Rather, engage in what I call Art4August, Get the dealers when they are down on their collective knees, or cash flow anyway. Turn the tables on the typical master slave relationship that is the norm when patronizing snooty art galleries. Summer collect! When business crawls to a near halt, vist spaces or reach out to dealers for jpegs. The art supply is more or less consistent whether its Calders or Colens; there’s always death, divorce, taxes and pruning in all seasons, and contemporary continues to be churned out at an alarming pace, I meant carefully and willfully created. Sure the rule still applies to buy what you love, but make sure you love what you buy—do diligence!

Cash is Crap, Sell the Kids, Buy Art

An executive at a top art insurance company told me that a Cezanne painting sold privately for $250m - that stands as the highest price ever paid for a single work of art to date. Not bad for some pigment on a bit of canvas. Many would say that such a lofty number is a ludicrous concept in a time of great political unrest and systemic poverty worldwide. I say why stop there; that the benchmark will steadily rise and in no time at all we will live to see the day of the $1-billion dollar painting. I can hardly wait. I feel entitled to have forged a life in aesthetics, and that you can now attain such high levels of remuneration only makes it that much more pleasant. So, in the age when cash is crap, not to mention the toxic dollar that has become the currency of choice for short sellers, the 1988 Christopher Wool painting Apocalypse Now sums it up perfectly: “SELL THE HOUSE, SELL THE CAR, SELL THE KIDS”. And buy art!