Subscribe in a reader
I have a penchant for modern art. If a painting looks like a doodle drawn by a 3-year-old, yet sells for millions of dollars, I probably own (or want to own) a print of it.
My desktop on my computer at work is Cy Twombly’s scribbled mess, Leda and the Swan. My desktop at home fluctuates between Jackson Pollock’s Full Fathom Five and an assortment of Canadian artist Marcel Dzama’s innocently unnerving drawings.
I own a framed picture of a room full of packing peanuts. A few leaf-blowers are hanging limply from the ceiling, and a couple of industrial fans sit in the corners. The peanuts are piled into drifts like snow. It’s beautiful. And according to the Baltimore Museum of Art, it’s art, no matter what the rest of you say.
As you can tell, I haven’t spent much time thinking about the business side of the art world. I’m usually too busy being transported by “the emotion in the brushstrokes” to consider a painting’s investment value. But recently I’ve started noticing the numbers side a bit more. And contemporary art (the stuff by people who are still alive… mostly) has become quite the earner for savvy investors in the last 20 years.
Francis Bacon saw his painting, George Dyer Staring into a Mirror, increase more than six times its value when it was sold a couple of years ago. In 1995, the painting went for $1.43 million. Ten years later, it sold for $8.98 million. That’s a 627% gain. And Maurizio Cattelan’s sculpture, The Pope Struck by a Meteorite, more than doubled in value in two years, selling for $880,000 in 2001 and for $3 million in 2003.
But I’m betting you’ve never heard of either of those artists.
We all know that buying a Monet or a Rembrandt is a good idea. Unless someone stumbles across a bunch of obscure Monet paintings in a Paris attic, you can be fairly sure that eventually your piece of French impressionist history will be worth more than it was when you bought it. But to get your hands on a Monet, you’d have to drop a cool $7 million, and that’s for one of his lesser-known pieces.
Grabbing up the works of the masters of the art world is like investing in blue chips. It’s safe and expensive, which would make buying contemporary art more like investing in micro-cap stocks -- except you’re not trading on a company’s future earnings but on an artist’s future fame.
And while we can all see the potential for a company that holds the only patent on, say, a miracle drug or a cheap new way to dig oil wells, making an assessment on the future of an artist is a trick most of us aren’t comfortable performing without help.
That’s where the marketers come in. Everyone is selling something after all, even in the world of fine art.
Art has always been a bastion of fads, just like everything else (fashion, entertainment, education, the stock markets). But the fads that were once controlled by those “in the know” -- the critics, the patrons and the avant-garde denizens of hipper-than-thou neighborhoods in New York City -- are now being created by marketing campaigns.
The most business-savvy artists have always done this for themselves. Look at Andy Warhol. He found fame just by being his absurd, grandiose self (sound like a few heiresses you know?), and his works are like baseball cards, traded for the value of the man behind them, not just for their artistic value.
But these days an entire marketing team stands behind the artist, making sure he or she is noticed and talked up by the right people. Like a political candidate or a new kind of men’s aftershave, artists are commodities to be sold to the public.
The art boom is based partly on fanatics who believe in the product and partly on insiders who are looking for a better cut, just like all good market frenzies. As art critic Godfrey Barker put it a few years ago, “Contemporary art exhibits the price stampedes, the euphoria and the financial calculations that Wall Street saw in the Drexel Lambert takeover years in the ‘80s.”
Unfortunately, I’m like the Supreme Court justice: I can’t define good art, but I know it when I see it… sometimes.
Tech Investing: Patching Together the Wireless Quilt of America
8/31/2007
The Great Financial Panic of 2007
8/31/2007
Economic Growth Reduces Housing Jitters
8/31/2007