Many years ago, when I was just starting out in the art business, a Mexican art dealer visited the Manhattan gallery where I worked. She had flown in from Mexico the day before, and she was looking for works of art by well-known artists that were small enough to fit into a briefcase. Mexico was about to institute a revaluation of its currency, and the dealer’s panicked, wealthy clients were looking for places to sock away money, including works of art that could be readily transported out of the country, on the person if need be. Such objects are called “flight assets.” Evidently, we didn’t have any artworks that filled the bill, as I don’t remember selling her anything, but her visit came to memory this week amid the current turmoil taking place in the Mideast. As I write this, everything about the war is changing by the hour, but the bottom line is that the world economy suddenly looks very uncertain. With all that oil locked up in the ground, sitting in unmoving ships, or burning in bombed refineries, people may be wondering if it’s time to convert some of their petrodollars into oils that can be taken off a wall and put in a car trunk before fleeing. It’s the same impulse that motivated the Mexican dealer’s clients all those years ago. Photo courtesy of CNN Portable wealth always has its allure in times of uncertainty, from gemstones sewn into the linings of coats to cash hidden in false-bottomed suitcases. Artworks are a different matter. People fleeing oppression, such as European Jews fleeing the Nazis, have had...
Fine art appraisers typically use what is called the Sales Comparison Approach when calculating a value; that is, the appraiser looks at what similar paintings by the artist have sold for and then derives from those sales a value for the work being appraised, allowing for differences in size, subject matter, condition, and other factors. But what do you do when the artist being appraised has no auction records?It is a problem I had to solve last year when I was appraising works from the estate of Margo Pelletier (1951-2016). Born in Bangor, ME, Pelletier showed an early interest in art, and her parents encouraged her studies of painting, sculpture, and photography. She attended the Boston Museum School and the Hartford Art School before receiving her BFA from the Cooper Union for Science and Art in 1988. Pelletier was active in left-wing New York politics and was a co-founder of the artist advocacy group Progressive Culture Works. In the late 1970’s, she worked with the May 19th Communist Organization in Brooklyn, eventually leading their propaganda facility, the Madame Binh Graphics Collective. After an action to protest Apartheid in 1981, Pelletier was arrested and spent six months in the city jail on Rikers Island. Those six months, more than any other experience in her adult life aside from identifying as post-queer, shaped the foundation of her work to come. In the early 1990’s Pelletier was one of the founding members of the artists’ community at 111 First Street in Jersey City, NJ. By the end of the decade, she had become interested in the medium of sound and began studying...
Who’s the greatest American artist of the late 19th century? I think you have to leave John Singer Sargent out of the running: though he had American citizenship, he was born in Italy, trained in France, and spent most of his life in Europe. Sargent aside, I suspect that most art historians would award the crown to either Thomas Eakins or Winslow Homer. You can make the case either way, but I prefer Homer, and much of the American art public agrees with me, or so it seems based on the crowds for the recent Homer exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Winslow Homer exhibition, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, photo by author. Roberta and I attended the show a week before its closing, and the place was packed. You needed Roller Derby-style elbow armor to see everything, or at least an enormous amount of patience. (Roberta asked a guard when the best time to see the show was if you didn’t want to feel as if you were on the subway at rush hour. “Wednesday afternoon, 4:00 PM to closing,” was his answer.) It’s not surprising. Generations of schoolchildren grew up seeing reproductions of Snap the Whip, The Herring Net, The Gulf Stream, or half a dozen other Homer paintings in textbooks or as illustrations on the wall of their classrooms. Union soldiers in the Civil War, deer hunters in the Adirondacks, elegant young ladies playing croquet, fishermen earning a cold and brutal living — Homer captured all aspects of American life. There’s a subject in his work to interest almost anyone. Most of the works...
“The report of my death was an exaggeration,” Mark Twain said in 1897, replying to queries from American reporters who were investigating reports of Twain’s death on a visit to England. It’s the same with the art world: troughs inevitably follow peaks, and doomsayers proclaim the end of the market. 2025 had been unexciting, when it was not horrendous (see my post from three months ago), and the current economic uncertainty had everyone feeling jittery. What a difference a few months make. The November-December auctions did well across the board. Record prices for paintings by Suzanne Valadon and Frieda Kahlo. An auction of Picasso ceramics where almost every lot doubled its estimate. A single-artist sale of David Hockney prints based on his iPad drawings that absolutely shot the lights out, with individual prints bringing well into six figures. Old Master prints are selling well. It looks like happy days are here again. The fall sales are a lead-in to the annual art circus in Miami Beach. Miami Basel is most prestigious of the art fairs in December, but there are a host of satellite art fairs in that city. The general public can visit Miami Basel on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, but major collectors and celebrities get in three days earlier, and most of the big sales are made before the fair opens its doors to mere hoi polloi. Speaking to several friends who exhibited at one of the Miami fairs, I found that most of them had done very well. Having to remove sold paintings and rehang your booth with paintings you were holding in reserve always brings...
There’s a drugstore near me that has a sign at the front door: “Pokémon Cards Sold At Checkout.” I understand why cigarettes and certain medicines need to be in a spot where they are always protected, but Pokémon cards? My children were too old to be the target audience when the Pokémon craze hit the United States in 1998, so I have never paid much attention to the cards. I had heard that some Millennials who had begun to hit peak earning age, Crypto Bros and the like, were still avidly collecting the Pokémon cards of their youth, but I didn’t realize the enormous prices that some of the cards were bringing. My ignorance was apparent at the Appraisers Association of America’s annual conference last week when I attended a seminar entitled “High Stakes and Holofoils: Inside the Explosive Market of Magic, Pokémon, and Yu-Gi-Oh!” taught by Travis Landry, an auctioneer of items from popular culture. Landry, a young man with a wealth of knowledge and a carnival barker’s enthusiasm, detailed for us the history of the Pokémon craze, which has become the world’s highest-grossing media franchise, generating an international franchise worth billions. The way for Pokémon was paved by Magic: The Gathering, a trading card game introduced in 1993. It proved to be a sleeper hit, and the rarer cards began to command money from gamers. With Pokémon, the developers went straight to stressing the cards’ collectability, with the motto, “Gotta catch ‘em all!” As Landry said, “How many people actually know how to play the Pokémon game? It’s all about collecting the cards themselves.” The creators succeeded...
