The Eight-Dollar Baseball Card
My nephew collected baseball cards as a kid. His father was an avid collector of various items such watch fobs, and Greg aspired to an equivalent seriousness. He got a guidebook about the value of individual cards and kept abreast of the value of each card in his...
Spoken Too Soon
In my last blog, I wrote about the results of the American auctions that had occurred in the previous week in New York. Among the lessons they taught, I said, was that the market for 19th century genre and still life paintings was “dead as a doornail.” Spoken too...
What Were We Thinking?
Is there anything more embarrassing, fashion-wise, than looking at your high school yearbook 10 to 20 years after you have graduated? Those hair styles! That outfit! What on earth were we thinking? The embarrassment gradually subsides. And, who knows, beehive hairdos,...
Whose Art Is It, Anyway?
There was a kerfuffle in the art world recently about an exhibition that opened in Beijing last fall and is currently on tour to three other Chinese museums. The exhibition is of the works of Anselm Kiefer (born 1945), a German artist whose monumentally-sized works...
One Who Did, and One Who Didn’t
Seven years ago, I was at the Montclair Art Museum viewing an exhibition called “Cezanne and American Modernism.” As the title indicates, the show traced the influence of the French artist upon American artists ranging from Maurice Prendergast to Arshile Gorky. The...
Corn Belt Surrealist
Ellen Lanyon, a Chicago artist who later ended up in New York, often painted pictures that placed ordinary objects in dream-like juxtapositions with a decidedly spooky air. In an article on her work for Art in America twenty years ago, I wrote that I had always...
Selling the Mona Lisa
What’s the Mona Lisa worth? The short answer is, whatever someone will pay for it. The longer answer is that nobody knows, because no one has tried to sell it recently, and you’ll never know how much a painting is worth until you try to sell it. Unless the Louvre...
Not Hip
Two things happened last month that served for me as contradictory bellwethers for the current state of the market for 19th century American art. The first was the annual meeting of the Appraisers Association of America. The second was the American auctions. I should...
It’s Worth What Now?
Last month the Pursuits section of Bloomberg.com published an article entitled “That $100,000 Painting Bought to Flip Is Now Worth About $20,000.” The article by Katya Kazakina detailed the travails of Niels Kantor, an art dealer and collector, who two years ago had...
Fool for Art
If you asked a hundred urban twenty-somethings to describe themselves, a fair number would define themselves as artists of one sort or another. “I’m a painter,” a few would tell you. “I’m an actor,” others would say. Jazz saxophonist, dancer, standup comedian – the...
