MariaAragon64
- Artist
- Author
Self taught artist and 'indie' author.
https://www.mariaaragon.com/
My novels are available via Lulu.com and Amazon.com in hardback, paperback and kindle.
Joined Mar 2020
@CJShaneArtBooks
Since I don't do "New Mexico" regional art, I'm having a harder time of it. I guess that's why I keep looking at houses in Detroit or in western NY.
@CJShaneArtBooks
There are artists all over New Mexico, too. Cost of living is less here, but the artists who do best are regionalists, making art of the southwest, etc.
The director of Sotheby’s, Peregrine Pollen, published a post-sale statement that quipped: “Good art holds up even in a bad market.” You might add that good art looks even better on the wall and like nothing much at all in a vault.
In the Sixties, a young artist with no family money, working as a waiter or waitress, could get a cold-water loft in Soho. It might not have had a bathroom but it was “a place to work, crash, live. That doesn’t exist now.” Artists moved on to Brooklyn, which is now “very fancy”. Today “New York” artists have studios in Detroit, a post-industrial city with a surplus of disused warehouse space.
Findlay says there are plenty of buyers who send their prize paintings straight to storage and only show their friends a jpeg. “So when they go out to dinner and they sit next to like-minded collectors, they compare collections on their phones. ‘I just bought this … I only paid that …’”
Even odder than not seeing a painting in the flesh before you buy it is what super-rich buyers do with paintings once they’ve bought them. Suppose I buy a Jackson Pollock or a painting by a hot and covetable artist such as Sarah Sze or Jadé Fadojutimi, I’d want to hang it above the sofa in my hypothetical Park Avenue apartment.
“They enjoyed it. It was fun.” In the early days of Findlay’s career even the busiest plutocrats would come in, ask to see a Dubuffet and end up buying a Miró. In the meantime, they’d have spent two hours chatting. “They’ve educated themselves. I’ve educated myself about their taste. That’s how it used to work.”
“Their client is four blocks from where I’m sitting in my gallery,” Findlay says. “I’m tempted to say why doesn’t your client put a pair of shoes on? People used to do this. Titans of industry did this.” He mentions the collector, major museum donor and uranium-mining magnate Joseph Hirshhorn who used to come to a gallery with his family.
“A moving video of a still painting,” he says with some exasperation. They’ll ask for a condition report. The adviser then forwards these to the prospective buyer. For a fortnight they go back and forth. “Is it that red? Does it look that red? There seems to be a spot on the edge, what’s that?”
Yet paintings today are bought to order. Findlay describes a typical phone call. “An art adviser will call me with a specific request like a pastrami on rye toasted with mayonnaise: a work of art by an artist in a certain colour.” If Findlay has something he thinks will fit the bill, the art adviser will ask for a high-resolution image. They’ll ask him to take a video.
“We’re much more self-conscious today and we think much harder about what’s going to happen in the future,” he reckons. “I think primarily because people are money-orientated today, so they want to know that it’s going to be worth more tomorrow. But that wasn’t an issue in the art world [of the Sixties] because it wasn’t a money world.”
Today the art market is a glittering international pageant, an endless parade of art fairs, openings, biennales, ever more eye-popping auction prices and galleries that drop their artists as soon as they fall out of fashion. Art is an asset, an investment and a security — and you might never hang it on the wall. It wasn’t always so mercenary.
Big Tech has the resources to curb its energy demands, but so far it has chosen not to. For example, there is no way for users to opt out of Google’s AI-generated search, forcing them to get the energy-intensive results even if they did not want them. That has to change. AI is only going to grow, and the companies behind the boom have a responsibility to ensure their technology doesn’t slow progress in fighting climate change.
MariaAragon64
- Artist
- Author
Self taught artist and 'indie' author.
https://www.mariaaragon.com/
My novels are available via Lulu.com and Amazon.com in hardback, paperback and kindle.
Joined Mar 2020