Levels of Success - High End Art

[jnantz]

that is a fantastic website !
about halfway down there is a link to an animated timeline
https://www.understandingduchamp.com/index.html
and the bride stripped by her bachelors, bare explanation ..
great stuff !

[Old_Dick]

When I was a kid I was sent cross country on a Greyhound bus. I insisted on taking my SLR along.
My dad asked me if I knew how to make money photographing on my trip.
I didn't have the foggiest idea.
He told me to take pictures of the worst public lavatories I could find at the bus stations and send them to Greyhound,
then see how much they'd pay for the negatives

John, how did it work out?

[consummate_fritterer]

Extreme/incessant promotion, geographic location, politics, luck.

[Vaughn]

The luck of the well-prepared.

[faberryman]

The luck of the well-prepared.

Which begs the question: How does one become well prepared?

[Ted R]

Sometimes I think the two main attributes for selling photographs for big bucks are print size and scarcity, as in, make it big, make only a few. I also agree with previous posts about the importance of the fine art market internal network. Say you are rich and want some big bold beautiful pictures for your walls, you may not care if they are paintings, prints or photographs but to find them you go shopping in the part of town where the fine art dealers hang out. They take you round their galleries and talk about pictures, they find out how much you want to spend, they make enquiries and keep in touch. Rich people like being pursued by hungry dealers
The point is that dealers need a supply of pictures, and quite possibly they deal mostly not with the artist but with the artist's agent and/or manager. So perhaps some of the people who are successful selling big-buck prints are those with the better agents and managers.

[mdarnton]

It's self-comforting to think that one's failure has been at the hands of gatekeepers and anonymous snobs, but the brutal fact is that he that tooteth not his own horn, that same horn it shall not be tooted.

[Serge S]

So I think if there were a simple answer that the art market would be a predictable investment. It is not unless maybe you are buying Da Vinci's. And also grand prices today do not guarantee grand prices in the future. Soth's work From Sleeping by the Mississippi was going for nearly 40k (I think I saw that in 2005 at Christies) in the early 2000's but now goes for 6 to 10k.

The French painter Bouguereau's work was highly prized in the 1880's and then academic painters fell out of favor and his prices never came back.
His work is still valued but not near it's apex.

[Tin Can]

It's self-comforting to think that one's failure has been at the hands of gatekeepers and anonymous snobs, but the brutal fact is that he that tooteth not his own horn, that same horn it shall not be tooted.

I thought ye fiddle not...

[John Kasaian]

John, how did it work out?

Sort of like the frozen turkey pinhole camera, it began to stink terribly.