Selling at craft markets - hard lessons learned.

[tim atherton]

Quote:
Originally Posted by tim atherton
Mind you, really crappy paintings will always sell pretty well - who was it who said: "no one ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public"?

I believe it was H.L. Mencken, and the quote may be more along the lines of the "intelligence" of the American public.

ha - H.L. Mencken, so it was - and suprise suprise I actually got the quote correct for once (according to both the internet and my oxford dictionary of quotations - it apparently was "taste")

[paulr]

I do believe you would find that the yearly expenditure for art and art-like decorative objects is at a high.

it may be at a high, but if you look at auction statistics you'll see that prices paid for photography have increased at much higher rate over the last two decades than prices for painting.

A true art collector would like the artist to be dead or dying. Defining those guys as the ideal buyer is making ones life difficult.

I disagree with that assessment. Not all art collectors are collecting primarily as an investment. And NONE of the people I know who collect the work of emerging artists collect primarily as an investment. Speculators and investors just aren't that attracted to emerging artists. It's just too bad a gamble. The chance of the work's value dropping to zero is as good as its chance of rising with the market. People who collect this work do it primarily because they love the work, and because they love collecting.