Pictures of sad clowns, or kids with big droopy eyes are my kind of Art. IMHO those Hamms beer signs with the waves in the lake that look like they move really kick @$$ Velvet Elvis, not so cool (but I'm a tough critic!)
Pictures of sad clowns, or kids with big droopy eyes are my kind of Art. IMHO those Hamms beer signs with the waves in the lake that look like they move really kick @$$ Velvet Elvis, not so cool (but I'm a tough critic!)
"I would feel more optimistic about a bright future for man if he spent less time proving that he can outwit Nature and more time tasting her sweetness and respecting her seniority"---EB White
Just redux one of those Hamm's signs twenty feet across and put it in the Miami Pop Art
fair with a twenty million dollar price tag, or take a photograph of that black velvet Elvis
rug and ask fifty grand for it - can't be any worse than a photo of a billboard. Winning is largely the art of the bluff, and not art of the eye, just as in poker.
I think there is an element of game theory involved in these kinds of payoffs, but I don't think poker is the best analogy for the game, which seems to have more in common with the category of games in which discovering the rules of the game is part of the game play. Poker would be more difficult if one didn't know if two Aces beats a straight flush, or the other way around, and even more so if your opponents did know.
The difference in this case is that you get to invent the rules of the game. But not much
sheer statistical chance to it. You need 250K min for a booth space and a well recognized
dealership. Need to know your potential clients. Everyone knows it's an esthetic con with winners and losers, but it can't be a business con. Have to have an established reputation for delivering the goods. Sorta a closed-loop highbrow thing for people willing to gamble big, but who are otherwise just excercising their right to conspicuous consumption. But it is a game. Once an artist loses collectable momentum, the house of cards falls. Not many are going to have recognized value in the long run. Fortunately, a lot of color photography will just plain fade. Going archival is not always a good thing.
Slightly different perspective on it - in his old age nearing death, Dali was signing stacks
of unprinted paper before even being lithographed. It infuriated collectors because they
thought it would make the value of their own collection fall. But the truth all along is that
these mass-produced reproductions were virtually worthless anyway. You go into some
Fisherman's Wharf tourist gallery, plop down a couple grand for a fancy Dali poster, which
is probably worth less than the frame itself. The dealer paid about fifteen bucks for it. If
you want to "invest" in Dali, you need hundreds of thousand of dollars to play with, or way more, and won't waste time on reproductions, signed or not.
I did a limited edition book where I sent the author endsheets to sign. There were a small stack left over after production. A few years ago, he passed on, but I still have the extra sheets. Someday they might be wanted. I know of editions done for a deceased author where signatures were cut from cancelled checks and pasted into the books.
This is one way, I suppose, where it is easier to deal with dead artists; the amount of work that has come from their own hands is fixed by time.
Hard to know what the truth was concerning Dali - but at the time the mere rumor (and it
did move fast) of him signing blank sheets caused a panic. But it is known he signed his name to tens of thousands of pieces, many relatively worthless. In this case he was obviously a deservedly recognized painter; but the casual "collector" probably didn't even know the difference between a lithograph and mass-produced photolithograph. At one time
the Wall St Journal ran an article pointing out naive collecting as one of the worst forms
of investment there is - in that case they were specifically referring to Kincade, whose stuff has already collapsed in value. No mystery there.
Few things stinks worse than a dead Artist.
"I would feel more optimistic about a bright future for man if he spent less time proving that he can outwit Nature and more time tasting her sweetness and respecting her seniority"---EB White
I don't know about that, John. I can remember a few hundred times driving past that muddy feedlot across the road from Little Table Mtn, on the Madera Co side of the River.
When I was young, a couple of the young cowboys who lived there would daily board the
school bus, and the other kids would sure be pulling the windows open!
Good. I hope it finally all gets decided, one way or another – but it won't – and I don't give a fig which way it goes. A pox on all their houses. Forget it Jake, it's Art town.
...and I can remember climbing on the sedimentary/basalt cliffs under the cross on afternoons after school.
Last edited by ROL; 10-Apr-2012 at 18:34.
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