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Affordable art? An oxymoron, surely, as the Christie’s publicity machine gears into full gear, ready to promote a Modigliani nude that will headline its next big auction of modern and contemporary art works, in November. The price tag for the 1917 oil painting? $100m or more.
It’s enough to drive an art lover to despair – especially if she has spent any time reading about those auctions, held every spring and autumn, at which works by the likes of Andy Warhol, Jackson Pollock, Pablo Picasso, Roy Liechtenstein and other 20th-century masters routinely set record after record. Last May, Christie’s raised $658.5m in a single evening sale, with some items fetching double what the auctioneer had estimated.
Modigliani had no success at all in his lifetime, often trading paintings for meals, and died broke. Today’s superstars fare much better – just look at Damien Hirst or Jeff Koons, who can sell works directly to collectors for six to seven figures.
So, even if you missed last week’s Affordable Art Fair in New York – or weren’t even aware that it was taking place – it’s worth remembering that artists like Koons, Hirst, and Takashi Murakami are the exception rather than the rule. There are thousands of lesser-known artists struggling to make a living. And it’s at fairs like these – launched in the UK in 1999 and now taking place at art-world hubs like Maastricht, Hong Kong, Milan and Singapore, as well as New York – that ordinary art lovers and wannabe collectors on a more limited budget can pick up those artists’ work.
The message from the fair’s organizers is clear, said Allison Tolman, whose family-owned business, the Tolman Collection of Tokyo, exhibited prints by the 103-year-old Toko Shinoda (whose works are in collections like those of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Guggenheim) for several thousand dollars, as well as pieces by newer artists for only a few hundred dollars.
“They tell us to make ourselves approachable,” she said, “to be prepared to answer questions that fair-goers have about the art.”
That’s no hardship for Tolman, who has little time or patience for what she sees when she walks into many New York galleries and finds assistants reluctant even to raise their heads and address her, dismissing her out of hand as unlikely to be a prospective purchaser.
“My theory is that so many people with money have jumped into this market and treated it as a fun game, raising its status, that it has created a sense among others who like art that it’s somehow not really for them,” she said, heatedly. “Nothing could be further from the truth. Art is for everyone.”
Indeed, the atmosphere at the Affordable Art Fair couldn’t be a greater contrast to that at the annual Armory Show, which draws top collectors to New York every year. There, the casual browser can be briskly brushed aside. At the Affordable Art Fair, it’s hard to duck the affable gallerists – who have come from Hong Kong, Barcelona, and Paris, as well as across North America – eager to explain the nuances of the photographs, lithographs, prints, oil paintings and myriad other works on display.
This year, while the top price was $10,000, the bottom was $100, and a lot of the pieces on display were in the range of $750 to $2,000 – a far cry from anything in a typical New York gallery, much less an auction house.
When prices for works by Picasso or Warhol by have reached such feverish heights that economist Nouriel Roubini – the “Dr Doom” who forecast the 2008 financial crisis – is warning that a bubble might be taking shape in the art market, even celebrities who once might have headed to the auction houses are opting for the affordable end of the market. Last Wednesday evening, during the preview, Mad Men star John Slattery spent $1,600 on a mixed-media piece by Janet Sherman.
Still, even if you’re tempted by arguments that art is the next new asset class, and data such as the Mei Moses World All Art Index, which as of June 2015 had outperformed the S&P 500 since the end of 2013, there are a few caveats to bear in mind.
First, you can’t and shouldn’t view a work of art as an investment, regardless of what some economists argue. Sure, your new painting may hold its value and may even appreciate. But art is the most illiquid and opaque market imaginable, one that makes the murky worlds of hedge funds and private equity look positively transparent in comparison.
There are no exchanges on which prices are determined, and only a fraction of the sales take place publicly. Far more happen behind closed doors, and their prices are never recorded; it can be impossible to gauge what that painting you bought at a street fair or art fair is really worth.
Then, too, there’s the fact that fashion has a lot to do with that value. For a long time, so-called “dark paintings” were out of favor, meaning that gloomy pictures by otherwise sought-after artists like Lucian Freud simply didn’t sell at auction. In the 1980s, it was the Impressionist masters who set the blockbuster sale figures. Now it’s figures like Picasso.
Sculpture can be favored one year, giving way to figurative painting the next. And while some other tangible asset – like a lakefront fishing cottage – might have an intrinsic value, regardless of how fishing goes in and out of vogue, the same won’t be true of that cool sculpture you bought for your garden.
None of that means you should be frightened off from spending on art, if that’s what interests you. It does mean that you should be wary about how much you spend, and how you treat it as an asset in your personal balance sheet, even if you’re one of the 1% and have the ability to schmooze with top gallerists and raise a paddle at the Christie’s auction when that Modigliani comes up for sale.
Art advisers who work with ultra-wealthy collectors are the first to suggest they focus on what they love and what has meaning for them. Only then do these advisors help guide their clients to the works within those categories that offer the best value and fit into their collections.
Most of us, of course, can’t afford an adviser, but if you invest enough time attending some of the accessible art fairs and smaller galleries and talking to the artists and curators about the works on display, your knowledge will grow.
And if you go about it carefully, you may even end up buying something by an artist your grandchildren will point to as the Modigliani of the 21st century.
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