One upside to the comic book art market thing - there's a small market for original pages from smaller creators. I'm not, like, a collector of comic book art but I have the original of one of my favorite pages from Linda Medley's Castle Waiting and an old, old Laugh Out Loud Cats from the early days of the strip and the internet.
I imagine the Linda Medley one will hold its original value and the Laugh Out Loud Cats one (which was IIRC $20 in about 2008) won't, just because the one is relatively well-known and the other isn't, but they're both very charming and I didn't buy them as investment pieces. It's nice for the creators to make a little money and they're pleasant drawings.
I've heard that furries provide commissions that support many young artists.
Thanks, Frowner-- one thing I meant to also convey in looking at this is the positive vibe from people liking art of any kind and maybe taking an interest in what artists do. The cats are lovely.
Even liking bad or faddish art is an evolution past putting whatever walmart has in the poster section up on your walls.
Given the dubious ethics surrounding the origin and provenance of a lot of older art, if collectors are now more focused on contemporary art that's probably for the best.
All Done by Kindness is a fun book by Doris Langley Moore where the cultural divides between people who do and do not follow that-regarded-as-fine-art is an important plot element. Also the ethics of prominent critics. (One side character is a provincial art dealer who falls into the latter category.)
That is, people who do not follow art, not critics.
We've got a page of original work by the late, wonderful German Expressionist-meets-Slumber Party Massacre comics artist Richard Sala, and I'm so delighted that we bought it. (I once saw an amazing page by Eddie Campbell from From Hell at a comic book convention and didn't buy it on the spot--it was, IIRC, like eight hundred bucks, more than I felt that I could just drop on a whom--and then it was gone when I went back to consider it some more.
And to follow on to 1, I bet it feels good to give Medley some cash given the, uh, struggles of publishing Castle Waiting, the same way I was happy to give Sala a hundred and fifty bucks or whatever it cost me for a page from the lucky dip pile.
Sala's work, which some of you might recall from MTV's Liquid Television.
Isn't a lot of high end art transactions fundamentally about tax evasion?
10. I had heard money laundering rather than tax evasion. I had some pages that I bought decades ago that I sold, that's what got me looking at auction spaces and prices. I don't know that the collectors for these are up to anything by and large-- I think it's a bunch of people happy to spend competitively on this stuff, maybe not that different from normal art markets or markets for say pro sports objects. I've by and large sold without meeting buyers, and it's been many decades since I've been to a convention.
I think the gallery owners by and large don't talk about their clients. Details get published sometimes after forgeries are discovered. This guy is the most recent one I've read about. Under communism, art shenanigans were for someone senior to arrange the loan of a painting (so restricted to minor work) from one of the national galleries to a public building they controlled. They'd have a copy made and hung, then return that. These weren't headline works, but minor pieces. In my limited exposure to the art world, I've heard more about misrepresentation and forgery than financial wrongdoing, but I haven't had even secondhand contact with anyone familaiar with buying or selling really expensive stuff.
That sounds easier than inflating the profits of a pizza shop by 15%.
Here is what art market analysts see as two art markets. But maybe they don't know about the market in comic book original art
But all three are the secondary market -- which at the high end is just a market for investment properties. Artwork on the high end of the secondary market isn't very different in that regard from Bugattis or fine jewels, although art investors can reap social rewards from displaying or lending out their work that presumably aren't available to sports car collectors. (I assume there are tax avoidance benefits too, but I'm not sure how those work.) Nonwealthy enthusiasts can access the lower end (where a lot of the comic art auctions are at), but even then, art sales in the secondary market don't directly benefit the artist.
Presumably, if you are still alive and your older works sell for more, you can make some newer ones and sell them for more than you would have gotten otherwise. But maybe the price doesn't go up until you die?
At least you can just look up a guide on faking your own death.
13: I thought that in Europe, there was some kind of future income stream that did benefit artists. Or maybe I just read something a dvocating for that.
14: Yes, and that's why I qualified it as "directly" benefitting the artist. But secondary market valuation can really harm an artist. Most emerging artists would want the value of their work to be set primarily by gallerists, museums and foundations (i.e., people and entities who know and care about art) rather than art advisors and investors (people who care about their clients' asset porfolios). At the extreme end (see, e.g., Stefan Simochowitz) the secondary art market can really hurt the careers of emerging artists -- art that rapidly increases in price can rapidly drop, and once that happens, no one wants to touch that artist again.
16. There have been lots of attempts to create resale royalty rights for artists, but I don't know that any of them have been meaningfully successful.
Buying art makes me nervous. I'm thinking of trying out buying craft though. But I'm afraid it will consume the house like the plants.
And how do you know that the squirrels are real? I'm not an expert.
Did the craft consume the plants, or are your plants eating your house? I feel like art would be a safer hobby.
And are squirrels now not real either? I thought it was just the trees and the birds. Soon there will be nothing real in the park but the skate ramp.
Prices of pieces bought at auction are a matter of public record. In the rare map and book world there are subscription services that record prices of items offered by vendors but that just records the asking price. I don't know much at all about the fine art world but I have friends who do from the institutional end.
13: It seems about as legitimate as this sort of thing can be, but the billionaire industrialist Mitchell Rales and his wife Emily Wei Rales, a former art dealer, set up a huge by-appointment-only museum in suburban DC called Glenstone and literally live on the property.
Art consuming a house (apartment). The Vogels--some here might be familiar with them--a great story.
And speaking of NYC apartments being filled with interesting things, Madeleine Kripke with an incomparable collection of dictionaries and books on slang. She was Saul Kripke's sister. Also a great little story.
[Note to Moby: Nebraskans make good. Them and the talk show guys.]
L Ron Hubbard is the one who went furthest.
OT: They said we were going to a cock fight, but it was a trick. It's a school concert.
Do people turn 45 and have all their clothing become Patagonia and I missed it?
I turned 45 a month ago. I am not particularly into patagonia but I did inadvertently start flipping through a J.Jill catalog and the clothes didn't look absurdly for-the-olds anymore.
You probably don't even need a down puffy though, what with the oppressive heat.
The river was already packed last weekend.
The Madeline Kripke story in 24 is something else, yeah buddy. The collection has gone to Bloomington, and there are intermittent blogposts about the excavations, apparently visitors are welcome to participate: https://blogs.libraries.indiana.edu/tag/kripke-collection/
Unfoggedcon Bloomington? No mention of what she liked to wear but there are some photos.