Establishing the Value of a Work of Art

What prompted this thought was twofold. First the question from a lawyer about how works of art were priced and then a story about Hunter Biden’s art sales.

As you have probably read Hunter Biden is an artist and he has gallery representation. Some of his paintings have been priced in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. Crazy prices for an artist whose only claim to celebrity is being the son of a president. But wait a minute, is that crazy? Examples of lathe turning that have been associated with the daughters of Louis XV whom he instructed in this hobby have been highly valued. In the past, I have bought and sold works with royal associations for a premium, and I would pay a premium for an object that belonged to JFK!

In this day and age, artists are usually introduced to the world by a dealer who believes in their art and works to get their creations into private collections then to exhibitions, and finally to museums. With each success, their work will increase in price. At some point, it will come to the auction houses’ attention where a guess, called an estimate, will be made of what the work might bring if there is more than one person who would like to acquire it. Through the process, an artist will become more and more “established”. At that point one would be able to find a basis of comparison and, depending on the quality of the example, establish a price range. Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler a German-born art collector who became a major French art dealer and was a champion of the cubist movement represented artists such as Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque.

A gallery in Melbourne Australia called Art & Collectors has a publication in which they came up with another definition of an established artist. “Established artists have hit icon status. They have exhibited extensively nationally or internationally in reputable institutions, been written about, and entered the cultural discourse. At auction, their status is reaffirmed by consistently high bids.”

Dealers often speak of clients who buy with their ears, not with their eyes. Astute collectors first use their eyes and then listen to the story. If the work has been owned by a collector renowned for his knowledge and taste that aids us in believing that it is worth the bid or asking price.

Every once in a while, you hear about a price at auction that has nothing to do with the usual prices for the artist’s work. This can be caused by a “disease” called auction fever, and one must be careful not to catch it. One can get so caught up in the moment trying to prove yourself by outbidding a rival. It may turn out you are bidding against the house, or an arrangement made between the owner and auction house.

Of course, if you have a work of art with a legendary name like Monet, you can decide what you think the price should be by looking up prices his work has brought and where this example might fit in his oeuvre. However, if you are speaking of Leonardo or Vermeer where there are a limited number of accepted works the price can go as high as the market will bear. How would one value the last remaining Vermeer in private hands, “Young Woman Seated at a Virginal” belonging to Thomas and Daphne Kaplan in their Leiden collection.

Sometimes a work of art hits the taste of the moment and brings a huge price at an auction but then later very little, as tastes change. Do your research and unless you are a gambler, never buy art as an investment. The art market is far more fickle than the stock market.

Protest Art

A few years ago I wrote about Protest Songs ... 

https://www.geraldstiebel.com/2021/09/does-anything-ever-change.html

But what about protest in Visual Arts? Protest art is not new ... I have read that there are early examples in ancient Egypt protesting the Pharaohs and the ruling class.

Art can be challenging, and some created to influence the viewer in a specific cause may continue to resonate. You might see the British artist Bansky’s “Vigil Candle Burning a U.S. Flag”, as a statement about the latest political news but you would be wrong. It was painted two weeks after George Floyd was killed in May of 2020 and Banksy said, “People of color are being failed by the system ... the white system.”

What sparked this Missive was seeing the exhibition of the work of Nicholas Galanin, a Tlingit and Unangax artist from Alaska, at our local Kunsthalle, SITE Santa Fe. His work protests how the treatment of Native Americans by the Whites since their arrival on this continent. One of the subjects he addresses is the boarding schools that Indian children were forced to attend. The Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) has reported that the Indian Boarding School System lasted from 1819-1969. The repeated goal was “Kill the Indian Save the Man”. It was a white supremacist belief that if you stripped indigenous people of their culture, they could become “civilized” and integrated into Anglo society. To this end, Native children were dragged off from their families with small handcuffs like these which Galanin made into an object of art in 2014 by engraving them with indigenous motifs.

A work that Galanin calls “Loom” is a series of prefab school desks and chairs stacked in the form of a Northwest Coast totem pole. Whitewall Magazine expresses my reaction precisely, “a gutting allusion to the North American practice of residential schools which forced Indigenous families to send their children away to facilities where conditions were so severe as many as half never survived to return home”.

In 1941 the brilliant black artist, Jacob Lawrence protested Jim Crow in the South with his “Migration Series“ His 60 images are devoted to the millions of African-Americans who fled the South to the more tolerant North in search of better lives. Each one grabs you with its color and strength and leads you to the details of what it is about.

When Michangelo’s sculpture of David proved too heavy to raise to its planned location atop the Cathedral of Florence it was installed in front of the city’s government offices, the Palazzo Della Signoria. Positioned so David appeared ready to launch his rock in the direction of Rome, it became a defiant threat to the former ruling Medici family who had fled there in exile. When the Medici returned David became the focal point of protest riots. Why did the sculpture appear in the Daytona Beach News-Journal last March in an article by C.A. Bridges? Because Michelangelo’s art was again at the center of protest as the principal at Tallahassee Classical School in Leon County resigned after three parents complained that the required Renaissance art class, which included "David" as well as the "Creation of Adam" fresco and Botticelli's "Birth of Venus," upset their children.

To avoid any hate mail, I won’t show any examples of religious art but over the centuries there has been plenty of explicit art for and against various religions throughout the ages.

But, to conclude, this work created in 1989 by the Gorilla Girls shows still another kind of protest.

The Power of Music

The other night we watched the movie “Maestro” about Leonard Bernstein, which had me thinking about music that I love and not necessarily Bernstein’s music. Then to my surprise, I found a Missive by the same name written over a decade ago. I have written about music every now and then and if you go to my Missives page and put music in the search box you can scroll down through them.

https://www.geraldstiebel.com/2013/06/hershey-felders-maestro-art-of-leonard.html

My takeaway from the current movie is how difficult it is to be married to a man who is possessed by his profession, in this case, music, and a homosexual at the same time.

I also found the film rather depressing, but I was seeing it from the perspective of a 79-year-old. After that, I went to YouTube and listened to Peggy Seeger singing “All in the Mind”. There is no direct correlation, but the film sparked that emotion in me. 

 

“Maestro” might strike a totally different chord for you but that is the point. On the Pfizer website, I found this, “Listening to (or making) music increases blood flow to brain regions that generate and control emotions.” taken from an article by L. Jäncke, L. (2008). Music, memory, and emotion. Journal of Biology.

After seeing a good movie, it tends to live on in my head. This dates back to when I was a child in the late 1940s and ’50s. Those were the days when the Westerns were the hit movies. After seeing High Noon (1952) with Gary Cooper I came out of the theater imagining a six gun on my hip singing the theme song and that song would be triggered by other Western movies. 

 

The same happened with the Gene Autry television show where the theme song was “Back in the Saddle Again”. 

 

In an article in “The Back Stage” (November 2021), Deezer D. writes that scientists Schulkind, Hennis, Rubin, and Professor Ira Hyman state, “a song triggers an emotion that matches the emotion felt at the time the event happened. To evoke memories, sensations need precise connections.”

Speaking with a psychiatrist who recommended meditation I told him I sometimes plugged into music. He agreed that too could work. Shahram Heshmat Ph.D. wrote in “Psychology Today” (October 2021), “Music provides a means of escape. Music distracts our minds from the outside world.”

We all enjoy different kinds of music. My father was a classical music buff, I have about 15 feet of his vinyl! As a child and teenager, I was exposed to all kinds of classical concerts and opera. It came to the point where I went because I felt it was the right thing to do. My father would refer to the “hit tunes” in an opera, but always with the caution to stay until the end because one of those “hit tunes” was in the final act. From Verdi’s La Traviata by the 3 Tenors. 

 

A psychologist once told me that 50% of people who live past 90 have Alzheimer’s and the famed singer, Tony Bennett, who died last year at age 96 suffered that fate. Yet, he remembered and could still perform the songs he had made hits.

To answer the doubters, from the “Psychology Today” article mentioned above, “However, not everyone experiences intense emotional responses to music. Roughly 2 percent of the general population do not experience chills. This incapacity to derive pleasure specifically from music has been called musical anhedonia (sometimes called tone-deafness).”

Unfortunately, they are missing a lot!

Attracting A Younger Generation

I am on the board of the Lensic Performing Art Center here in Santa Fe and a question that comes up all the time is how can we attract a younger audience while at the same time not neglecting our loyal and older constituency.

This is obviously not a new issue, and every generation has to approach it anew.

I would venture that this may be an even greater problem in museums. My wife, Penelope, and I often discuss the fact that there is no such thing as a museum of contemporary art and even a museum of modern art is transient. The Museum of Modern Art in New York has many Picassos though some have already referred to him as an Old Master!

Penelope was a curator at the Metropolitan Museum and at the Portland Art Museum in Oregon. Even though at the Met she worked to extend the decorative arts collection up to the present, she is now upset by what she finds art museums’ excessive emphasis on contemporary art at the expense of their other collections, all in hopes of attracting a younger generation. It is, indeed, a delicate balance. Here is an image of the installation of one of two 11 X 22 foot paintings by Kent Monkman (1965 -) being installed for a time in the Great Hall of the Metropolitan.

The Art Institute of Chicago does Teen Workshops and a teen council, which is “a group of 15 creative and passionate youth artists, leaders, and organizers who collaborate with museum staff to reimagine the future of cultural institutions through teen-designed digital and live engagements.”

When we were at the Metropolitan Museum last May they had an exhibition about the legendary clothing designer Karl Lagerfeld. We saw the young folk standing in long lines to get in. Would they visit the rest of this museum full of old art? Honestly, I don’t think many did, but while they were there some may have visited another section of the museum, and they may have told their friends that they found something “really cool” there.

The American Alliance of Museums has its own suggestions. One that sounds most apt is, “Your average millennial has 9.3 social media accounts, according to a 2019 Global Web Index report. So make sure you’re using social media in a way that will appeal to a younger audience.” They also speak of the use of technology which I wrote about earlier this year.

https://www.geraldstiebel.com/2023/06/museums-in-age-of-artificial.html

Yesterday, the Frick Collection closed an exhibition of the work of Barkley L. Hendricks (1945-2017). The Wall Street Journal wrote, “inspired by European masterpieces but rooted in his own milieu, the painter produced dazzling portraits of African-American subjects.” The Financial Times wrote “Now that he’s posthumously become the superstar he always deserved to be, one of his favourite museums, the Frick Collection, has gathered 14 of his paintings in a show that stands alongside its permanent collection of works by Rembrandt, Bronzino, Velázquez and Van Eyck. They look utterly comfortable among such rarefied company.” How better to blend the old and the new and bring in a different and younger crowd.

Of course, it is best if the kids want to go to the museum in the first place. Forty years ago, Sesame Street produced a movie called “Don't Eat the Pictures” taking place at the Metropolitan Museum. The concept was that the Sesame characters get locked in the museum after hours and go on a chase to find Big Bird. In the process, they see many areas of the museum. It is a one-hour show and not at all academic.

Not sure what has been done since, but this is the best way to introduce the young to a foreign place. Make them curious.