Buying with One’s Ears

We all do it, though we don’t always realize it… buy with our ears rather than our eyes, and sometimes without thinking. In our everyday lives, if we see the word “Sale,” we pay attention immediately. Another word that grabs our attention and the most magical word of all, or so it was explained to me by my advertising agent many years ago, is “Free”.

We don’t necessarily buy right away, but if we think we want it at some time or think maybe we can use it in the future, and it's on sale ... Do we want to go to that museum or exhibition, and if it is free admission today? Maybe this is an opportunity to take advantage of it being free.

Buying with our ears is also something we do as art collectors, though we have to be wary of it. You wouldn’t see the word “free” at an art gallery or auction house, but “sale” sometimes occurs in a gallery ad. That usually worries me, thinking there must be something wrong with the work of art or that the artist is surely not selling well. That is just my suspicious mind. It is quite possible that the gallery just wants to expose the artist more to the general public, or maybe, just maybe, the gallery can get a well-known but tight-fisted collector to buy it. Then the gallery can say, “You know the CEO of a major company bought one recently.”

The idea, of course, is to grab your attention but also to intrigue a potential buyer. I recently saw an ad announcing a “Newly Confirmed Lucien Freud Debuts in London”. If it was newly confirmed, it was either doubted before or found in someone’s attic. I prefer the latter to the former. Debates over authenticity always existed, but a consistent attribution is always preferable. Otherwise, one has to worry about what the next expert has to say.

Here is another one: “Rediscovered Constable Goes on View for First Time in Decades”. That is enticing, we love to learn about discoveries, kind of like unearthing a treasure, even if you did not do it personally.

A provenance from a well-known collector or personage is exciting because you can feel you have a relationship with that individual. Or in the case of a painting by Winston Churchill, you have touched a piece of history.

In the auction room or gallery, people want to hear why they should buy the work of art. Some people like scandal, and I heard of someone being proud they owned something that had belonged to Jeffrey Epstein … chacun à son goût.

Better, of course, if you can say it compares with this other important work. Even better if you can tell a story, a true one like this…. We had a good friend and client, Baroness Clarice de Rothschild, of the Vienna Rothschilds. After WWII, she went into the salt mine at Altaussee, Austria, where Hitler’s art squad had neatly placed her treasures all together. She didn’t get everything from their five palaces, but more than enough to furnish her Park Avenue apartment in New York. She sold much of the rest through our gallery, Rosenberg & Stiebel. I could have also added that she crashed my first wedding at the Plaza Hotel! My parents would not have dared to ask a Rothschild for a personal event. I mention this last part because if you tell the human story around a work of art, it brings the piece closer to the collector.

If you read my Missives regularly, you are probably tired of my repeating this, but I will continue to remind my readers to buy a work of art because you want to live with it or simply feel you can’t live without it!