In the time of the sacred sites and the crashing of ecosystems and worlds, it may be worth not making a commodity out of all that is revered. —Winona LaDuke
When the high-end art scene starts crashing, do we worry, or do we look for opportunity?
The art world is crashing. Don’t worry, your favorite museum is safe, at least for now. In fact, for all but maybe .001% of the population, life will go on as it always does. No big deal. In fact, even as I’m typing I’m still trying to decide whether or not I should be concerned. I mean, after all, there are much more important things to be worried about. Just look at this list:
- Global investors are cashing out, which typically means they’re anticipating a crash and want to be as liquid as possible.
- China’s army is making itself combat ready. Why? When the world’s largest army starts prepping for war, how do you not worry?
- US workers in chicken plants have to wear diapers. This is seriously the most WTF moment of the week. We may all have to start raising our own chickens.
- People are still arguing about bathrooms. Doesn’t anyone understand that no one wants to use a public bathroom at all? We only go because we don’t carry a change of pants.
- McDonalds is testing using fresh hamburger material rather than frozen patties. Perhaps next they’ll test using real meat.
Oh, and on top of everything else, it’s Friday the 13th with a full moon while Mercury is in retrograde. I may know people who won’t leave their house today. I may be one of them; I’m not sure mowing the lawn is worth the risk.
With all these really critical issues out there, why am I most bothered by this article about art sales crashing? I’ve been sitting here staring at it since Tuesday, trying to decide if I’m really concerned that Sotheby’s reported a loss of $32 million. Am I really all that upset by the fact that auction at Christie’s this past Sunday only brought in $78.1 million compared to the $658.5 million of a year ago? Is this really all that important?
On the surface, what happens in the high-end art world is irrelevant to the overwhelming majority of people because we are not and never will be invited to that party. The people who invest $20.4 million for Auguste Rodin’s sculpture “L’Eternel Printemps” are not your next door neighbors. These are people who have stupidly insane amounts of cash on hand, more money than sense some may say, and are investing it in the hope that art produced by dead people will go up in value.
Note, the artists’ families don’t see a dime of this investment revenue. The artists only get the amount for which the work was originally sold and I can, in most cases, promise you that it was not $20.4 million. The art investment scene is a game among the super rich to see who can obtain the bragging rights for the largest and most valuable collections.
What makes the high-end art market even worse is that all too often the people who buy the art don’t have any intention of displaying it. Some of the world’s most valuable art has been sitting in climate-controlled warehouses for decades. Occasionally someone will loan a piece to a major museum, but even among the most elite very few have sufficient security systems in place to risk displaying irreplaceable works of art. The only value in buying these art pieces is the hope that the next sucker will pay even more for them.
Given all that, is there really any reason to be concerned that the handful of extremely evil art brokers who control high-end art have seen their over-priced commissions slashed by 37%?
Actually, there is. See the article in the very first bullet point up there, the one about global investors cashing out? The crashing art market is part of that same worry among major investors that something bad is about to happen to the global economy. People who have money, lots of money, are resilient in the face of normal market fluctuations; the daily ups and downs don’t bother them a whole lot. So, they lose a few million on one day, they gain it back and more a couple of days later. No worries.
When the economy shows signs of depression, or worse, however, people who have money start cashing out so that they don’t risk losing everything. Should the markets suddenly decide to go crashing, they don’t want to lose all their money. This week’s hit was about $7.3 billion taken out of the markets and that’s the fifth consecutive week for such a gap over the amount of investment.
Where the art market fits into this is that it doesn’t involve as wide a group as does the stock market. There are no hedge funds in art. The number of people making this kind of investment is extremely small, fewer than 500 by some counts, and involve only the richest individuals and estates in the world. Not much makes these people nervous. They barely flinched in 2009 after the markets collapsed in 2008, and have been consistently making heavy investments in art since then, despite various challenges to the economy. When these people are nervous enough to stop investing in art, the rest of us should probably be shaking in our dime-store boots.
That’s not to say that there might not be an opportunity here. Previously, when the high-end art market starts crashing as it is now, investors look to more modestly priced art and unknown artists. Such investments are cautious, to be sure, because investors never know whether an artist whose work is currently under appreciated might “catch on” within the art investment community and suddenly increase in value. If it doesn’t, they’re just stuck with a $4,000 painting of flowers that they’ll probably just end up loaning to a small museum and forgetting about.
Still, for all those unknown and under appreciated artists out there, which is pretty much every artist out there, a downturn on the high-end may well be their opportunity to gather high-level attention. Doing so is not easy. These investors rarely go shopping among second- or third-tier galleries, and even then one has to figure out how to deal with the nasty-assed art brokers to even get a showing at any place remotely impressive. Being an artist is wonderful. Actually trying to sell art absolutely sucks but can be worth all the trouble.
We all know how important timing is and this crash at the high-end may mean the timing is right for a number of artists.
Or, it could mean that the entire global economy is doomed.
It is Friday the 13th, after all.
A Mother’s Beauty
Mother’s love is peace. It need not be acquired, it need not be deserved. —Erich Fromm
Mother’s Day brings plenty of memories, but we forget the beauty sacrifices mothers make for us.
I typically avoid the topic of mothers on Mother’s Day, partly because that’s what everyone is talking about and I’m not sure I can, or should, compete for your attention. Mother’s Day is also a little sad now that my own mother is gone. Some days it is better to let others do all the talking.
We romanticize our mothers in a sense, not that such a perspective is inappropriate, but our love for our mothers sometimes keeps us from seeing the depth of a mother’s sacrifice for her children. She wouldn’t bring it up, of course, mothers rarely do. But what we remember of our mothers is seen through the perspective of a child. We don’t see what all went on in a mother’s life before she had children and everything she willingly gave up for us.
There aren’t many pictures still around of my mother when she was young. Her family was dirt poor and didn’t have a camera so the only pictures are those someone else took and gave her. What I see in those few pictures, though, is someone with a quick smile, sparkling eyes, and curly jet-black hair. I can understand why Poppa found her attractive. She was petite, like her other mother, with her father’s slim build; enough curve to be feminine, but not so much as to appear inappropriately sexual, which was apparently a thing back in the 1950s. She wore bobby socks with loafers and heels and gloves as was common at the time. Poppa said she was very prim and proper, very strict in her etiquette, but more than anything, he said she was beautiful.
Sure, everyone thinks their mother is beautiful, but we don’t see the same beauty that our fathers did. We see someone who is loving and caring and made sacrifices for us so that we could have everything we needed. Remember, though, that our fathers knew our mothers before we did and they saw her beauty in a different light. They saw a side of a mother’s beauty that we’re not all that comfortable discussing. Despite everything that might have happened later, all the arguments and divorces, the illnesses and emotional issues, before we were born our fathers thought our mothers were sexy. They wouldn’t likely use that word in front of us, but that’s what they were thinking.
I occasionally come across someone who has nude photographs of their mother taken before they were born. We don’t often think of artistic nude photography having existed much before Helmut Newton, but it most certainly did, and was secretly very popular. The difference was that they kept those photos to themselves. There was no Internet or social media on which to share them, so rarely did anyone else ever know they had been taken and it certainly wasn’t something they would just show to the kids. Typically, the photos are found by the adult child while helping their mother go through things later in her life. They elicit all knew stories about a side of our mothers we never considered: they were sexy.
Then, we came along and spoiled it all. The effect might not have happened immediately. Some women’s bodies handle childbirth better than others. Others, though, never lose the weight they put on carrying you. Hips that widened to facilitate your delivery didn’t snap back in place. If you kicked the wrong thing while you were swimming around in all that amniotic fluid, you likely created a physical problem your mother had to endure the rest of her life. She was thrilled to nurse you and cuddle you close, but because of that her breasts sag and she never looked the same in a swimsuit again.
You gave her stretch marks and those dark circles under her eyes from 18-plus years of never getting enough sleep and worrying about the trouble she knew you were getting into, even if she didn’t know exactly what it was. You killed her arches as she ran after you in shoes that were not meant for running. Her joints eventually became stiff and arthritic from all the times she put herself in unnatural positions to find that toy you had just dropped, or teaching you how to play leap frog, or picking you up and carrying you from the playground after you fell from the swing, again.
Before you were born, that lady you now call your mom paid more attention to how she looked when she went out. Her ensemble was carefully put together, even if it was more bohemian and less Chanel. She might have even worn makeup and had her nails done. After you came along, though, she was happy if what she was wearing didn’t have any fresh stains and if everything matched it was more by coincidence than design. Your mother’s stylist thought you were cute, but secretly hated you because your mother went from trying out different cuts and colors to short and easy-to-manage.
After you came along, your mother didn’t go out with friends as often, didn’t travel as much, gave up on trying to fit into Gloria Vanderbilt jeans and damn sure wanted to make sure there was sufficient coverage between her and her Calvin’s. Almost everything that had gone into making her so physically desirable to your father either you ruined or she had to give up to care for you, except for one thing: Love.
And that’s what we remember on Mother’s Day: her love. After all, that’s what is important, right? Nothing else matters, at least, not now. A mother’s beauty isn’t defined by how “hot” she looks, how many heads she once turned, or how many hearts she once broke. A mother’s beauty is defined by how she could kiss a boo-boo and make the pain go away, or how she knew exactly when you needed her to make those special pancakes, or how she could mend a broken heart then help you plot revenge. She likes that definition.
Mothers don’t care about what they’ve given up for you. The love you and, in the vast majority of situations, would do everything all over again (with the benefit of a little wisdom from the experience). She loves you, you love her, and that makes everything beautiful enough for her. But don’t you ever forget that she did make those sacrifices. I’ll tell you what she might not: you owe her. Big.
A poet, whose name escapes me at the moment, once said that a mother’s beauty is defined is defined by the grace and compassion of her children. Your mother gave up a lot for you. Make her beautiful, damnit.
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