Fine art appraisers typically use what is called the Sales Comparison Approach when calculating a value; that is, the appraiser looks at what similar paintings by the artist have sold for and then derives from those sales a value for the work being appraised, allowing for differences in size, subject matter, condition, and other factors. But what do you do when the artist being appraised has no auction records?It is a problem I had to solve last year when I was appraising works from the estate of Margo Pelletier (1951-2016). Born in Bangor, ME, Pelletier showed an early interest in art, and her parents encouraged her studies of painting, sculpture, and photography. She attended the Boston Museum School and the Hartford Art School before receiving her BFA from the Cooper Union for Science and Art in 1988. Pelletier was active in left-wing New York politics and was a co-founder of the artist advocacy group Progressive Culture Works. In the late 1970’s, she worked with the May 19th Communist Organization in Brooklyn, eventually leading their propaganda facility, the Madame Binh Graphics Collective. After an action to protest Apartheid in 1981, Pelletier was arrested and spent six months in the city jail on Rikers Island. Those six months, more than any other experience in her adult life aside from identifying as post-queer, shaped the foundation of her work to come. In the early 1990’s Pelletier was one of the founding members of the artists’ community at 111 First Street in Jersey City, NJ. By the end of the decade, she had become interested in the medium of sound and began studying...
“The catbird seat” is an idiomatic phrase used to describe an enviable position, often in terms of having the upper hand or greater advantage in any type of dealing among parties. It derives from the secluded perch on which the gray catbird makes mocking calls.–Wikipedia Roberta and I are currently watching The Day of the Jackal, a miniseries based on the 1971 novel by Frederick Forsyth. (A movie was made of the book in 1973.) In this year’s iteration, Eddie Redmayne plays a professional assassin code-named The Jackal who is hired by shadowy employers to carry out killings of persons whom they believe to be a threat to their interests. The Jackal’s current target is a tech genius who has developed a soon-to-be released software called River, which will permit total transparency in worldwide financial dealings. The monied powers-that-be don’t want that to happen. Eddie Redmayne as The Jackal, photo courtesy Peacock Fortunately for Magnus Resch, art dealers and the owners of art world databases did not have to hire The Jackal to eliminate him when he unveiled an app in 2016 that would, he claimed, lead to total transparency in the art market. Using the app, visitors to an art fair or a gallery could scan an offered artwork with their cell phones and immediately learn the name of the artwork, its artist, its previous exhibitions and sales, and the current price being asked for similar works by competitors. Lawsuits from dealers and databases concerning copyright and intellectual property infringement succeeded in getting the app removed from the Apple store. Back when I began working for a gallery,...
Summer normally brings family parties on the deck for Roberta and me, and at a recent such get-together I was talking with my nephew Greg, about whose boyhood enthusiasm for collecting baseball cards I have written. Greg, now middle-aged, long ago put his baseball cards aside and now collects illustrations and other collectibles from popular culture. He has a particular fondness for Batman. Greg had read my blog about baseball card collecting in 2017, and he told me that the advice on collecting that I tendered then still guides his collecting. “Guys at work know that I collect this stuff, and they’re always asking me, ‘Greg, I have a chance to buy a Superman action figure for $25.00. What do you think? Will it go up? Is it a good buy?’ I always tell them that nothing is guaranteed to go up. If they like something and want to live with it, they should buy it, but forget about trying to buy low and make a killing later.” He went on, “I have some very nice things that I enjoy living with. I paid top dollar for them, to get the best. I never intend to sell them, so it doesn’t matter what happens to the market.” Top dollar in Greg’s case is very much below top dollar for works by important contemporary artists, but collecting principles should remain the same. Alas, too many people – I won’t call them “collectors”; they’re the artworld equivalent of day traders – haven’t read my blog. A recent front-page article in The New York Times by Zachary Small and Julia Halperin detailed the...
The Appraisers Association of America is releasing a new edition of its handbook Appraising Art next spring. I was asked to contribute a chapter on appraising the art of the American West. Since finishing my chapter, I’ve been thinking about how different my contribution would have been if it had been written, say, 30 years ago. Much of the advice I give now would have been the same then, such as the fact that you need to compare apples with apples: paintings of European subjects by artists who are commonly classed as Western artists bring a fraction of what their Western subjects bring. A painting of a Prussian soldier by Frederic Remington will bring less than a painting of a U.S. cavalryman. A landscape of the Alps by Albert Bierstadt will bring less than a painting of the Rockies. In writing my chapter today, however, I found myself obliged to discuss how recent social changes have affected the value of Western art. Paintings of Native Americans that portray them as bloodthirsty savages are not going to be sought after by museums and many collectors. This rejection of stereotypes applies not only to Native Americans. A painting such as this early oil by Charles M. Russell is practically unsalable today. Charles M. Russell. Making the Chinaman Dance. Black Lives Matter and other movements have changed the landscape for collecting. It’s irrelevant whether an appraiser personally feels that such changes are long overdue social justice or whether an appraiser thinks that PC has gone too far. Just as changes in aesthetic fashion cause the value of a particular artwork to rise...
Branding is everything these days, and lately I’ve been wondering if I should change the name of my business from Reagan Upshaw Fine Art to Reagan Upshaw Appraisals and Fine Art. It’s not that I don’t have fine works of art to sell – I do. But appraising art has been the meat and potatoes of my business since I began to deal privately six years ago, and some of my clients for art don’t realize just how many appraisals I do. Like most of the bare necessities of life – food, housing, et cetera – appraisals aren’t inherently glamorous, but as long as people die, get divorced, or owe taxes, appraisers will be needed. And many people have no clue about what goes into calculating a value for a piece of stained canvas or a piece of hacked-at stone. Things used to be very informal when it came to appraisals. Fifty years ago, a brief letter saying simply, “One painting by Joe Smith, value $200” was considered OK. Some of the old-timers have even told me of having a pad of forms – they just filled in the details of the piece, entered their valuation, then signed at the bottom of the list, and that was that. The Savings & Loan debacle of the 1980’s, caused in part by grossly inflated valuations put on real property had an effect on all appraisals. The Appraisal Foundation, a not-for-profit private foundation, was authorized by Congress as the source of appraisal standards and appraiser qualifications. The Appraisal Foundation put together what has become the Bible of appraisers, The Uniform Standards of...
