There’s a drugstore near me that has a sign at the front door: “Pokémon Cards Sold At Checkout.” I understand why cigarettes and certain medicines need to be in a spot where they are always protected, but Pokémon cards? My children were too old to be the target audience when the Pokémon craze hit the United States in 1998, so I have never paid much attention to the cards. I had heard that some Millennials who had begun to hit peak earning age, Crypto Bros and the like, were still avidly collecting the Pokémon cards of their youth, but I didn’t realize the enormous prices that some of the cards were bringing. My ignorance was apparent at the Appraisers Association of America’s annual conference last week when I attended a seminar entitled “High Stakes and Holofoils: Inside the Explosive Market of Magic, Pokémon, and Yu-Gi-Oh!” taught by Travis Landry, an auctioneer of items from popular culture. Landry, a young man with a wealth of knowledge and a carnival barker’s enthusiasm, detailed for us the history of the Pokémon craze, which has become the world’s highest-grossing media franchise, generating an international franchise worth billions. The way for Pokémon was paved by Magic: The Gathering, a trading card game introduced in 1993. It proved to be a sleeper hit, and the rarer cards began to command money from gamers. With Pokémon, the developers went straight to stressing the cards’ collectability, with the motto, “Gotta catch ‘em all!” As Landry said, “How many people actually know how to play the Pokémon game? It’s all about collecting the cards themselves.” The creators succeeded...
I was on a business swing through the Midwest recently and visited the Art Institute of Chicago to view Salvador Dali: The Image Disappears, the first exhibition at the museum to be devoted to the work of the artist most associated in the public mind with Surrealism. It was a strong show, displaying works from the 1930’s, a pivotal decade in the artist’s career. Paintings like the one below, included in the exhibition, would make his name. Salvador Dali, William Tell, 1930, Collection Centre Georges Pompidou, ParisImage courtesy Wikiart. Born in the Catalonian region of Spain in 1904, Dali received a thorough grounding in Old Master techniques in Madrid at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando. Intelligent, articulate, a tireless networker before the term was even invented, and an exhibitionist with a talent for attracting notice, he went through brief Cubist and Futurist phases after art school before becoming a proponent of Surrealism, a style in which his classical chops could be put to full use. He would become the most important member of the movement. Art historians and certainly Andre Breton, the founder of the movement who later expelled Dali from its ranks, would disagree with the above statement, but in terms of popular recognition, the verdict is in. The person in the street may not be able to define the term “surrealist,” and they may not have heard of Max Ernst, Hans (Jean) Arp, or Yves Tanguy, but everyone knows the name Dali. St. Petersburg, Florida, is not generally noted as an artworld hotspot, but over 400,000 people visit the Dali Museum there each...
Often (though not nearly as often as dealers would like) when you’re visiting an art fair or antiques show, you will see a small red dot placed on the label of a work being offered. That dot means that the work has already been sold and thus is no longer for sale. It’s funny how a tiny red sticker can arouse longing in the human heart. There is something about forbidden fruit that tempts us. I guarantee that if you hold an exhibition of paintings, all by the same artist, all the same size, and all of the same subject, and put a red dot next to one of them, visitors to your show will point to the painting with the dot and exclaim, “Oh, THAT’S the one I would have bought! Do you have any others just like this?” Dealers can play upon this yearning for the unobtainable. Long ago I knew a dealer down South who would invite a wealthy collector to his home for a formal dinner. During the course of the evening, the dealer would give the collector a tour of his private collection. There would always be a spectacular painting in the place of honor above the fireplace. Let’s say it was a Mary Cassatt. When the guest exclaimed about what a lovely Cassatt it was, the dealer would agree, “Yes, I’ve never seen a better one.” “What would you take for it?” the guest would demand. “Oh, Bill,” the dealer would demur, “That’s not for sale! It’s in my personal collection,” lingering lovingly on the word “personal.” “But what would you take?” the...
I like to say that the only truly original artist was the man or woman who drew that first mastodon on the cave wall. All other artists have been stealing from that person ever since. Wayne Thiebaud, currently the subject of a wonderful exhibition at the California Palace of the Legion of Honor in San Francisco, would agree with me. The exhibition, “Art Comes From Art,” foregrounds a practice grounded in his statement, “I believe very much in the tradition that art comes from art and nothing else.” Thiebaud still gets mentioned in discussions of Pop Art, but, as Timonthy Burgard, Senior Curator at the de Young Museum points out in the exhibition’s accompanying video, Thiebaud has none of the irony that suffuses the work of Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, or Tom Wesselman, and his paintings have none of the flatness that characterizes Warhol’s silk screens, Lichtenstein’s Ben Day dots, or Wesselman’s collaged works. Thiebaud was in love with oil; all of his subjects are caressed with delicious impasto. Installation view of Wayne Thiebaud Art Comes From Art exhibition, 2025.Photo by Gary Sexton. Image courtesy of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. Thiebaud was from a working-class background and first studied art at a trade school in Los Angeles. Following service in World War II, he attended state colleges in San Jose and Sacramento. His first art mentor was the head of the advertising department at the Los Angeles firm for which he worked. Thiebaud was never ashamed of his roots in commercial art; indeed, as he once quipped, “I don’t care much for Pop Art. It’s too...
“Sculpture is something you bump into when you back up to look at a painting,” the painter Ad Reinhardt once famously opined, and it’s true that the physical accommodations that sculptures demand have made them problematic for many collectors. They take up so damned much space, and their weight, for anything larger that a table-top piece, means they’re pretty much going to stay wherever they’re plopped. This inconvenience is true for institutions as well as for private collectors: a church the size of St. Peter’s in Rome can handle a 14-foot-high sculpture such as Bernini’s Saint Longinus; most American churches can’t. This means that large-scale sculpture usually works best out-of-doors. Baroque princes had formal gardens with occasional sculptures sited at strategic points. Contemporary sculpture, however, often finds itself in a park devoted to the art. Roberta and I live within an easy hour’s drive from two such parks. Storm King Art Center, established in 1960, occupies almost 500 acres of beautiful landscape outside New Windsor, NY. An hour north of New York City, it attracts around 200,000 visitors a year from all over the world. The collection is world-class, featuring a Who’s Who of major contemporary sculptors such as Richard Serra, Mark di Suvero, Louise Nevelson, Martin Puryear, and many others. Mark di Suvero, E=MC2, 1996-1997. Steel, 92-3/4 feet high.Collection Storm King Art Center. Photo by author. Storm King is an environment that rewards Abstract-Expressionist inspired, testosterone-fueled sculptures. The environment practically shouts, Go Big or Go Home. George Rickey is a wonderful sculptor, but compared with di Suvero’s behemoths, Rickey’s 14-foot-high sculptures, displayed in a grove of trees, seem...
A reader of this blog recently sent me an article from Bloomberg News entitled, “Prices of Contemporary Indigenous American Art Have Risen Over 1,000 Percent.” That statement is undoubtedly true, although, as with all “hot” tips on Wall Street, by the time the tip reaches the general public, insiders have already made their profit and moved on. New buyers will pay much higher prices. The savviest contemporary collector I know transitioned his buying from Black art to Native American contemporary art at least three years ago. It’s easy to get cynical about the art market. Is Native American contemporary art just the new Flavor of the Month? With art, there is no inherent demand. You have to eat; you need someplace to live. Prices for food and housing may go up or down, but there will always be a market. The market for works of art, by contrast, is influenced by any number of things, all of them artificial, no pun intended. Dealers are seeking to get in on the ground floor of the latest thing, trying to create a demand they can stoke. Curators are aware of political concerns as much as aesthetic ones as they try to organize shows that will receive critical approbation while still bringing in crowds. Critics are looking for new movements on which they can make their names. The climate is constantly changing, and art fads can be as short-lived as those of the world of fashion. After centuries in which art markets and art museums were dominated by white men, hitherto under-represented artists are now being aquired with a vengeance, particularly by...
