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...
“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...
My wife says that you know you’re getting old when you visit an antique store and recognize something from your past. “Oh, my grandmother had one of these!” you say, picking up a kitchen implement. “Oh, my mother had one of these!” you say, picking up something else. “Oh, I had one of these when I first got married,” you think, wondering where the time has gone. Selling antiques is a tricky and ever-changing affair, as can be seen in The Winter Show, formerly The Winter Antiques Show, now being held at the Seventh Regiment Armory on Park Avenue in New York. Courtesy Winter Show, Photograph by Simon Cherry Premiering in 1955 as an exhibition to benefit the East Side House Settlement, the show soon established itself as the most prestigious antiques fair in the United States, an event that brought curators, designers, and collectors to New York from around the country each January. But times change. What, today, constitutes an antique? “Antique” is in the eye of the beholder. Is a 1985 edition of a Mario Brothers video game an antique? Somebody thought it was worth $660,000 (see previous blog), so if it’s not an antique, it’s at least being regarded as a very special old thing. A school lunch box with Star Wars characters on it and a silver tray commemorating the accession of Queen Victoria – can they be seen in the same light? Both of them have utilitarian functions, but they also fall into the category of decorative art. Are we being snobs if we say that one of them is more worthy of aesthetic...
I received a lot of comments from museum directors and curators on last month’s blog, agreeing with me that changing social mores have caused a re-evaluation of what gets presented in museums today. The art market follows this trend: paintings depicting Native Americans as ignorant, bloodthirsty savages are much harder to sell than they were 30 years ago, and their fair market value has consequently decreased. On the other hand, paintings that depict Native Americans in a sympathetic light have risen in fair market value. A telling example can be found in a sale at an auction in Nevada last month. Western art, in addition to being offered at the New York auction houses, has its own specialty auction houses, and the Coeur d’Alene Art Auction (which, though it bears the name of its original venue, has been held in Reno for years) is one of the 800-pound gorillas of the Western art market. Its annual summer sale is attended by all of the major Western collectors and dealers, and record prices for Western artists’ works have often been achieved there. Howard Terpning (born 1927) has long been the dean of living Western artists, with several works previously bringing seven figures at auction. The painting below was sold for $2,360,000 last month, a record for the artist. Howard Terpning (born 1927). Paper That Talks Two Ways – The Treaty Signing, 2008Photo courtesy Coeur d’Alene Art Auction I think that Terpning’s choice of subject was the major factor contributing to the record price. Just as politicians in Congress do today, a Native American tribe is discussing a proposed treaty that...
