Word: buying
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...less than $300. Says Sotheby's Los Angeles president, Peter McCoy: "It makes sense for the average person to frequent our auctions. He'll be competing with the antique shop owner who'll sell a piece for more [probably 40% more] than he can buy it here." Caveat emptor...
That may be an exaggeration. The wealthy and the powerful have invested in art from time immemorial, though it is true that the great collections have been amassed by acquisitors possessed of taste and love for the objects they buy. They have not generally been dis couraged by hard times. On the contrary, in recessions and depressions and inflations, the smart ones tend to liquidate stocks, bonds and real estate and thus have all the more cash to invest in other fields. Like art. Given the scar city of beautiful things and the insatiable demand for them, the sales will...
...People buy art for all reasons and with all incomes. Broadly, however, they fall into three categories: the amateur, who appreciates beautiful objects for their own sake; the investor, who is primarily intent on making money; and the rare great collector, who assembles treasures on the grand scale that enriches society. Three vignettes...
...scarcely anything to the rest. The American art education system, churning out as many graduate artists every five years as there were people in late 15th century Florence, has in effect created an unemployable art proletariat whose work society cannot "profitably" absorb. Generous tax laws, which enabled collectors to buy low, keep a picture for years and then reap a tax benefit by giving it to a museum at its enhanced value, fueled the art boom. The inequity of such laws has been that, if the artist gives his own work to the same museum in the same year...
...most of us who cannot make or buy art but do want to look at it in peace, the art boom has been a disaster. The confusion of art with bullion may have done more to alter the way people experience works of art than any event since the arrival of mass color reproduction. It may well be that my generation -the people born between 1935 and 1940 -will be the last to remember what a truly disinterested museum visit was like. Quite simply, it is now difficult and, for most people, impossible to walk into a gallery and look...