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 detailed the woes of some artists in their 20’s who had the misfortune to become very hot. Why was that a misfortune? Because speculators, dealers, and art advisors began buying their works like crazy. The artists responded by pumping out a lot of art. Then their buyers sold, taking a quick profit, and the bubble burst.
(Hit a paywall on the NYT article? Read an unrestricted version here).
The market for works by artists of color has been extremely hot in recent years, and three of the four artists profiled in the Times article were artists of color. The other was a woman, also a hot market these days. Amani Lewis’s story was typical. Five years ago, they (the artist’s pronoun) were a well-regarded young artist whose works sold in the low five figures. Then the fickle finger of fate tapped Lewis as a soon-to-be star, and their works started bringing six figures. The culmination of their rise at auction came in November of 2021, when Into the Valley, The Boy Walks (Psalms 23:4) sold at Phillips in New York for $107,100 including premium. They were, to use an old expression, hotter than a two-dollar pistol.
