Archive for November, 2011

• Investing in Art

  Monday, November 28th, 2011

  When someone starts out learning how to invest in art for the very first time, there is a very peculiar learning curve that is perhaps an anomaly in the world of investing in general.  For all of the unstable forces that guide the markets in the world, the art market could very well be the most unstable.  That is because the contemporary art world is controlled by a series of very unstable factors, and the artists often seem to be the most stable of these.  For anyone who has spent time with artists, this does make the game seem like a rather absurd proposition.  Anyone who’s looked into market trends, financial video, and general economic projections knows that minimizing risk is important for anyone investing with the intention of making profit from it.  While critics and thinkers like David Hickey might seem to be arguing against investing in art in the first place, their arguments are equally compelling for investing in the world art marketplace.

   

  But one of the first myths that would need dispelling is that there is no such entity, really.  A world art marketplace may include the great and recognized works of art, but it may also include the realm of art celebrities, as well as sudden successes from relative unknowns.  Things can shift very suddenly when an investor has the power and the connections to make someone instantly famous, and it’s up to the rest of the art world to sort out their value.  However, no one really holds a stable place in that world, where balances of power can shift very quickly from the weight being on the opinions of high academics to the more populist notions of a larger, and equally unstable, public.

  

  This doesn’t mean that someone looking for new investments shouldn’t look into art.  There isn’t a time when taking a fast cash loan from www.MoneyMutualTV.com wouldn’t be somehow rewarding when there’s an opportunity to acquire a new world of art for the home.  Art is pleasing, or it should be, and that kind of value is its own reward.  With a little bit of savvy, and some knowledge of how the art world works, it is possible to start putting together a valuable collection, but it won’t be worth anything if it doesn’t give the collector some amount of pleasure.

   

  There are, of course, other ways of investing in art than buying work by artists.  There are art investment funds, as well as ways of sponsoring someone you believe could be very important sometime in the future.  Either way, it is something that is rewarding as long as it grows out of love for the subject.  The objects themselves are always risky, but that is only because they can occasionally trade for enormous sums of money.  It may be that investing in art is much less statistically measurable than gambling, but the thrill is the same, although the pleasure is much more enduring, and can be passed down to another generation.

• The Artist’s Eye: Vision and Nothingness

  Saturday, November 19th, 2011

  It might be well-argued that every art form is about seeing.  In photography and video, or any visual arts for that matter, the connection to sight is obvious.  The photograph is the medium and the message, containing the objects that the artist chose to see, as well as reflecting the inner vision that guided the impulse to frame the objects.  Other art forms contain these elements as well, where the writer is engaged in a process of painting a very selective version of reality, where what is contained is as essential as what is left out.

   

  This is more apparent in the work of some artists than it is in others.  Some filmmakers, like Godard and the French New Wave, were entirely conscious of how the camera selects and negates, where the film is a relic of everything and nothing all at the same time.  Likewise, photographers like Diane Arbus force the viewer to consider why this particular reality is being considered above all others.  Well-constructed works of art always cause a shift in the vision of the viewer, where the world beyond the moviehouse or the gallery can’t be seen in the same way, not quite, at least for a little while.

   

  Giacometti was one of the great modernist artists, who opened up the notion of seeing in an entirely new way.  His haunting sculptures of lean figures suggest an imminent mortality, depicting human beings in the middle of a precarious journey.  These figures, although they certainly bear resemblance to images of people in the midst of the greatest sufferings of the 20^th century, are not meant to comment on the events of the time.  He was engaged in trying to depict things as they were seen, and focused his obsessive gaze on the act of seeing.  Their thinness, then, comes as a result of his capture of their movements as caught by a mortal eye, and in these acts, they become immortal.

   

  The act of seeing, then, is always something that approaches the sublime.  At a purely anatomical level, it is simply the reflection of light and color playing against the muscles of the eye.  On a deeper level, however, there is always something else present.  The root of vision is connected to sight just as much as it is connected to knowing.  This means that the artist capturing the object, whether on film, or in words, or in a movement, is engaged with something they know, or something that makes them curious, and the art object is a remnant of this process, inviting the viewer to see, and to know, in the same way.