Transcript
Speaker: Hello, and welcome to Curious Objects.
Speaker: I'm Ben Miller.
Speaker: In a lot of ways, Georgia O'Keeffe's background is pretty unremarkable.
Speaker: She was born in Wisconsin to a family of dairy farmers, one of seven children, decided she wanted to be an artist.
Speaker: She studied at the Art Institute of Chicago and the Art Students League here in New York City.
Speaker: Her breakthrough, if that's the right word for it, came around 1918 when the photographer Alfred Stieglitz took an interest in O'Keeffe's work and used his resources to exhibit and promote while subsidizing O'Keeffe and, of course, eventually marrying her.
Speaker: That relationship would end in disaster when O'Keeffe discovered her husband was having an affair.
Speaker: But that's a story for another day.
Speaker: O'Keeffe's frequent subject matter was objects from the natural world, which she depicted in stylized and simplified, almost schematized ways.
Speaker: By the 1920s, she was producing the flower paintings that would come to be associated with her more than anything else.
Speaker: One of these, White Flower No.
Speaker: 1, sold for $44 million at auction in 2014, setting the world auction record for a female artist.
Speaker: In recent days, two important O'Keefe paintings have been sold at auction.
Speaker: One, deaccessioned from the collection of the Newark Museum, is a picture of tree leaves, which sold at Sotheby's for $1.17 million.
Speaker: The other, an image of a white flower in front of a dark leaf, sold at Christie's for just shy of $5 million.
Speaker: Here to talk with me about both these sales is Regan Upshot.
Speaker: Regan is an art dealer, advisor, critic, and appraiser based in New York.
Speaker: I first encountered him through his blog at ReganUpshotFineArt.com, where he writes colorful commentary on art and the art market.
Speaker: Regan, thanks for being here.
Speaker: Thanks very much, Ben.
Speaker: I want to start by talking about O'Keeffe and the context for these two paintings.
Speaker: Green Oak Leaves, the one sold by Sotheby's on behalf of the Newark Museum for about $1.2 million, is 12 inches by 9 inches and depicts a cluster of leaves against a gray background, possibly suggesting that the viewer is looking up at them toward the sky.
Speaker: The other painting sold by Christie's for $5 million, Autumn Leaf with White Flower, is a 20 by 9 inch portrait.
Speaker: And the floral subject matter is more quintessentially O'Keeffe.
Speaker: Now, she herself denied that any of her paintings represented female genitalia, but this painting is one of many of her works where I think it's not crazy to draw the comparison perfectly.
Speaker: It is a fact that flowers are the sexual organs of plants, so it's not a huge leak to go from one to the other.
Speaker: But the difference in price, I mean, first off, I'd point out these are really done a couple of years apart in the 20s.
Speaker: You mentioned that the green oak leaves is about 12 by 9, and that's something that surprises many people because they see flower paintings that are just reproductions, and they think they must be
Speaker: 20 by 30 or whatever.
Speaker: She did lots and lots of paintings in the 8 by 10, 12 by 9 format.
Speaker: So many of them are small.
Speaker: They're generally framed that she did not like in general big frames.
Speaker: And generally they just have a very simple strip molding of metal around it, which, you know, conservators and curators hate because they don't really protect the painting.
Speaker: The one that sold for about $5 million had a much more fancy, almost shadow box frame put around it, which I doubt that she did, but it's the kind of thing that collectors and museum curators like to do.
Speaker: I think that it made, certainly, the painting was about, the $5 million, the flower painting was about twice as big as the other, and the frame made it look even bigger.
Speaker: But I think the main thing there is just, you know, there are, with O'Keeffe, there are the flowers and then there's everything else.
Speaker: And when we think of O'Keeffe, some people may think of the landscapes with a pelvic bone or something like that.
Speaker: But it's generally the flowers that come to mind.
Speaker: And it's no surprise, and of course they're enormously popular, and it's no surprise that when the U.S. Postal Service did...
Speaker: I know Keith's stamp, and this was, oh, 20, 30 years ago.
Speaker: It was one of the big red poppies.
Speaker: And I heard, and I see no reason to doubt, that at that time, that stamp sold more copies than any other stamp except Elvis.
Speaker: Wow.
Speaker: And, you know, because, you know, everybody likes them.
Speaker: So they are the things that are sought after.
Speaker: But, of course, she did many subjects.
Speaker: She did Lake George.
Speaker: You know, she painted in Hawaii and, of course, all the desert landscapes and occasional things like a kachina doll or something like that.
Speaker: Well, yeah, so let's put these pictures in some historical context because she painted both of these paintings in the 1920s, which was right when her career and her reputation were starting to skyrocket.
Speaker: So what is it about these two paintings?
Speaker: I know they're very different, but what about them and what about her work in general during this period was setting her apart from other artists of the 1920s?
Speaker: Well, I...
Speaker: I'm going to say that they set her apart, and yet she's actually not as set apart as you might think.
Speaker: I've spoken to the fact there was another artist born the same year as O'Keefe was, Marguerite Thompson-Zorak, who was also painting and actually earlier showed in the famous Armory show of 1913.
Speaker: And so there were other modernist painters, female modernist painters, though O'Keefe always said, no, I'm not a female, I'm not a woman painter, I'm a painter.
Speaker: And she declined to be included in shows that were strictly women.
Speaker: But her bringing in close-ups, and I think this also is something that comes out of photography,
Speaker: at the time, this close-up focus on paintings.
Speaker: And an early reviewer of her work back in the 20s said the paintings made him feel like a bee.
Speaker: You know, he was slightly tongue-in-cheek.
Speaker: But to bring something in that big and just focus you on it, on the sepals and the stamens and the, you know,
Speaker: filaments and all the parts of a flower was something that really hadn't been done and and in Mokey's way of simplifying and and you know the curves there they are this sensual and yes they are sexual but even though she would deny that was something pretty new the thing about them though of course is that they are so
Speaker: immediately identifiable with O'Keeffe that no one can paint like that, you know, anymore.
Speaker: If you paint a flower close up, you know, slightly modernist style, you're coming, you know, your derivatives.
Speaker: Yeah, she paints like Georgia O'Keeffe.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So she really just, just, she cornered the market.
Speaker: She, she, and then I think that's the other thing about O'Keeffe.
Speaker: And, and, you know, she was,
Speaker: It's interesting.
Speaker: She was, you know, you say, you know, come from a dairy farmer, but she had two other sisters who were involved in the arts.
Speaker: One of them, Ida O'Keefe, taught for years at SUNY Cortland.
Speaker: uh... what is now state university of new york at courtland uh... i would show keep basically ran her out of new york every day now there's only room for one ok for the arts and and i'd have been getting some of her due in recent years there have been uh... shows but okie was very uh... territorial and of course with uh... our relationship with the quits she had a promoter genius and uh...
Speaker: the heat without him you know and this is has nothing to say with her about her talent but without somebody pushing you no matter how talented you are you're going to have a much harder time getting traction than in the art market than if you've got someone who's in your corner so I think and O'Keeffe also had a certain genius for what today would be called branding
Speaker: There was a wonderful show at the Brooklyn Museum a couple of years ago.
Speaker: I think it was called Becoming O'Keeffe.
Speaker: I can't remember.
Speaker: But she very consciously curated her public image.
Speaker: She was an excellent seamstress.
Speaker: She made her own clothes.
Speaker: They were made in lines that would not be weird today.
Speaker: I mean, they were classic, simple lines, simple colors, a minimum of decoration.
Speaker: And that really, people got an idea.
Speaker: I think that she's someone that the average person, if they saw a photograph of her,
Speaker: and you said, who's this?
Speaker: I would suspect a fair number, a majority of kind of average people would be able to say, that's Georgia O'Keeffe.
Speaker: Yeah, and there are some really sort of... You know, Marsden Hartley or Arthur Dove or anyone like that, they wouldn't know.
Speaker: O'Keeffe is, you know, she was iconic.
Speaker: She wasn't conventionally beautiful, but the camera loved her.
Speaker: And she knew how to, I think maybe partly because of her working with Stieglitz, she knew how to pose for advantage.
Speaker: I was going to say, I mean, some of the most recognizable pictures of her are, of course, by Stieglitz.
Speaker: But, you know, Ansel Adams later, and it's amazing to me that even late in her life, and this would be in around, oh gosh, I don't know, the late 70s, early days, Calvin Klein...
Speaker: went out to new mexico and did a photo shoot using her to uh promote you know his latest where there she is her silver hair her black very severe black you know dress with a con just you know with nothing but say a concho belt you know looking out over the landscape you know and everybody would know oh that's georgio keep in new mexico i mean meanwhile
Speaker: Marguerite Zorak, who married and had a couple of kids, and, you know, she's a, by that time, you know, she's a dumpy grandmother.
Speaker: I mean, no one's, you know, it's inconceivable that someone would have used her, but O'Keefe had a real, though she, you know, could be and was, you know, reclusive or, you know, putting off, but that just, that just encouraged people.
Speaker: You know, there she was in her home in Abiquiu, and, you know,
Speaker: So I think that with O'Keefe, as with someone like Andy Warhol, you know, the persona is as big, really, as the artwork.
Speaker: And you really can't think of one without thinking about the other.
Speaker: Unlike, again, Marsden Hartley or Max Weber or any other number of American modernist painters.
Speaker: And do you think that's why the flower pictures are so much more desirable, because they're so closely identified with her personality and her brand?
Speaker: I think so.
Speaker: Though you could certainly make a case that, you know, those paintings you did of Ghost Ranch or an Abacute where you've got a Western landscape and a, you know, a ram skull, you know, there.
Speaker: And maybe, you know, those are, again, you look at those and you know they're O'Keeffe.
Speaker: But certainly, you know, who doesn't like flowers?
Speaker: Everybody likes flowers.
Speaker: That's a fair point.
Speaker: Have them there, you know, and you have to give her credit, too, because flowers traditionally have been kind of, you know, denigrated as, oh, well, that's something ladies paint, you know, well-bred ladies in the Victorian times would paint watercolors of flowers.
Speaker: And, you know, that she could take a subject that was too often just seen as the...
Speaker: the amateurs province and to say no
Speaker: look at this you're not looking at i'm going to bring you in close i'm not going to have a nice well you know uh... made flower arrangement in a vase i'm going to bring you right in so there's almost something scientific about it because i'm in there and of course anyone looking at that can identify the you know that the species of flower but it's almost scientific in its close-up and yet it's still so sensuous and uh... you know i think that just speaks to everybody
Speaker: Yeah, but it's interesting.
Speaker: I mean, so one of the pictures we're talking about, this green oak leaves painting that sold for about 1.2 million.
Speaker: And, you know, that's obviously not a flower picture.
Speaker: And there's a little bit of controversy around it in that it is a museum deaccession.
Speaker: And, you know, in a recent episode, I talked with the director of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Timothy Rubb, about the
Speaker: very complicated considerations around museum deaccessions.
Speaker: And there were objections to the sale of this Georgia O'Keeffe painting, along with a number of other pictures that were included in the same sale.
Speaker: You know, I'm curious, what are your thoughts about the museum's decision to sell that picture?
Speaker: In general, you know, on general principle, I'm opposed to deaccessioning.
Speaker: And I'm certainly opposed to deaccessioning for anything except
Speaker: accessing other using the funds as is permitted by the Association of American museums to buy.
Speaker: If you've got, and I don't know, I should have looked up, but I don't know how many O'Keeffe's the Newark Museum has.
Speaker: If it's got five of them and they, okay, if this one's just going to be sitting in the basement in storage,
Speaker: then why not let it get out and and and be seen but i think the danger of course in the pandemic brought it home and the bur the whole controversy about the berkshire museums deaccessioning stuff when you start eating your seed corn so to speak when you start selling off your assets then the you know that why people come to the museum to see it then you're you're going down a very uh uh you know dangerous uh road and uh
Speaker: So, again, I don't know.
Speaker: I'm sure museums are always broken, the best of times.
Speaker: And I'm sure that the Newark Museum, you know, though it draws from northeastern New Jersey, you know, I'm sure it's had a rough time, the pandemic.
Speaker: So if they've got five others, then, okay, they had to do something to keep going.
Speaker: But I would hope they would use the funds to buy it.
Speaker: you know, and particularly since this is a work by a woman artist.
Speaker: I mean, there is a move these days to deaccession to acquire works by women and artists of color, and that's fine.
Speaker: In this case, you're getting rid of a work by a woman.
Speaker: So I hope that they would use some of the funds to buy works by, you know, other women.
Speaker: Now, both of these sales, both of these pictures, sold either within or close to within the auction estimates.
Speaker: Do you think these were fair prices?
Speaker: Yeah, I mean, one thing about, you know, it's a crazy thing that I can, it's very hard to explain to a civilian.
Speaker: You know, what's a painting worth?
Speaker: Well, it's worth that somebody will pay for it.
Speaker: It has no practical value.
Speaker: So,
Speaker: I think that, I think, you know, the auction houses, these particularly because of the pandemic, have had to be conservative with their estimates.
Speaker: And I certainly think that five or seven was for a small, you know, 12 by nine inch painting that wasn't a flower.
Speaker: It's very attractive, but it's just leaves.
Speaker: I think that was a conservative and a realistic estimate and it went past that and that's great.
Speaker: I'm happy for them.
Speaker: So, you know, I can't...
Speaker: I think it'd be very hard to sell, you know, even the flower that sold for $44 million all this year.
Speaker: So that was a gymsum weed, I believe.
Speaker: You would have a hard time kind of selling that flower.
Speaker: Today, I mean, the market, the modernist market has largely recovered from the, you know, the recession where everything dropped, rolled back about 30 percent at least.
Speaker: You know, some things have not recovered as well.
Speaker: You know, Hudson River things and Victorian genre and that kind of stuff.
Speaker: But modernism is good.
Speaker: And again, if you know, if you're the man in the street and you know the name of only, you know, one modernist artist, it's going to be George O'Keefe, you know.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Well, and it's interesting.
Speaker: I mean, as you say, there's, of course, burgeoning interest in communities of artists who've been underrepresented in the past, women, people of color.
Speaker: And Georgia O'Keeffe, it sounds like, was not altogether comfortable with that designation.
Speaker: And yet, you know, it's hard to avoid categorizing her in that way regardless.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And of course, these days, she might push it because, I mean, you know, if you were talking to someone in 1930 or 35, a young artist about their work, they might have discussed it in terms of like Marxist, you know, economic things.
Speaker: And, you know, during the abstract expressions years, you would talk about the art, you know, the canvas is this arena in which
Speaker: you dance and then you know you get into post-modern.
Speaker: Today any, if you talk to young artists, you know the vast majority, if you say what's your art about, they're going to say my work is about gender and identity.
Speaker: And so I very much think that if Georgia were today or the Georgia O'Keeffe's of today, they foreground their gender and they would not be at all
Speaker: averse to people finding sexual references in their works.
Speaker: Well, and she was, as you've described, she had a keen market sense and a self-promotional sense.
Speaker: And so maybe she would see... She was also at a time when women, and it's not over yet, but to be a woman artist, you better be tough.
Speaker: I mean, you're there in the...
Speaker: in the ring with all these guys, and they're all tempted to pat you on the, oh, isn't she sweet?
Speaker: Oh, nice little pat, pat, pat.
Speaker: To hold your own as a serious artist and say, look, I am worthy of real consideration, she couldn't foreground her female.
Speaker: She obviously never denied it, but she wasn't going to stress it.
Speaker: Yeah, well, and clearly her relationship with Stieglitz is a very complicated part of that picture.
Speaker: If we were doing another podcast episode, I'd want to dive deeper into that.
Speaker: But we'll save that for another time, I think.
Speaker: We'll be back in a minute with Reagan Upshot.
Speaker: Thanks for listening and for your support.
Speaker: There are images of these O'Keefe paintings online at themagazineantiques.com slash podcast and on magazine's Instagram at antiquesmag.
Speaker: My Instagram is at objectiveinterest.
Speaker: If you enjoy Curious Objects and want to support our work, please take just a minute to leave a rating and review on Apple Podcasts or wherever you're listening now.
Speaker: And if you have ideas or feedback for us, you can email me at CuriousObjectsPodcast at gmail.com.
Speaker: I'd love to hear from you.
Speaker: Next episode, I'll be speaking with interior designer Thomas Jane about the history of the use of antiques in the home.
Speaker: And we're also coming up on the 50th episode of Curious Objects, and we'll be doing something special for that.
Speaker: So stay tuned.
Speaker: I want to change gears and talk a bit about your career in the art world, which goes back to 1981.
Speaker: And, you know, obviously a lot of business has, yes, well, you know, there have been plenty of changes in the industry since then.
Speaker: But of course, there are many things that have stayed the same.
Speaker: Now, you started working for a fellow that some listeners may know of, Iris Benearman.
Speaker: I stumbled into that.
Speaker: I had come to New York with a wife and a baby and was looking for a job.
Speaker: I figured I would get one in publishing because I had done that in Chicago, but I had been a grad student at the University of Chicago and
Speaker: one of my professors call me in New York in Brooklyn to say hey look iris spanderman second banana is leaving and then he's looking for someone so I I went to see him and he you know he was I he was the boot camp of the art world you know people left in one day or six months or stuff but but if you don't cut it if you could cut it you got a lot of responsibility very fast and
Speaker: And, you know, I learned so much from him.
Speaker: I'm still... But on the other hand, the art market has changed so much since then.
Speaker: I mean, the transparency, the enormous influx of auctions, and the very thin, almost invisible line now between auction house and private dealer or...
Speaker: Well, tell me a little bit before we dive full on into the contemporary market.
Speaker: Tell me a little more about this world that you were entering with Ira and what skills he was trying to teach you.
Speaker: Well, he taught me many things.
Speaker: But I mean, the main thing back then was that there was, you know, auctions had begun.
Speaker: Obviously, they'd been around for years, but in the 70s,
Speaker: the auctions made the decision to go into the kind of what we call the retail market.
Speaker: When I joined Aira, for example, there were beginning to be estimates, but they were in the catalog on a separate page in the back of the catalog.
Speaker: And once a year, a book would be published of auction sales, but it had no illustration to just say, you know, Joe Smith, landscape, 12 by 14, $4,000.
Speaker: So,
Speaker: auctioneers or rather dealers had so much inside knowledge that the average you know collector didn't have and also there were you know the on the addicts of America were not empty I mean people came in IRA ran big ads in antiques magazine that said we will pay over a million dollars for highly important paintings by
Speaker: you know Albert Bierstadt and you know Cropsey and Church Cole and all these people so we got calls you know every day and people would bring things in and so it was a we had the knowledge you know then the average person didn't really have it but options became much more you know how they they stress themselves they they began to publish the
Speaker: the estimates and put them right on the wall there they became much more user-friendly and they cease to be a wholesale outlet to the trade and they became you know they became retail so it became you back when I was started dealers owned most of their inventory they would buy it and then you know mark it up and sell it over the years that became harder and harder because they couldn't buy it at auction anymore because all your clients are there bidding against you so you can't you know you can't
Speaker: take it there and you know again the number of paintings still being out there decreased and so I mean nowadays most dealers in older art most of what they own is is consigned from someone like it's very hard to buy it and then to hold inventory you know I mean back I a friend of mine who was with Kennedy gallery who knew Kennedy galleries in the old days he said back then you know they had inventory equal to
Speaker: like seven years expenses.
Speaker: I mean, nowadays, I'd be amazed for dealers to own inventory that was even two years worth of expenses.
Speaker: I mean, it's just, it has changed.
Speaker: And of course, again, all the databases and the fact that you can send an image and just click and send, it's completely changed.
Speaker: Well, okay, so you've mentioned that auctioneers are now acting much more like retailers.
Speaker: Of course, they have full-on customer management departments and vast marketing budgets.
Speaker: Obviously, in some ways, that puts the squeeze on dealers because they have new competition.
Speaker: And in the decorative arts world where I work, you know, I'd argue that it's had an upward pressure on prices, but at the same time, a downward pressure on quality and connoisseurship.
Speaker: But, you know, of course, I'm biased as a dealer.
Speaker: And to be fair, so are you.
Speaker: But that's okay.
Speaker: I mean, would you agree with that assessment?
Speaker: Is that happening in the painting world, too?
Speaker: You know, the auction houses have...
Speaker: put an upward pressure on prices for masterpieces and a downward pressure and this is the case in all antiques I think you know the the masterpieces can still bring real money the I'm I'm lesser stuff you know it's hard because young people generally go that what we call brown furniture you know the Chippendales and the Apple whites in the Queen Anne and stuff like that the days when
Speaker: young people you made executive vice president you went out and bought a a set of you know Georgian dining room to mark your new status you know those are because they took on and people I think also you talk about connoisseurship there is much less in the terms of connoisseurship now we are into
Speaker: kind of lifestyle auctions where, you know, yes, they might buy a Georgia O'Keeffe, but they would also buy, you know, LeBron James' game-winning tennis shoes.
Speaker: I mean, you know, I say that only slightly facetiously, and there's no point in it.
Speaker: I'm not putting it down.
Speaker: I mean, the old days, you know, we loved the old collectors, the people who really were passionate and who studied and even with modest budgets were able to
Speaker: to study and to take their time and to trade up and knew everything about the painting and the field.
Speaker: And there are still a few people who do that.
Speaker: But generally now it's more, okay, we'll take one from column A, one from column B, one from column C. It's just different.
Speaker: And there's no point in complaining about it because the tide is coming in.
Speaker: It'll go out at some point, but I don't know when.
Speaker: Well, and as you mentioned, of course, there's also the matter of price transparency.
Speaker: It used to be, well, the way that our firm and many firms in our antique silver dealing field used operate is, you could go, and here I'm talking about 50 plus years ago, but you could go down to Park Burnett and look at all the pieces of silver that are coming up in the sale.
Speaker: And you could pick out, based on your connoisseurial knowledge, the pieces that you thought were the best 5 or 10 or 15 pieces in the sale.
Speaker: You would bid what you needed to buy them.
Speaker: It didn't really matter particularly how much.
Speaker: You'd bring them back to the showroom and you'd mark them up 50% to 100%, maybe more if it was a particularly good find.
Speaker: And you'd sit around in your shop until somebody came around and bought it.
Speaker: And that was a pretty good business model.
Speaker: And it made a lot of people a lot of money.
Speaker: Now, that's not quite so easy when what you paid for the object is published on the internet.
Speaker: And the first thing anybody does when they look at it is to Google it.
Speaker: And they know exactly what profit margin you're making.
Speaker: Now, you know, it's... God forbid you should make more than that.
Speaker: Well, you know, it's funny because of course there are two sides to the coin.
Speaker: And on the one hand, you know, it does seem sort of crazy to say, well,
Speaker: there shouldn't be transparency.
Speaker: You shouldn't know how much this piece sold for in a sale.
Speaker: You know, that should be secret information to the trade, and we should be able to charge whatever prices we want.
Speaker: On the other hand, you know, it can create these strange incentives where, you know, often these days I speak with my colleagues and with our colleagues in other businesses in the field and talk about how we would rather buy something for a higher price sometimes at auction.
Speaker: because it sends a signal that it's a more valuable object.
Speaker: And if it sells for too little, you know, it used to be you would get excited that you had made a great find that nobody else had recognized.
Speaker: But now when somebody Googles it and finds out it sold for much less than what you think it's worth, they get suspicious.
Speaker: Well, I think I always quoted Alfred Krauss, the book dealer, he was being interviewed once and
Speaker: someone was asking him about a book or a series of books that he had bought at auctions and sold, you know, like six months later for three times as much.
Speaker: And Krause said, when I find a dollar lying on the sidewalk, I don't sell it for 50 cents.
Speaker: And, you know, I mean, it's part of it to say, look, man, I saw it, I recognize it, and I'm, you know, and you've got to convince people that your eye or your expertise is worth it, but
Speaker: And one thing about buying it and owning it, you know, at least you've got your, it's yours.
Speaker: You know, I mean, you can wait.
Speaker: If you've got the wherewithal to wait, you can just wait.
Speaker: A story that Ira used to tell, he was once talking with another dealer.
Speaker: They wanted to buy a painting together by Theodore Robinson, and it was in a private collection, and the dealer was saying, well, Ira, what do you think we can do?
Speaker: What do you think we can ask for this?
Speaker: And I said, well, if we buy it for 250,000, we'll ask 350,000.
Speaker: If we buy it for 150,000, we'll ask 500,000.
Speaker: And what he was saying was, if we get this right, if we buy this, you know, if we're into this painting right, we'll just wait because it's a masterpiece.
Speaker: Someone eventually is going to, you know, come and recognize this.
Speaker: And meanwhile, you don't have quite as much capital tied up in it.
Speaker: Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Speaker: So with not as much capital, you can afford to wait.
Speaker: But I think, you know, things change.
Speaker: You know, certainly back in the early 80s when inflation was going crazy and stuff, you know, every month you didn't sell something, it was costing you X dollars, you know.
Speaker: So you had to turn it.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So as we look toward the future of art collecting, I'm going to ask you to be an oracle for us here.
Speaker: What is it that makes you, let me phrase it in an optimistic way, what makes you most excited as you imagine the coming, I don't know, 5, 10, 20 years of art collecting?
Speaker: I think, good question.
Speaker: You know, it's not going to go back.
Speaker: I think it'll again continue to be a much more mixed market where people, instead of collecting deeply in one field, will travel, you know, quickly across many and then you can complain about shortened attention spans or whatever.
Speaker: But that's going to continue to happen.
Speaker: But I think there is still always going to be a place for...
Speaker: that magical thing with that we call an artwork I you can talk about in F T's and you know all this stuff and that fine great but you know I I've always said you need to look at a photo if you Google the Mona Lisa in the Louvre venue could look up photos in there you know there's the painting on the wall and there are all these people you know pushing and shoving trying to get photos selfies of themselves with the with the Mona Lisa and there's a couple of guards standing there and I said what if
Speaker: the guard were to say to those people, oh, well, actually, this isn't the Mona Lisa is too valuable to be seen.
Speaker: So we've got it in the basement in a bomb proof vault.
Speaker: But we have experts, you know, create an exact replica and the world's greatest experts in Leonardo da Vinci standing where you're standing would be unable to tell the difference.
Speaker: And we put it in the original frame behind its glass.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: So it's the same exact experience.
Speaker: I mean, you know, you're seeing exactly the same thing.
Speaker: Would the people stay and look?
Speaker: No, of course.
Speaker: This magic with which we invest objects, it's crazy, it's insane, and yet I think that will continue.
Speaker: So a great painting will continue to be a great painting, and there will be people.
Speaker: I mean, there's always people playing with the market and people trying to goose this artist and that artist.
Speaker: but you know sentimental as it may sound or naive as it may sound I think in the end quality quality will come out something well made and that you know that will last someone will like that and someone will want that and prices may go up and they may come down but if you buy what you really like then
Speaker: you're golden, you know?
Speaker: You'll always love it.
Speaker: Or if you don't love it, then if it's good, you'll sell it in a few years and find something else that you love.
Speaker: But I think that desire to own something beautiful will stay.
Speaker: So you're saying we may be all crazy and irrational, but we're going to keep being crazy and irrational, so it's kind of okay.
Speaker: Oh, it's, you know, since Neanderthal...
Speaker: People begin collecting pretty rocks to put on their, you know, I mean, that's enough.
Speaker: That's in our DNA, really.
Speaker: And that will stay.
Speaker: Well, Reagan Upshaw, thanks so much for your time.
Speaker: Is there anything else you want to get off your chest while I got you here?
Speaker: No, no.
Speaker: I mean, I'm just, just buy what you like.
Speaker: Buy what you like and love it.
Speaker: That's all.
Speaker: Well, you heard it here.
Speaker: Thanks, Reagan.
Speaker: Thanks, Ben.
Speaker: Bye-bye.
Speaker: That's our show.
Speaker: Thanks for listening.
Speaker: We'll be back next time with Thomas Jane.
Speaker: Very much looking forward to that.
Speaker: In the meantime, today's episode was edited and produced by Sammy Delati.
Speaker: Our music is by Trap Rabbit.
Speaker: And I'm Ben Miller.
