Priceless Art
Friday, 25 October 2024
Priceless Art
I’m fascinated by people who find extravagant art at thrift stores. Are they just lucky, or do they actually have a knack for finding things that end up at Sotheby’s? If it’s the latter, I need to know their secret:
- "Woman finds 2,000-year-old bustof Roman general at a Goodwill for $34.99"
- "Carlo Scarpa vasebought at Goodwill for $3.99 sells for more than $100,000"
- "Rare Texas paintingsaved from Goodwill sells for $112,500"
- "Nike shoesfound in Portland homeless donation bin sell for $50K at auction"
- "A woman bought four ceramic platesat a Salvation Army for $8. They turned out to be original Picassos."
Art is an intimate thing. If I enjoy an artist’s work enough to want to bring it home and stare at it in the privacy of my apartment, I’ll buy it! If, years down the line, the work is somehow worth more than I paid for it, that’d be exciting and I could retire early. But I’m not buying art to sell it; I’m buying it to savor it. I often think about how Dirtco-founder Daisy Alioto saw this paintingin a coffee shop six years ago and bought it because she thought it externalized everything she believed about the relationship between art and science. Turns out, it was painted by Martin Schreiber in 1981. Fast-forward to 2023 and it’s worth between $6,000 and $9,000. "Moral of the story? Taste is our most valuable asset," she wrote on X.
Even when taste doesn’t yield monetary gains, it can still have narrative value. Howard Chua-Eoanwonderedif he was on the cusp of his own windfall after he saw a complete set of Ode à Ma Mèreby Louise Bourgeois at this year’s Frieze Masters, the annual arts fair in Regent’s Park. One image in the set — "a tall spider, either languid or exhausted, in some sort of conversation with a tiny member of her species" — was nearly identical to the print sitting in Howard’s bedroom, which he purchased at a charity gala almost three decades ago:
"The Frieze series was priced at £62,000 ($80,000); I paid a few hundred dollars for mine," he writes. "Momentarily, I felt like an Antiques Roadshowparticipant at the moment an expert passes judgment on a dusty keepsake. But, very quickly, my expectations deflated. My spider is a test print. Though bearing an autograph, it’s an out-of-context artifact separated from its eight other eight-legged kin."
Still, Howard isn’t too upset about it: "My art story is priceless, provided you don’t care about money." In an era of Baja Blast oil paintings, hippo fart masterpiecesand duct taped bananas, nobody knows who’s going to be the next Vincent van Gogh. So, please, don’t drop off your boring old art at Goodwill. Send it to me instead!