‘If wishes were horses then beggars would ride.’ Countless times my mother repeated this old chestnut to me in my (now long departed) youth. The point, of course, was to teach my sister and I to deal with the here and now- not expend energy on the wish it were otherwise. My mother is a child of the Great Depression. She learned and never forgot its hard lessons and wanted to communicate them to her progeny. As much as I sought to ignore these lessons, mercifully some of what she had to say stuck.
Times being the way they are, those of us who intend to come out of this relatively whole have had to become coldly pragmatic, with strategies that are more in line with what we need to do to get through the month than positioning ourselves to take advantage of perceived opportunities. Perception can, of course, be the mis-perceived and wished-for, occluding good judgement and clear thinking. We are having to cope with one particularly overwhelming mis-perception on nearly a daily basis.
Specifically, with everyone scrambling to stay afloat financially there is a perception that extraordinary items of personal property will be dumped in great numbers on the market, and available for pennies on the dollar. This kind of thing happened in the Great Depression, didn’t it?, where the Duveens and the Wildensteins of the world were able to acquire wonderful pieces of fine and decorative artwork from the newly impoverished.
In the art market, as in most other things, a consideration of the then and now, with so many variables, renders any comparison specious. In the art market, the rare and wonderful in existence now is, to a great extent, what was in existence then and, have you noticed? there are more people, and more moneyed people in more places now than there were then. Consequently, with that which has always been in finite supply, when blended with the greater numbers who seek the rare and beautiful, becomes as a consequence even rarer. A bargain is always seen by those in the art market channels (read ‘an art and antiques dealer’) and is snapped up before it ever sees the light of day. Think about it- with the numbers of public disbursal sales that have occurred in recent weeks, what was on offer ranged from the mediocre that was, shall we say, ‘shoppy’, to the somewhat better than mediocre. By this I mean, what was for sale was what no one really had wanted anyway. The best goods had already been sold off or placed with another dealer. Bargain prices? If something sells at auction for its appropriate value, even if it is less than the previous owner was asking for it, that doesn’t represent therefore a bargain purchase: it merely indicates that it was formerly overpriced.
Unfortunately, there seems to be this pervasive notion that bargains are to be had, even though none are forthcoming. Consequently prospective buyers are in fact missing out on what bargains there really are. To wit, an art and antiques dealer might now accept a little less for good material than he would otherwise. Note, however, that I said ‘good’ material, because the great material the dealer will oftentimes already have sold off, or will hold on to. Or, for instance, he might be willing to broker a sale on a commission basis rather than purchase an item outright and hold it for resale. That, of course, is quite a bit of what Duveen did during the Great Depression, and his buyers finally cottoned on to the fact that Duveen was still the go-to guy for fabulous artwork. That, in a nutshell, is the message. Now, as then, it is the art and antiques dealer that will have, and to whom one should apply, for the ‘bargain.’