The responses I get to blog entries, every one of them, surprise me, as they are generally only obliquely related to the blog itself. Now that we are actively socially networking on Twitter, we’ve cast our nets wider beyond the 20 or so devoted readers with whom I seem to share a common mindset.
Although I opined yesterday that it was unlikely to the point of near impossibility to find a ‘sleeper’ either at auction or amongst the stock of any particular dealer, someone asked about getting good value in a contemporary gallery. Doubtless familiar with how poorly contemporary art has fared over the course of the last 12 months, my reader, who is working with an interior designer to acquire, curate, and display her growing collection of contemporary art, presumes that this might be one of those buy now times.
To repeat what I wrote yesterday, with period material, I would say emphatically yes- buy now, enjoy it for years, and sell it off when it no longer works for you. Moreover, I’d say this applies to anything established in the canon of the fine and decorative arts. Note that I said ‘canon’, because what has come off the boil has been contemporary material. 
This phenomenon is what I term the Luke Fildes effect. Who is Luke Fildes? Well may you ask, as this illustrates my point perfectly. Sir Samuel Luke Fildes was arguably one of the most celebrated, popular and highly paid artists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. His socialist realist style is perhaps best realized in a painting from the late 19th century, ‘The Doctor’, depicting a physician pondering how to treat a sick child in a poor crofter’s cottage. Well drafted with a clear narrative content, it is, however, miles from anything currently thought fashionable.
Don’t dismiss fashion, as it as strong an influence in the fine as it is in the decorative arts. Whatever critics may embrace in terms of the fine arts, they are nevertheless trapped in time as we all are, and what looks au courant today may look like a buggy whip tomorrow, no matter in what sort of critical framework it was grounded.
I am not dismissing the importance and influence of criticism. Would we know Jackson Pollock had there been no Clement Greenberg to champion him- in suitably abstruse language, of course.
This is Friday, and I am off to an auction view, so let me bring this to a quick close. I can, of course, because the advice I’m proffering is what you’ve always heard, and it is of sufficiently few characters to be contained in a ‘Tweet’- where contemporary art is concerned, buy what you like within your own budget. For when buying art outside the canon, where value and fashion are concerned, what is a ‘sleeper’ today might next year appear as sick as Luke Fildes’ patient.