Hakluyt
04-26-2006, 05:41 AM
http://www.theepochtimes.com/tools/printer.asp?id=40151
The Dot.Com Crash of Modern Art
Price of modern art declines while traditional art increases
By Fred Ross
Art Renewal Center
Apr 12, 2006
(In 2001 Fred Ross, Chairman of the Art Renewal Center, addressed over 700 portrait artists, gallery owners and members of the press at the Metropolitan Museum in New York during the American Society of Portrait Artists (ASOPA) Conference. Following is the fourth and final installment. All emphasis is the author's.)
I am quite certain that every artist in this audience paints better than all of the famous modernists and post modernists, and is more deserving of societal attention and praise. Yet still, so-called "major works" of theirs can sell for between two and twenty five million dollars at auction. The dirty little secret, however, that the modernist establishment and the press has been hiding, is that those same works sold for two to three times those prices back in 1988 and '89. While the prices of all the icons of modernism peaked at that time, and any money invested then has declined a whopping 50 to 80%, the market for Gérôme, Waterhouse, Bouguereau, Alma-Tadema, Burne-Jones, Rossetti, Millais and Lord Leighton, has increased between 2000 and 10,000 percent since 1975.
Every year, records are being broken again and again. In 1977, the world record price for a Bouguereau was $17,000. Now, in the past 3 years, the world records for his work first topped a million dollars in 1997, then a million and a half in '98, two and a half million in '99, and last May, Charity sold for over $3,500,000. Additionally, last June the world record for any Victorian painting was completely trampled when Saint Cecilia, by John William Waterhouse, sold for just over $10,000,000 in London to Andrew Lloyd Weber.
There are only 826 Bouguereaus and about 465 Tademas in the world. Do you know how many Picassos there are? Can anybody here guess? There are 80,000 of them, and the balance between supply and demand has faltered, and like the dot com stocks of last year they will soon come crashing down along with hundreds of billions of paper profits lost in the dust of history. Like the tulip bulbs in the 17th century, or Tokyo Real estate in the 1980's, investors will be decimated. If I owned a work by any of those "Abstract artists" I would be racing to cash it in before the fall, and that has been my recommendation to dozens who have asked me.
The Dot.Com Crash of Modern Art
Price of modern art declines while traditional art increases
By Fred Ross
Art Renewal Center
Apr 12, 2006
(In 2001 Fred Ross, Chairman of the Art Renewal Center, addressed over 700 portrait artists, gallery owners and members of the press at the Metropolitan Museum in New York during the American Society of Portrait Artists (ASOPA) Conference. Following is the fourth and final installment. All emphasis is the author's.)
I am quite certain that every artist in this audience paints better than all of the famous modernists and post modernists, and is more deserving of societal attention and praise. Yet still, so-called "major works" of theirs can sell for between two and twenty five million dollars at auction. The dirty little secret, however, that the modernist establishment and the press has been hiding, is that those same works sold for two to three times those prices back in 1988 and '89. While the prices of all the icons of modernism peaked at that time, and any money invested then has declined a whopping 50 to 80%, the market for Gérôme, Waterhouse, Bouguereau, Alma-Tadema, Burne-Jones, Rossetti, Millais and Lord Leighton, has increased between 2000 and 10,000 percent since 1975.
Every year, records are being broken again and again. In 1977, the world record price for a Bouguereau was $17,000. Now, in the past 3 years, the world records for his work first topped a million dollars in 1997, then a million and a half in '98, two and a half million in '99, and last May, Charity sold for over $3,500,000. Additionally, last June the world record for any Victorian painting was completely trampled when Saint Cecilia, by John William Waterhouse, sold for just over $10,000,000 in London to Andrew Lloyd Weber.
There are only 826 Bouguereaus and about 465 Tademas in the world. Do you know how many Picassos there are? Can anybody here guess? There are 80,000 of them, and the balance between supply and demand has faltered, and like the dot com stocks of last year they will soon come crashing down along with hundreds of billions of paper profits lost in the dust of history. Like the tulip bulbs in the 17th century, or Tokyo Real estate in the 1980's, investors will be decimated. If I owned a work by any of those "Abstract artists" I would be racing to cash it in before the fall, and that has been my recommendation to dozens who have asked me.