I have been given a legacy of £500, and I want to use it for something “proper”. I want to buy a piece of art. There are very few things in life that are both fashionable and sensible. It seems that, right now, buying art is one of them. Research by Barclays Capital suggests that fine art generates returns of 10.9 per cent, compared with 8.1 per cent for property and 4.7 per cent for stocks. Art, the report concludes, “has an advantage over other hard assets because it can be enjoyed, and confers status, or ‘wall power’”.
So, I have a mission: as much “wall power” as I can get for £500.
My first port of call is that of any lazy bargain hunter - eBay. At the rock bottom end of the price list are an awful lot of paintings of dogs and tulips. Indeed, should I so wish, my budget could get me 50 portraits of golden Labradors; but I suspect my walls would then be petrifying, rather than powerful. At the £500 mark, there are more exotic animals; a family of elephants drinking by a lake; a tiger with a soul-piercing gaze.
At this sort of price, you also start seeing famous names. Well, Rolf Harris, anyhow. His print of the Houses of Parliament (Buy It Now for £415) looks, if one squints, rather like a Monet. Then, offered at a starting price of £499 is a watercolour of Dame Ellen MacArthur, curled up on deck as a storm lashes her boat, painted by Norman Gray CSD, “twice a finalist in the Annual Daily Mail National Competition”. There are also offerings from artists unlikely to be so honoured soon: “1-OF-A-KIND-THE-CROW-BRANDON-LEE-ORIGINAL-PAINTING-LRGE”; “1930s-PAINTING-MINIATURE-PORTRAIT-HITLER-WWII-NAZI”; “SEXY FEMALE NUDE OIL PAINTING ANTIQUE FRAMED 4 HOME!!!”
What is needed here is some quality control. A minute of searching comes up with just that: The Electronic Museum of Modern Art (www.emoma.org), “designed to assist collectors in appreciating and acquiring cutting-edge artwork online, primarily via eBay auctions”. The site has helpful advice for the novice, explaining, for example, the difference between a reproduction and a print, as well as a section called “Curator’s Choice”. At the top of the list, with an opening bid of $24.95, is “Triumph (A Crucifiction)”. The picture, painted in a loose, expressive style, shows a slow, agonising death taking place on a hill overlooking the sea at sunset.
Yes, there is something for everyone on eBay; everyone, it seems, except someone who wants to buy a good picture. I type “affordable art” into the Google search engine. Dozens of sites come up, all offering original art at cheap prices: www.artzu.co.uk; www.artyourservice.co.uk; www.bigart.co.uk; www.numasters.com; www.picassomio.com; www.fourblankwalls.co.uk. A few of the online galleries have innovative ideas, for example, notquitedry.com reserves a fifth share in every picture it sells so it can offer the work at low prices.
It is heartening that there are so many opportunities for artists to exhibit their work, and that the public’s appetite for art is strong. The only problem is that all the pictures are rubbish. No, let me rephrase: I’m sure there are some gems out there, but the generally high level of badness, plus the head-numbing effects of prolonged internet use, result in robbing one of judgment. After two hours of clicking through pages of thumbnail images, I could have seen Picasso’s “Guernica” on sale for £19.99 and thought it was overpriced.
The obvious conclusion is that, when it comes to finding good art, it is worth heaving oneself off the sofa and seeing the things in the flesh. Contemporary art fairs, where galleries group to exhibit their wares, are the art world’s equivalent of department stores. Frieze, which this year takes place in London’s Regent’s Park on October 21-24, is the most prestigious; the Harvey Nichols of fairs. At a more realistic, John Lewis, level are the London Art Fair, where work ranges from £100 to £500,000, and the Affordable Art Fair, where everything is under £3,000, and which takes place twice a year in London and annually in Bristol, New York, San Francisco, Sydney and Melbourne. The spring show begins on Thursday in Battersea Park, London.
I go along to The London Art Fair, which is held in January at the Business Design Centre in Islington. It is a huge space, with hundreds of galleries spread over three floors, and is buzzing with smart people. Some are carrying a bubble-wrapped painting, tucked under an arm as casually as if it were a Whistles’ bag. Actually, it seems less like a department store than a rather chic souk. If one pauses to look at something, a sales assistant wearing expensive, unusual shoes (if a woman) or a pin-stripe suit (if a man) sidles up and starts a sales pitch. I stop at an exhibit of polystyrene cups that have been torn into the shape of figures. They have then been cast in metal, and painted to look like cups again, so their weight is a surprise. They’re quite fun, and, the salesman informs me, they “question the notion of value”. They also cost £500. Could these be my artwork? I make a mental note.
My intended first stop, though, is the section run by the Whitechapel Art Gallery. The gallery is holding an event called “On The Couch: Collecting Confidence”, where punters have the chance to talk to experts about how to begin buying contemporary art. I sit down with Adam
Cohen, a collector and gallerist for the Gagosian gallery, and ask what I should do with my £500. The best bet, he says, is a limited edition print by someone well known. Perhaps unsurprisingly, he recommends the Whitechapel Editions. “They’re not-very-large editions by very established contemporary artists.” Those artists include Liam Gillick, Paul Noble, Nan Goldin and the currently very hot Ian Monroe, and prices start at a mere £75. “You see them later on eBay for double the price,” adds Cohen. (Sure enough, I later find the Nan Goldin piece, “Clemens at Lunch at Café de Sade”, up for sale with a starting price of £200).
And what if you want to become patron to an unknown; snap up an early work from the Damien Hirst of the future? Cohen suggests going to the college degree shows, which take place in the summer, and looking out for open studio events. It is essential to study the market; he advises visiting galleries and reading magazines such as Frieze, the Art Newspaper and Art Forum.
It is also worth subscribing to the free e-mail service from e-flux.com, which keeps you up to date with the goings on in the art world, and having a glance at artdaily.com, an online newspaper.
My next advisor is Ben Lewis, art critic for Prospect magazine, and the writer/presenter of a programme on Channel Four last year called Why Do People Buy Art? He accompanies me on a tour of the fair. “If you want the piece to increase in value, the worst advice is to buy something you like,” he says. “Often one’s first instincts are to gravitate towards something obvious, or that reminds you of a Peter Blake or whatever. You have to be educated and ask questions: How does the piece fit in with the artist’s body of work? How does it fit in with the issues other artists are dealing with? How intellectually significant is it?”
We pass by the polystyrene cups I had admired earlier. Lewis’ expression suggests that they wouldn’t pass the latter test. We stop instead at some wonderful photographs of books by an artist called Veronica Bailey. The pictures are not only gorgeous but are quite possibly, Lewis reckons, intellectually significant. I’m interested. Now what? Lewis runs through the questions one should ask a gallerist: how old is the artist? Where did they study? At which galleries have they exhibited? How many pieces have they sold? Who else has bought their work? Which magazines has their stuff appeared in? The first question I have to ask, though, is “How much?” The answer means that asking the other questions is a waste of breath.
Let’s cut to the chase: is £500 simply too little to buy something good ? “To be honest,” says Lewis, “I don’t think you’ll get a one-off piece by a significant artist for less than £3,000.”
Looking at the recent prices of contemporary art at auction, it seems that Lewis might be right. Christie’s in New York is this month launching first open [sic], a twice yearly auction of postwar and contemporary art aimed at new collectors. In 200 lots, however, there is only one painting with a low estimate of $1,000, and two prints.
And what about art galleries? Would small fry be laughed out of the door? I call Kathy Stephenson at Victoria Miro, one of the UK’s leading contemporary galleries, which represents artists such as Grayson Perry, Chantal Joffe and Peter Doig. Do they have anything to offer a meagre spender?
“It could be a bit daunting for people - both for us and for them - if they just wandered in with £500 and said ‘What have you got?’,” she says. The artist currently on show at the gallery, Suling Wang, has some works on paper for £950, but that’s as low as it goes. “But we do sometimes have things that fall within that [£500] price range, so it’s always worth calling,” says Stephenson.
She suggests that talent-spotting bargain-hunters should look out for group shows, which commercial galleries often put on at the beginning of the year and in the summer, as a good way of finding out about new artists.
If you fall in love with a piece out of your league, I discover, it’s always worth asking whether the gallery offers any payment schemes.
The Arts Council of England has an initiative called Own Art, which gives interest free loans of up to £2,000, to be paid back over a maximum of 10 equal amounts.
So, at the Photographer’s Gallery in London, a Margo Davies print costs £650, or 10 monthly instalments of £65. About 250 galleries around the country have joined up and, for once, Londoners are at a disadvantage; the scheme is aimed at areas where the market is not so strong. Scotland and Wales are also involved. (In Wales the scheme is called Collectorplan). Full details are on the artscouncil.org.uk and scottisharts.org.uk websites.
All of this is good to know. However, I still don’t have my artwork. Back home, I am staring at my blank, powerless wall, when Ben Lewis calls with the names of a couple of websites I should try. Eyestorm.com and www.countereditions.com both offer limited edition prints and multiples from names such as Damien Hirst, Tracy Emin, Jake and Dinos Chapman, and Marc Quinn. The sites are well put together, with detailed biographies of the artists. They are also budget friendly; Eyestorm has a category of “art for less than £500”, which has 1,213 items. There is even a “make an offer” option, for those who can’t quite afford the asking price.
It is on countereditions.com that I find my artwork. By Sarah Lucas, it is a large fruit cake, with a slightly naughty photograph printed on the icing. You can buy a Perspex box in which to display it. It is in an edition of 25, and costs £480.
Due to the difficulties of framing and hanging a cake I may not have, strictly speaking, purchased “wall power”. I do have, however, a work of art by someone famous that is witty and quite possibly intellectually significant. And it can be eaten in an emergency. Now, that’s what I call a good investment.
