As the price of photography has continued to rise over the decades between when photography was not considered and medium worthy of being called art and now, the focus has moved more and more towards the stable or inflationary fiscal value of a photograph. We dealers are busy cornering, developing and monetizing our artists bodies of work. The clients are busy viewing, understanding (at best) and buying the works we offer. This all is appropriate and a regular part of any business. Buy low, sell high. Its a simple and meaningful principle for any business to live by.
I regularly find myself in conversations with friends, artists, clients, collectors and most anybody, about the value of the artwork that is bought or sold. Particularly by younger collector I am often asked, how stable the value of the artwork is that I am recommending they purchase? I have never been able to answer the question without changing the focus of the questioner.
There is something personally valuable about every object we hold dear to us. The meaning of these things we collect are bound to our experience. They help us both define as well as express who we are at any given stage in our lives. That is a meaning I think is incredibly potent. If we free ourselves from having to have that meaning justified by someone else’s approval then we take a step closer to standing without holding on to anyone or anything. It’s kind of like what happens when a child goes from crawling to standing, to walking to running. These developmental stages are all confined by their own restrictions and challenges. We need to develop our senses, challenge our ideals and test our truths to see if they still hold up. They are all part of our becoming complete people.
The arts are a perfect and omnipresent tool to help us in this process. All of us started defining our world using our creativity. Every parent has received a drawing (resembling chicken scratch) from their child who stand beaming and says, “look a house!” (or whatever) We see a bunch of scratchy marks, but the child sees the house. Most of us forget this childhood understanding of abstraction. We unlearn it because our world of productivity declares that the most efficient is always the best. Maybe it is in many ways, but certainly not all ways. We inherently can understand the arts. We may just need to relearn or awaken it in ourselves.
So how do I answer the question of stable value? If you consider that a work of art that you purchase becomes a part of your life. It becomes a part of you. It serves a purpose in it being with you. That purpose can be fulfilled in a very short or a very long time, or maybe never. If, at the time the purpose is fulfilled, you decide to part with it then ask yourself if it was worth it to have solved whatever it was that the artwork helped you solve? If the answer is yes, then any amount of money you may receive for that work is icing on the cake. And if that happens to be more than you paid for it, then thats all the better for you.
I know this is a lofty and dreamy view on all of this, but it is how I live with the arts. I have grown up with art in the house, and in the museums where I regularly went (The National Gallery in Washington DC rules!!). Now this will not always work, but as Benjamin Zander said in a his TED Talk from 2008, “…it is a possibility to live into..”
