Assessing True Value

A Guide to Successful Art Collecting, for Pleasure and Profit. Part 3 covers techniques for assessing the value of an artwork.

Know The Art Market

A six-part series on successful art collecting tips. Part 4 is about knowing the art market and how to find the best deals.

Art Conservation 101

A Six-Part Guide to Successful Art Collecting, for Pleasure and Profit. Part 5 looks at art conservation techniques.

Leaving a Legacy of Art

A Six-Part Series on successful art collecting for profit and pleasure. Part 6 provides guidelines on how to prepare an art collection for posterity.

Why Buy Art?

A guide to successful art collecting for pleasure and profit.

6 Golden Rules of Art Collecting

A Guide to Successful Art Collecting, for Pleasure and Profit. Part 2 covers six basic rules of art collecting.

How to Protect Your Money from Art Forgeries?

Art forgeries are all mischievous imitations of works of art, used for gaining money from the naive art collectors. Art forgeries are different from art copies. Other artists usually make Art copies of certain paintings. For example, the students of DaVinci, the famous Caracci, Durer, and Rota, copied some of his sketches and paintings to exercise on his style. Art forgeries are worthless, while some art copies can be priceless, depending on the artist that did them.

What Makes Art Valuable?

I read an amazing article by Grayson Perry entitled How art appreciates: it's a class act. In a nutshell he reckoned that art finds its true monetary value from what the experts say. But I can see something more from what he says.

It doesn’t have to cost you several years’ salary to buy good art. Fine Art Prints are an affordable way of owning original works of art by well-known artists. Generally prints are less expensive than paintings because they are created in multiples, i.e., limited editions.

However, don’t confuse fine art prints with posters. Unlike a poster, which is a photographic reproduction of an existing work of art, limited-edition prints are original works of art in their own right. Printed in tightly controlled limited editions, the artists work with fine art printers creating unique lithographs and screen prints that are numbered, signed, and many come with a letter certifying their authenticity.

Within the Art Collectors Program we have a number of unique fine art prints:

• Fragile Crossing, with Luis Cruz Azaceta having personally approved each print.
• Bright Surround, to which Jacob Kainen added free-hand elements, so each work stands alone.
• Some of the prints in the Art Collectors Program have as many as many as 40 separate colors, such as Aura by Wolf Kahn.
• Mindy Weisel’s Flowers for a Country is a serigraph, with 41 colors printed through hand-cut stencils.
• Inscapes: Words and Images by Philip Guston is the only serigraph that the artist ever created.

When it comes to contemporary art, it’s hard to beat the value of the Art Collectors Program commissions. Major American artists have donated their talents to the Smithsonian, allowing the limited-edition prints to be sold at a fraction of gallery prices. In most cases, the prints cost $1,000 or less.

Remember that if the art speaks to you in some way, makes you happy thinking about it, you know you have a homerun. How do you find that kind of art? Look for artwork that reflects the artist’s life experiences; they are often themes that affect the viewer emotionally, intellectually, and spiritually. Financial gain should never be the primary goal of collecting art.