There are so many factors to consider when buying an artwork, and personal taste is perhaps the most important. But when it comes down to actually valuing an artwork, there doesn’t seem to be many guidelines for the potential art buyer to follow. And unless you hold some sort of art degree, you won’t even know how to begin to technically appraise an artwork. Add to this the festering intellectual elitism of the art world today (by this I mean the trend of art buyers to passively accept that any artwork which makes it into an exhibition is innately honest, valuable, and meaningful) and you have yourself a climate in which people are easily duped – and don’t think that this is not intentional.
So how do you decide whether or not an artwork is valuable? How do you know that the price tag the artist has attached to his or her creation is justified? And how do you know that your friends and family aren’t going to be laughing behind your back over that new sculpture you just bought (you know, the one with the blind dwarves and the kumquat)? Well, answering the following questions before you invest in an artwork should help:
1. How long does it take to discover meaning in the artwork?
Some artworks are abstract. Others exude meaning at first glance. However, there are artworks out there which possess about as much meaning as the French Monarchy possessed public favour during the storming of the Bastille.
If you have spent more than ten minutes staring at an artwork, your mind so open that an Airbus with whales strapped to the wings could fly through without scraping the edges, and you still cannot figure out what an artwork means, then the artwork is probably meaningless. Or, the artist was on some type of hallucinogen at the time, and unless you’re prepared to hand out LSD to all your guests at dinner parties, no one’s going to understand it but the artist.
2. How does the artist describe his/her own artwork?
Read this:
“My artworks seek to capture an omnipresent sense of transient civil migration and mitigation; I wished to express an ever-expanding sense of self, enthralled to complete and utter ego death, perhaps as a result of society’s banal need to deviate from non-conformist ways of being”.
You know when you go on a road trip, and every once in a while you drive past some long-dead thing, and think to yourself “I wonder what the hell that was?”
Well, this unidentifiable carcass of words is the road kill of artistic pseudo-thought. Perhaps at some point in time, long, long ago, this excretion of thought was true and meaningful. But now, it means nothing, and you can safely assume that the artwork it describes means nothing too.
3. What is the artwork made from?
Today’s world has seen very many different forms of art, executed through very many different mediums. I have seen art pieces constructed from Lego, spaghetti, and beer cans. All of them honest artworks, in the sense that they actually conveyed some sort of message, or at the very least stood as a testament to human ingenuity and imagination.
However, I have also seen ‘artworks’ constructed from decaying fish guts and cow poop. Suffice it to say, if your prospective artwork is so long passed its expiry date that it has developed a central nervous system and now plans planetary domination, or if your artwork involves the termination of a metabolic process, then its only value lies in fertilization.
4. Does the artwork actually exist?
Ever heard the phrase “a fool and his money are soon parted?”
Technically, I shouldn’t even be mentioning this one, because anyone who would buy an artwork which could, at a stretch, be referred to as fictitious deserves to be parted from their money.
A relatively recent development within the art world is a rise in the “exploration of the intangible”. In other words, people are trying to sell you nothing for something. You can’t buy rainbows people. And the actual act of selling and buying a rainbow is not art either. It’s just wanton stupidity.
5. Is the artist known for brilliant work, or for trying to be brilliant?
So many artworks are sold on the basis that the artists who created them are “going somewhere”. This “somewhere” seems to be a magical world of suspended disbelief and institutionalised nonsense, which would make even Lewis Carroll raise an incredulous eyebrow.
If you can’t find meaning in an artwork, no one else can. But the artist is relying on the man in the cheesecloth kaftan, the woman wearing square brimmed glasses, and the androgynous humanoid carrying an embroidered satchel all pretending that they know what the artist is saying, just in case one of them is the only one who can’t figure it out.
If the artist has resorted to descriptions of his or her artwork which proves nothing more than their ability to use an online thesaurus, or if the description contains the words “banal” “eclectic” or “irreverent”, then the artist is faking it.
If you view an artwork, and the first thing that pops into your head is “I’m sure glad I didn’t step in that”, then you don’t even want to get within ten feet of the artist, let alone give it your money.
And finally, if the artwork doesn’t exist, then neither does the artist. Perhaps the person trying to auction fresh air during a recession is just a good businessperson. Immoral, but still talented at selling things that aren’t really there. Or the artist is the by-product of a stagnant pond which has formed next to the gene pool. Either way, they are not someone you would want to be affiliated with.
