How To Dispose of 5000 Works of Art: Herb and Dorothy 50 x 50

Robert Boyd

The collector's mania sneaks up on you. I'm in my super-cluttered bedroom looking around, and there are 51 visible artworks (and many more in portfolios on my bookshelves as well as artworks hanging in other rooms). They range from a painted postcard sent to me by Earl Staley and silkscreened limited edition beer-bottles with art by Ron Regé, Jr. and C.F. to paintings by Lane Hagood, Rachel Hecker and and Chris Cascio. I'm not saying this to brag--well, maybe a little--but to point out what all serious collectors come to realize--that they have a lot of stuff and will someday need to dispose of it.

We think of collectors as rich people, but despite the shocking auction prices we read about, the reality is that almost anyone can collect art. Small artwork, prints, art by non-"big name" artists can all be pretty affordable. If you can buy directly from an artist, that usually saves you some money. Sometimes you can trade for art--if you offer a service that artists need. (Hence the art collections of dentists.)

The Vogels are the gods of this approach to collecting. A quick recap of their story: Herbert Vogel was an amateur painter who worked for the post office. His wife Dorothy had a job at a public library. They loved art. They were really into pop art when they got married in 1962, but it was too expensive for them. So they started buying minimal art (not quite yet the new thing when they started). They made a deal with one another--they would live on Dorothy's salary and buy art with Herbert's income. And they did, for decades. In the end, they had a collection of over 4000 pieces of art, which they donated to the National Gallery. In 2008, a really entertaining film , Herb & Dorothy by Megumi Sasaki, was made about the couple. And that seems like it should have been the end of it. The problem is that Herb and Dorothy kept on collecting and kept on donating to the National Gallery, which finally said, enough! As big as the National Gallery is, it just couldn't absorb 5000+ pieces of art.

So they came up with a wonderful solution. They made a gift of art to 50 museums--one in each state--of 50 pieces of art. This is the 50x50 program. Thus 2500 pieces of art were distributed all over the country. And Megumi Sasaki filmed a sequel, Herb & Dorothy: 50x50.

The Blanton Museum at the University of Texas got the 50 pieces of art reserved for Texas. I saw them when the Blanton mounted an exhibit of the work, and one thing I noticed is that not every artist they collected has ended up in the canon. The Vogels had an amazing ability to pick "winners," but no one bats a thousand. (Interestingly, the Blanton also received James Michener's large collection of modernist art after his death. In the book American Art since 1900, Robert Kushner looks at Michener's collection in terms of a year by year "batting average"--significant works as a percentage of the whole. He calculates Michener's lifetime average at .319, which I'd say is pretty great. Is it crass that I'd like to know what the average is for the Vogels?)

That's one thing the new documentary examines--artists who haven't achieved any particular fame whose work was collected by the Vogels.


Charles Clough with the Vogels at the Metropolitan Museum (still from Herb & Dorothy 50x50)

For example, the film looks at Charles Clough. He is an abstract painter who came out of the same Buffalo scene that spawned Cindy Sherman and Robert Longo (Clough was a co-founder of Hallwalls). The Vogels collected a large number of his pieces (127 are part of the 50x50 collection), and he is one of the artists whose work ended up in all 50 museums. But his career as an artist has been rocky. He admits to having hardly sold anything in the previous 10 years. He points to a map of the USA covered with thumbtacks. Each one represents an artwork in a museum. And two-thirds of them are a result of the 50x50 program.


Charles Clough painting (still from Herb & Dorothy 50x50)

Another artist who never achieved fame was Martin Johnson. Johnson had some success in the late 70s and early 80s, but eventually moved to Richmond Virginia to run the family business, which represented plumbing supplies to buyers.


Martin Johnson and the family business (still from Herb & Dorothy 50x50)

As it turned out, the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond was one of the recipients of the Vogel collection, and they were amazed to learn that one of the artists whose work they received lived right there in Richmond.


Martin Johnson and his work (still from Herb & Dorothy 50x50)

Artists whose moment of success happened decades ago are suddenly finding their work in museums all over America. For artists like Clough, it could mean a second chance at success.

The artist who most exemplifies the Vogel collection is Richard Tuttle. Herbert Vogel was quite close to Tuttle, and Tuttle is represented by 336 pieces in the 50x50 collection--enough for each museum in the program to get at least six Tuttles.


Richard Tuttle with the Vogels (still from Herb & Dorothy 50x50)

As it turns out, he's not super happy about the 50x50 program. He would have preferred to see the collection stay in one piece, even if it meant storing most of it. But he's realistic and is shown visiting with curators in Maryland to discuss the best way to display his work from the collection.


Richard Tuttle at the Academy Art Museum in Maryland  (still from Herb & Dorothy 50x50)

Of course, Tuttle is a pretty difficult artist to love. Most of his work in the collection consists of pieces of lined notebook paper with one or two small watercolor marks on it. This is pretty challenging work, especially in provincial museums in Montana or Alabama. How to show this work in these disparate places is the main subject of the movie. The filmmaker traveled to several of these far-flung museums, including small museums in Honolulu and Fargo, North Dakota. Stephen Jost, the director of the Honolulu Museum of Art, addresses this head on. He knows the work is difficult for many visitors, and the Honolulu Museum has worked very hard to help viewers engage with it. One scene shows children playing a game with the art--they have a guide to all the pieces with little image excerpts, and they are in a race to see who can find them all on the walls first. But Jost acknowledges that there are some viewers who are just plain hard to reach in general and especially with the art from the Vogel collection. These viewers are teenagers and young adults.


Sullen teens at the Honolulu Museum of Art (still from Herb & Dorothy 50x50)

What some of the museums have done is make the Vogels the focus of the exhibits--telling their story. The Blanton had the first Vogel documentary running continuously. Some museums actually recreated parts of the Vogel's apartment, down to stuffed cats and turtles (the Vogels never had children--they had pet cats, fish, and turtles).


The Plains Art Museum (still from Herb & Dorothy 50x50)

Places like the Plains Art Museum were thrilled to get the gift. Director Colleen Sheehy states her pride in being in the company of LA MOCA and the Albright-Knox Gallery, who also received Vogel gifts.  She used the Vogels themselves as the way to interest viewers in the work. She explained it this way: "The work might seem difficult, but they're so accessible." She actually commissioned a local artist, Kaylyn Gerenz, to create a stuffed animal version of one of their cats to be exhibited alongside the work in a small recreated corner of the Vogel's apartment.

One of the museums they donated the work to, the Las Vegas Art Museum, abruptly closed in February 2009, a victim of the recession which hit Las Vegas especially hard. Part of the conditions for accepting the gift were that if you closed, you had to give it to an approved museum in the same state. In this case, the work went to the Donna Beam Fine Art Gallery at UNLV. By focusing so much on several small, regional museums, Herb & Dorothy: 50x50 almost becomes a documentary about provincial museums. It's fascinating to see how they strive to stay relevant and stay afloat.

Herbert Vogel died during the filming of this documentary. The Vogels had already stopped collecting, and their apartment was emptying out.




Before and after (stills from Herb & Dorothy 50x50)

After you've given away your life's work, I guess passing on (at the ripe old age of 90) is not so bad. But I worry about Dorothy (now 78). Will an apartment with no art and no Herb be too lonely for her?

One more interesting thing about Herb & Dorothy: 50x50. It was partly financed by a Kickstarter campaign. They did a typical thing--gifts of a certain size would get you a download of the finished movie, and a little more would get you the DVD.  In short, they presold the movie. I was pretty sceptical when I heard about it, mainly because I didn't really believe there was anything else to say after the first movie. But I went ahead and donated enough to get the DVD, and I was very pleasantly surprised. By focusing on artists like Charlie Clough and Martin Johnson and museums like the Plains Museum and the Honolulu Museum, Sasaki created a completely new documentary around the Vogels. It's an informative, moving documentary.

Assorted Links

by Robert Boyd


Esther Watson, Mistake Pizzas, acrylic on panel, 6" x 6" (posted on curate 1K)

The Cheap Art Revolution continues. To me, the cure to the elitism of much of the art world is not picketing, but making less expensive art available. I've written about schemes for this purpose here and here. curate 1K is another source. Norah, the woman behind curate 1K, writes

Living with art is joyful, but it has a bad reputation for being prohibitively expensive. Luckily, there are an increasing number of websites that sell gorgeous pieces in a price bracket most of us can afford. [...] While plenty of the artwork featured on curate 1k is original, I also include prints. I try to find archival, signed and numbered editions whenever possible. curate1k is a project, not a business. I do not act as a middleman between artist and buyer, and I do not profit monetarily from the site.  My aim is to to gather together the best online art I can find and present it in an accessible, fun-to-follow format.

Another reason to dislike Laurel Nakadate's work, in case you need one. I guess it's no secret that I dislike her work. Corinna Kirsch, writing for Art Fag City, piles on.

Regardless of whether or not you’re anti-feminist, there’s plenty of reasons to dislike Laurel Nakadate’s work. My choice: her works are too simple.365 Days: A Catalogue of Tears (2010-11) could have been ripped from an undergrad photography course assignment: take a photo of yourself repeating the same action everyday; then read about how photographs always lie about real life (re: Roland Barthes, Susan Sontag, Walter Benjamin).

Good point, Corinna Kirsch! (Art Fag City)

Art in Porn, a seriously extremely NSFW link. The creator of the blog Art in Porn has done some serious art historical detective work. Looking at various pornographic photos, he has identified the various art prints on the wall in the backgrounds. Why are their art prints on the walls in the first place? I guess they make it seem like there is actually someone living there, and that the people in the photos might be porn performers, but they also have at least some culture. Who knows? But I like the idea that someone if looking past the porn at the weird background details. (Art in Porn)

Some of Jerry Saltz's pet peeves. He's the art critic for New York Magazine (and married to Roberta Smith, art critic for the New York Times--they may be the only family that can sustain a pretty decent lifestyle from art criticism). Asked about his art worl pet peeve, he launched into a lengthy list:

I am peeved at idiot billionaires flying mindless millionaire artists to bloated biennials to party down on private yachts; at seven-figure prices paid for derivative dreck that supposedly "critiques the system"; at gilded auctions attended by those who get their kicks from being profligate in public; at the absolute equation of art with capital; at curators flying from city to city to speak on one other's panels about "The Role of the Curator"; at an endless stream of art-school-trained artists trying to crawl up the asses of Andy Warhol, Richard Prince, and Gerhard Richter in order to stake out a microscopic piece of insular, already-approved territory; Also, I wish lots more young art-critics would start online blogs, art-magazines, screed-sheets, Facebook pages, whatever. Art critics aren't paid anything anyway so there's nothing to lose. (My emphasis.)

This isn't everything on his list, by the way. ("19 Questions for Art Critic and 'Work of Art' Judge Jerry Saltz," ArtInfo)

Linky Winks

by Robert Boyd

Art Haterz! Marshall's wants your business! I wish I had video for this one. Apparently there is a commercial for Marshall's that is currently running that disses art. Edward Winkelman describes it:

Three women are in an art gallery, looking at dubious concoctions on the walls and questioning their meaning, when the Marshalls spokeswoman whisks them out of there and into an environment that one supposes is meant to represent the shopping experience you'll find at an actual Marshalls (only they left out the piles and piles of useless junk crammed high in aisles you can barely fit through and the poorly trained and grumpy staff).

One of the three women picks up a purse in this fantasy version of the store and says, "This is art." The Marshall's spokeswoman agrees, noting "Yeah, who needs 'real' art. Such a snooze."

From now on Billy Bob's Big & Tall is getting all my business and Marshall's can suck it! [Edward_Winkleman,  Savvy Shopper]


Yoko Ono, Imagine Peace, billboard, 2001, 2011 (Image from Colton & Farb pres release)

We have always been at war with Eurasia. If you've driven south to downtown on I-45 recently, you've seen this billboard by Yoko Ono. Apparently it was sponsored by Colton & Farb for the 10th anniversary of its initial erection in New York after the September 11 attacks. In some ways, it is more provocative now--after all, we have been continuously at war for 10 years. There are millions of American children growing up who have never experienced their country at peace. Still, the press release manages to amuse: "Deceptively simple with its basic black and white palette the billboard engages the thoughts of the viewer on an almost subliminal level, inevitably provoking discussion of current events." Hmm... I don't think its simplicity is "deceptive", and stark black type on an enormous billboard is hardly subliminal. But hey, it's a good thing to do, even if it is as likely to have as much impact on America's wars as a large pancake dropped from a height of 10 feet (to paraphrase Kurt Vonnegut).


Miranda July, Pedestal for Strangers, cast fiberglass, steel, paint, 2009


Miranda July is very clever. This is one of 11 sculptures ("Eleven Heavy Things")by Miranda July currently on view at MOCA Pacific Design Center in LA. [Design Milk]



Bob Montana

Something Rotten in Riverdale. Bob Montana, in addition to sporting a killer beatnik look and having an awesome name, created Archie Andrews, the famously wholesome teenage comic book character. He drew Archie for MLJ Comics until his death in 1975. It was "work for hire" (even though he created the character), but at least he got to keep all his original artwork, which wasn't the norm back then. Later his heirs made a deal to sell his original artwork to comic book distribution king Steve Geppi. Montana's family hired hired Jerry Weist to appraise the collection. Weist thought it was worth $2 million, and Geppi bought it for $1 million, to be paid in four quarterly installments. He paid the first two but then claimed that he was out of money (his businesses were suffering serious reverses). This purchase was an investment for Geppi--he planned to sell the Montana pages off piecemeal. Unfortunately, the individual pages sold for much less than Weist's estimate. Weist, who recently died, might have been basing his valuation on previous auction results. If so, one can speculate that the appearance of so many Bob Montana pages on the market (or even the knowledge that they would eventually be on the market) depressed the prices. Geppi offered to return the unsold pages and let the Montanas keep the $500,000. They sued Geppi for damages, saying he had misrepresented his ability to buy the pages. The suit is ongoing (as far as I know). There don't seem to be any obvious bad guys here. The story about how an art deal can go bad, though, is fascinating. Daniel Best has written an exhaustive account of it on his blog, 20th Century Danny Boy.

Jerry Weist, Founder of Million Year Picnic and former Sotheby's Consultant

I am shocked to find out that Jerry Weist died today. Jerry Weist was behind one of the seminal comics fanzines, Squa Tront, which ran from 1967 to 1983. As many of you can guess from the title, it was an EC fanzine, and one of extremely high quality. Weist also founded one of the first comic shops, The Million Year Picnic, in Cambridge, MA. By the time I move to Massachusetts and started shopping there, Jerry had sold it and was working for Sotheby's. But it was always a very progressive shop and in the mid-90s, it was one of the few places in North America where one could get copies of the new wave of European art comics (L'Association, Amok, etc.)



I first got to know him when he was working on his price guide for original comic art. I think the deal was that Kitchen Sink Press was going to publish it, but when KSP went under, he just self-published. But he came up to Northampton a couple of times to visit, and I persuaded him to include some more modern alternative comics artists like Dan Clowes and Adrian Tomine in the book. The book was itself a bit of a sham--the prices were based on real prices (Weist had lots of Sotheby's data to go by, plus he knew most of the dealers of original art in the country), but as I demonstrated in my analysis of Jaime Hernandez art prices, art from a single artist can vary wildly in price.

But on reflection, I don't think Jerry was trying to impose a price on the art he was listing. The thing was, the market for original comic art was very undeveloped then. (It's still hardly a mature market, in my mind.) The natural market for this artwork--comics fans--were still obsessed with collecting comic books. The market for collectible comic books had been carefully nurtured by Robert Overstreet for over 20 years by the time Jerry wrote his original art price guide, and Wizard Magazine pushed comics collecting even further. I think Jerry wanted to reach all those people who were buying collectible comics and say--here's something truly unique, the actual artwork. A price guide was a familiar way for those people to think about collecting, so I imagine Jerry thought it would be a good way to make them feel comfortable about a whole different level of collecting.

That said, I don't think it completely worked. Sotheby's discontinued its comics auctions (that business has largely moved online to Heritage Auction  and eBay). But it worked well enough that Jerry published two editions. And things like this are needed--collecting original art can be very intimidating.

Jerry was an extremely likable guy who loved comics, comics artwork, and science fiction. He also introduced me to my favorite Italian dish, pasta puttanesca. So long, Jerry.

The Weird Impulse of Collectors to Pretend to be Artists

I read a really great travel book about Texas years ago. I can't remember the title or author (which kills me, because I would love to reread it). I bought it in London in the late 80s, and it was by an English writer. He made really funny, astute observations about Texas in the 80s. For example, he was at a party in Dallas, and mentioning some behavior he had witnessed earlier, one of the guests said to him, "In Dallas, the guy who collects the art is more important than the artist."

This observation really shouldn't be limited to Dallas. In the context of the book, it was about the crassness of Dallas, the naked worship of wealth that typified Dallas. But really, is Houston or anyplace in America all that different? Especially now when we have the widest gap between rich and everyone else that we have had since the gilded age.

Anyway, what got me thinking about this stuff this morning was this hilarious post on Hyperallergic.

A not-unexpected surprise awaits visitors to the Miami-based Rubell Family Collection’s website. Scion of collector royalty and son of Don and Mera, Jason Rubell is releasing a catalogue of a show memorializing the works he collected from ages 13 to 21, an illustrious and mature body of art that Jason also gathered into a senior thesis exhibition in college. Pay attention folks, this is a lesson in narcissism that’s likely to go unparalleled in the art world for a little while. [...]

To call this conflict of interest would be ridiculous because we’re dealing with a wholly private collection. Rubell can do what he wants. I’m just calling it stupid and self-obsessed. Are we supposed to believe Rubell’s posing his early “collecting work” as some kind of curatorial accomplishment? This catalogue is self-mythologizing in the worst way. And worse yet, a (Thomas Ruff?) portrait of the collector as a young man is the only thing to grace the cover of the volume.

This is a catalog memorializing Rubell's precocious brilliance as a teenage art collector? Astonishing. I hope Holland Chaney will have enough class to avoid this kind of thing 25 years from now.

That said, there is an impulse among collectors that I am personally very well aware of--the tendency to take pride in one's collection; to view it as a reflection of one's own self-worth. And this is true of any kind of collector--stamp collectors, comics book collectors, collectors of glass insulators--anything really. The only difference between the Jason Rubells of the world and a dude with a truly awesome barb wire collection is that the Rubell types have huge amounts of money to promote their collections. Some do so in ways that are hard to criticize (the Menils, for example, were civic minded exemplars of noblesse oblige), and some--like Jason Rubell--do it in ways that make them the target of ridicule by bloggers and other poor people.

My Comic Art Collection

I am a collector of comics art in addition to collecting contemporary fine art. Collecting comics art is a lot easier than collecting contemporary fine art for one simple reason--original comics artwork is a lot cheaper. Why? I don't really understand it, to be honest. It seems like in the past decade especially, there has been a growing acceptance of the importance of comics as an artistic medium in this country. This has affected a lot of things--the format of comics (they are much more likely to be published in book format as opposed to the more disposable comic book format), the acceptance of certain comics in the literary world. and obviously (and somewhat regrettably) the embrace of comics by Hollywood.


James Kochalka, Skull, acrylic on paper

But the art world lags behind. Comics art is not collected by museums (that I know of) and there are few art galleries that deal with it. The MFAH has a page where you can search their collection, which is mammoth. I put in the names "Herriman," "McCay," "Crumb," "Spiegelman," and "Chris Ware" and got bupkis. The CAMH had a show called "Splat Boom Pow! The Influence of Comics in Contemporary Art" in 2003. It featured the following artists: Laylah Ali, Candida Alvarez, Polly Apfelbaum, Ida Applebroog, John Bankston, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Dara Birnbaum, Roger Brown, Enrique Chagoya, Michael Ray Charles, George Condo, Cat Chow, Renee Cox, Henry Darger, Jason Dunda, Michael Galbincea, Kojo Griffin, Trenton Doyle Hancock, Keith Haring, Rachel Hecker, Arturo Herrera, Roy Lichtenstein, Liza Lou, Kara Maria, Kerry James Marshall, Julie Mehretu, Takashi Murakami, Elizabeth Murray, Yoshimoto Nara, Raymond Pettibon, Sigmar Polke, Robert Pruitt, Mel Ramos, David Sandlin, Peter Saul, Kenny Scharf, David Shrigley, Roger Shimomura, Andy Warhol, and Jennifer Zackin. In short, it had precisely zero comics artists. That is indicative of the lack of respect (if not outright condescension) comics art gets from art world institutions.


OK, enough griping. The point is, I think this is a cultural error. But this is how it is, and for me, one unexpectedly nice aspect of this is that comics art is relatively cheap, as I mentioned above. So I have bought a bunch of it over the past few years.




James Kochalka, Worms, acrylic on paper

There is a website called Comic Art Fans where collectors post their collections. Now most of these collections are pretty mainstream--not what I personally would consider artistically interesting artwork. But there are a lot of adventurous, sensitive collectors who post there. For instance, Suat Tong Ng's collection, or Dries Dewulf's (you can deduce from the names that the collectors come from various points on the globe). 



James Kochalka, Worms, acrylic on paper

I have put my own collection up there (there are still a couple of pieces I need to photograph, but this is most of the comics and comics-related art I have). Take a look. What's enjoyable about this site is that it becomes a database for the work you have collected, which means it becomes a database for everyone's work. I can easily find people who have similar interests as collectors as I do, and vice versa. So it is a small but perfectly focused social network. 


If I ever get my comics festival off the ground (unlikely given the resounding shrug of indifference the proposal has evoked in the readership of this blog), CAF will be a valuable resource. For example, if I were curating a show of Chester Gould Dick Tracy originals, focusing on his use of silhouette, I could look Gould up on CAF to see what collectors have examples and if there might be any I want to borrow for the exhibit.



Yirmi Pinkus, untitled, pen and ink and watercolor, 1998

The Great Contempary Art Bubble

I would love to see this. Supposedly it can be bought from Ben Lewis's website, but I can't figure out how. It doesn't seem to be available from iTunes either (but so much that I want to see it not there--Paris, Texas, In the Mix, etc.--that I have stopped being disappointed when they don't have something).

I don't get too worked up over super-high prices and the people who pay them. After all, there is plenty of exciting contemporay art available at very reasonable prices. The main downside is when you have situations like with the New Museum or the Chaney Family shows at MFAH, in which a collector in essence hijacks a museum to show their collection. (Although I am sure the New Museum and the MFAH would object to the term "hijack").

Recent Acquisitions: Marzia Faggin, Eric Faggin and Woody Golden

As I mentioned in my last post, I bought some art at the AMG Stimulus Package.


Woody Golden, untitled, laminated paper, 2009

I mentioned in an earlier post how much I liked the work of Woody Golden. He's a sculptor, and the work I was responding to were these pieces where he carved a hole into a large book, then took the carved out pieces, laminated them, and sanded them into organic, stone-like shapes--then put them back into the void in the book.

This piece is related to those sculptures. Golden has again taken paper (colored paper this time), somehow laminated it into a solid block, then sanded it into this shape. The paper used is important. In the book projects, the paper was slightly yellowed and covered with small black type. The solid shape ended up being a pale tan with black speckles. They looked like smooth stones or of eggs--very natural and organic. But this piece, with its colors, looks more like an oversized piece of hard candy! (I got the long thin one. I wanted to show both, though. They look great against the grain of the plywood walls--kind of the perfect backdrop for them, don't you think?)


Eric Faggin, various untitled works, tape on paper

I was definitely attracted to this suite of paired pieces by Eric Faggin. The figures are made out of tape, and the red tape is much brighter in person--it's actually fluorescent. Anyway, they all looked great and the pairings were intriguing (often implying a dialogue between young and old, or across cultures, or between people who might be at odds for some personal reason). Here's the one I ended up getting.


Eric Faggin, untitled, tape on paper

Finally, I got a piece by Marzia Faggin. I have no idea what relationship Marzia and Eric Faggin have (if any). Google doesn't really turn up much on them. They were both in a recent group show at Poissant Gallery. There is an Eric Faggin who is a designer, but I don't know if this is the same guy.

Anyway, as I mentioned in my last post, Marzia Faggin's work goes in a lot of different directions.


Marzia Faggin, Zor and Zam, ceramic, paint and other materials, 2010

This is so unlike her paintings it's sort of a shock to think that it is by the same artist. The bullet, wings and flower seem to be glued on and perhaps made of plastic. The ceramic part is unglazed--the colors are paint. (At least as far as I can tell.) Of course there is a delicious irony in combining the flower and ceramic with the bullet. This aesthetic choice reminds me of the work of Charles Krafft, who makes machine guns and hand-grenades using the ancient somewhat kitschy, little-old-lady-like techniques of Delftware.

I think this genre of work (Faggin had another similar piece in the show) probably would have a lot of appeal to certain collectors. She should make molds of them and make multiples using slipcasting.  I could envision some beautiful glazes on them...

As I have mentioned before, I have a strong interest in accessible collecting--art collecting for beginners, one could say. I like schemes that bring high-quality art (with the value-judgments and presence of aesthetic gatekeepers that the word "quality" implies) to non-rich collectors. This show is a pretty successful example of this kind of thing. I certainly am happy with what I got--and if I had had more extra money to spend, I would have gotten more!

New Acquisitions--Frank Robbins, Chester Gould and Skip Williamson

I have gotten a little behind on my "new acquisitions" posts. I always feel a little reluctant to do them because they feel vainglorious and make me look like the kind of person who brags about his stuff. Which is what I am doing, so I can't dodge that one. One thing I'm trying to do is discuss collecting in a non-rarified way. I am not a rich guy, but I am able to collect. If you like art, you can too.

So I'm going to have two "new acquisitions" posts today. This one will focus on comics art.


Chester Gould, Dick Tracy, ink on bristol board, October 15, 1962


Chester Gould, Dick Tracy, ink on bristol board, October 18, 1962

I was able to get both of these pretty cheap. I think the reason why is that neither of them showed Dick Tracy or any of his regular characters or his distinctive villains. But Chester Gould's drawing and storytelling are well-represented in these two pieces. We see his typical use of silhouette in the earlier strip. And the airplane sequence--especially with the successive downward sloping black areas--is fantastic. Two relatively minor examples from one of America's greatest artists.

This next one is from the same year, curiously enough. Frank Robbins is a far lesser artist than Gould, but still interesting as a guy who started off as a Caniff imitator and evolved his own unique variation on that style. It's looser than Caniff's, with a lot more crazy anatomy (which gives his characters an unexpected expressiveness).


Frank Robbins, Johnny Hazard, ink on bristol board, August 9, 1961

The last new piece in the collection is far more recent.


Skip Williamson, "Snappy Sammy Smoot, Death Merchant" page 2, ink, halftones, photo-typesetting on illustration board

Some of you may recognize this as a page from a story that I already own another page of. Bought from the same dealer, of course. Maybe I'll eventually get them all. Skip Williamson is an underground cartoonist, one of the originals from the 60s. This piece was done in the 1980s.

William Powhida, The Brooklyn Rail, and 20X200

Robert Boyd

This should probably be three different posts, but they all kind of flow together. If you follow the goings on of the art world (and good for you if you don't), you may have heard of the controversy of a show at the New Museum in New York curated by Jeff Koons selecting from the personal art collection of Greek uber-collector Dakis Joannou--who just happens to be a trustee of the museum. Major conflict of interest. How? Remember what Don Thompson wrote in The $12 Million Dollar Stuffed Shark--museum shows brand art. Given two otherwise similar pieces by an artist, if one was included in a major museum show, it will on average be worth more. So this looks like a way for Joannou to increase the value of his collection.

Tyler Green wrote an excellent criticism of this practice. But it is unlikely to stop as long as contemporary art and big museums are seen as amusements for the rich. Why should the average person get too bothered? (More on this later.) The wittiest take-down was done as a drawing for the cover of the Brooklyn Rail by William Powhida.



William Powhida, cover of the Brooklynn Rail, November 2009

OK, that was really cool, but what is the Brooklyn Rail? It turns out that they are a monthly magazine (I've never seen a physical copy--is it more of a newspaper?) with distinctly contrarian views about art. In a recent editorial where they basically say ditto to a piece written by Roberta Smith for the New York Times (well worth reading, by the way), the editors of the art section of the Rail wrote the following:

As Ms. Smith made quite clear, New York museum curators “have a responsibility to their public and to history to be more ecumenical, to do things that seem to come from left field. They owe it to the public to present a balanced menu that involves painting as well as video and photography and sculpture. They need to think outside the hive-mind, both distancing themselves from their personal feelings to consider what’s being wrongly omitted and tapping into their own subjectivity to show us what they really love.”

We would go a step further and state unequivocally that many of these individuals have not only shirked their public responsibility, they have turned the museums into playgrounds for an elitist group of trustees and globetrotting art fair devotees, stocking their exhibitions primarily from “powerful galleries.” And if our position is not clear enough, it will become more so in the coming months through in-depth articles and well-researched drawings examining the actions of particular individuals, their public statements and their exhibition track record.  (editors, Brooklyn Rail,  March 2010)

Personally, I can't wait. Taking names and kicking ass makes for good reading. But part of the problem is that well-to-do collectors who are able to buy very expensive works of art end up having a lot of power within the art world. Now I don't find this particularly sinister. I think most of these people are really into art and want to be involved in some way. I can fully relate to this. I'm not an artist, but I like it and want to be involved. But people who have spent a lot of money on a thing (shares of a company, a house, a piece of blue-chip contemporary art) want it to retain its value. This is going to provide an incentive for some of them to do what Joannou has done.

So is there a solution? I have my doubts. Let's face it--artists and curators have been playing around with solutions with varying degrees of success for at least 40 years without really changing the system. The usual solution is to try to build an alternative space or scene. This works for a while, but it's hard to sustain. Money (and its lack) is always a problem. If you choose not to be commercial, you are reduced to begging for grants and donations. You can scrape by this way, but who is giving those donations? When you need to build a new roof for your space, the tip jar isn't going to cut it. You need a person or institution with deep pockets.

Here in Houston, if you talk to young artists or curators, these issues are always brought up. I always feel like the odd man out in such conversations. I'm older and have a knowledge of business and economics that most of the younger artists just don't have. So for me, the problem of sustaining a viable space or scene is fundamentally about cash flow, but for them it's about creating something within a hostile culture. (A gross simplification, of course.) But even so, Houston artists keep on doing, just as they have been for decades. You're a young curator like Keijiro Suzuki, and you whip together the Temporary Space, and for a time (hopefully a long time) it is a place where exciting art happens. But eventually, Suzuki (or someone) has to ask someone for money. If it is one person or one institution, that person or institution ends up having a lot of power over your space. (Note: I am not suggesting Suzuki is or ever will be a sell-out!)

But I think solutions come from getting more collectors involved. Instead of depending on the tastes and wishes on a small number of very rich people, disperse the art income to a large number of small collectors. That means more people buying less expensive art. I asked earlier, why should the average person care about the ethics of museums? If the population of "average persons" included a lot more small-scale art collectors, they might care--they might become an important constituency in these matters. I've written about one such scheme in the UK to encourage art collecting among non-rich folk. Another is 20x200. Jen Bekman is a gallery owner who came up with a way to connect to potential collectors who 1) are not rich, and 2) may not have access to lots of galleries.

Jen Bekman opened her pocket-sized gallery on the Lower East Side nearly 5 years ago with the mission of supporting emerging artists and collectors, and she's made a name for herself doing just that. 20x200 takes the mission one step further, making art available for everyone.
On a Sunday night back in January2007, Jen came up with a formula:
(limited editions x low prices) + the internet = art for everyone

As we see it, there are a lot of people out there who want to sell their art and a lot of people who'd like to buy it. They just have a hard time finding each other. The internet is the perfect place to bring those people together, and we're exactly the right people to make it happen. We're passionate about art and the internet at 20x200. We're really excited about creating a place where almost any art lover can be an art collector.

Cool idea. But how is it different from, say, Etsy? I like Etsy, but with art (like other artforms), you need gallery owners and curators and editors and other gatekeepers. This sounds very elitist, but without these people, you have a chaos of random art that would paralyze a lot of collectors (it would paralyze me, at least). Jen Bekman's 20x200 works for me because she is a good gatekeeper.So when I discovered her site (through Art Milk, another good gatekeeper), I went ahead and bought a print. (This was back in early March--I haven't gotten it yet.) Here's what I bought:




William Powhida, Why You Should Buy Art!, archival pigment print, 2010


Here's what Powhida (always verbose, if you haven't noticed) has to say about this piece.

When I was in Miami during Art Basel last December, I conducted an interview with New York Times journalist Damien Cave who repeatedly asked, "What's the alternative to the art market?" The question is not an easy one to answer.

Short of radical social and economic reform, which seems incredibly unlikely in our pro-Capitalist, market-trusting society, I struggled to articulate my thoughts surrounded by the spectacle of Basel. While I was down there, I also saw Jen Bekman's booth at PULSE and it reminded me that one of my answers to Mr. Cave should have immediately been "access." Access to contemporary art is often restricted by high prices, including my own, that put it out of reach of the majority of people who love art. 20x200 offers a way to make art and the experience of buying art accessible to the broader public than the limited pool of collectors who have the means to buy unique and often wildly expensive art objects. Art, in many ways, is a luxury commodity and the larger question remains, "what is enough?"

I believe that it's a matter of scale; prices leap from hundreds to hundreds of thousands based on branding and marketing. I hope that established artists who command hundreds of thousands of dollars for their art will consider what it means to sell to a very small collector class. Are they really reflecting their own creative expression or the tastes of the ruling class? I don't begrudge their wealth or values, but I do believe that art is made freely and for more than those who can afford to own it.
-William Powhida, Maker*
*Please see my bio for William Powhida the "Genius"

Bringing Art Collecting to the Masses

by Robert Boyd

Everyone knows that part of the missions of museums, 1% for art programs, etc., is to bring art to ordinary people. And they do a great job. But sometimes folks want to own art, and they just can't afford it--at least not in the usual "walk into a gallery and plunk down $1000s for a piece of art" way. So how can an ordinary Joe buy some art? In the U.K., they came up with a truly weird program to enable that ordinary Joe to get him some art!

Set up in 2004 by the Arts Council, Own Art enables people to take home a piece of contemporary art straight way but then pay for it in 10 monthly interest-free instalments, borrowing anything up to £2,000. So far the scheme has made over 14,500 loans to purchase art valued in excess of £11.6 million. “It’s a simple idea that works for artists, buyers and galleries,” says Mary-Alice Stack, development manager for Own Art. “From farmers to policemen, students to pensioners, we’re making it possible for everyone to buy original art for their homes.” ("Buying Art in Interest Free Instalments", Zoe Slater, Telegraph.co.uk, 11-28-2009)

What a great idea! Here's an amazing collector--David Pike, a pig farmer who lives in a tiny mobile home.

Seriously.

“I’ve bought about ten pieces of art over the last ten years, six or seven through the scheme. Two are in the caravan but a friend has the rest as they don’t actually fit in here. He displays them for me at his house and I go and see them most days. The two in the caravan are by Houson and Paul Denham.

“[...] My favourite piece is a Houson called Severus. It is a strong, strong painting that has a real resonance with me as it depicts a working man who is deep in thought. It shows how working men can still be intellectual and capable of deep thought, which I like because although I do manual labour, I’m an intellectual.

“I don’t really go on holidays, partly because it’s hard to find someone to take care of all the animals, but also because I’d rather buy a piece of art. Buying art is still a luxury although the scheme does make it easier. I like buying work from local artists since I feel more of a connection with them."

At first, one's reaction is "pig farmer in a mobile home who collects art"="wacky news story of the day". But as a collector myself, I was very moved by his account. You hear about people like Dorothy and Herbert Vogel, and they are amazing and all, but it's impossible to totally relate. Their collecting is just too extreme to be a followable example for others. But David Pike? His collection is modest but meaningful to him. Almost anyone could do what he does--if they had a financing program like Own Art.

Obviously there is no way such a art-financing scheme would ever be set up by any government body in Texas. It's just too far out for us. But I could see a non-profit doing it. Anyone out there interested?

Charles Saatchi on Charles Saatchi

Robert Boyd


A trivial book, it does at least give some insight into the practices of Charles Saatchi, one of the most prominent collectors of original contemporary art in the world. He displays his art in his own personal museum and is a huge power in the world of contemporary art. A good deal of the success of the YBAs can be attributed to his patronage. This book is presented in very large type and in a Q&A format--you can read it in an hour. Not worthless, but not terribly enlightening. Too bad--we know a lot about how artists and critics think, but not much about collectors.

New Acquisitions--Stephanie Toppin and Jorge Galvan

I mentioned in my previous post how much I liked "American Bred" by Jorge Galvan. I liked it so much that I bought it. Galvan is an senior at U.H. He's thinking about MFA programs--which one would be right for him, what he can afford. He feels he still has a lot to learn. I think, however, he is astonishingly accomplished, and expect nothing but great stuff for the next 50 years from him. Here's another view of "American Bred."



And here it is open.



This is a very finely crafted Anglo-American version of the humble tortilla press, like this one:



According to Galvan, "American Bred" is fully functional.

I have been a fan of Stephanie Toppin's painting since I saw her work at Diverse Works last summer, and subsequently at Box 13. I bought a few of her drawings around that time and then took the plunge to buy a painting when she exhibited at Rudolph Projects.

Like Galvan, Toppin is a really young painter. I don't really know what her background is, but I like her colorful abstractions. The paint appears to be housepaint and she paints on large masonite boards. This photo makes the colors look brighter than they actually are (as if the paint has some flourescent pigment mixed in that was lightened by the flash).

Recent Acquisitions: Two Clear Line Strips

Ernie Bushmiller, Fritzi Ritz, ink on bristol board, April 21, 1946

I've never been a "Nancy boy," even though I understand why they love the strip so much. But I always preferred the Fritzi Ritz strips, with their pin-up style depictions of Nancy's sexy aunt. And Bushmiller's ultra-clean style is extremely eye-catching. The original art here is huge--24" by 17". It's kind of astonishing how varied strip artists were in how they created their originals.


George McManus, Bringing Up Father, ink on bristol board, December 10, 1937

In contrast, George McManus worked quite small on this strip (18" by 4 3/4"). The gag here is not very funny, although Jiggs's line in the first panel made me laugh. McManus is said to have invented the clear line style. I'm not sure if that claim is really true, but his crisp drawing does remind one of Herge, but even more of Joost Swarte. Swarte and McManus both seem to exemplify a moderne art deco approach to drawing comics--Swarte as a postmodernist and a nostalgist, and McManus as a cartoonist perfectly in tune with his times.

Recent Aquisition: Green by News

Last month I went to a show at the Aerosol Warfare gallery called Pieced Together. While I was there, I bought a small acrylic painting by a graffitist who goes by the name "News." I picked it up yesterday.


News, Green, acrylic on canvas, 2009

News is from San Antonio and is in his early 30s, and that's all I know about him. (He's impossible to Google!)

The owner of Aerosol Warfare told me that the artists in Pieced Together had decorated a building on Crawford, and that News had done a mural-sized version of "Green" there. So I went and took a photo.


News, Green, spraypaint on a wall, 2009

This building, which houses a business called X.L. Parts,  is absolutely amazing--it's well worth a walk-around.(It's where the green arrow is on the map below.)


View Larger Map

Props to XL Parts for being unbelievably good sports!

The $12 Million Stuffed Shark

Robert Boyd


I have been mentioning this book in recent posts, whenever talking about values of art. The value of artworks has long been a fascination, especially since the 80s when auction prices went crazy (think of the Japanese collectors paying tens of millions for Impressionists and Van Gogh). The source of high prices has always been mysterious, and  The $12 Million Stuffed Shark: The Curious Economics of Contemporary Art by Don Thompson doesn't necessarily provide a complete answer. Right off the bat, it must be said that Thompson looks almost exclusively on the supply side of art values. He doesn't talk about the fact that money needs to go somewhere--that Japan in the 80s had excess money that could not be spent on rational investments (because all the rational investments had been made), so Japanese would spend insane amounts for real estate or artwork. Or that hedge fund managers in the 90s and 00s had gathered a huge quantity of wealth that had to go somewhere. So at least some of it went towards status building--hence buying expensive art, or high-profile philanthropy. Thompson touches on this, but the main thrust is where the artwork itself gets value before someone buys it.

He concentrates on the values added by dealers, auction houses, and, yes, collectors. The subject is very high priced art. The only dealers that add to the price of a super-expensive piece of art are dealers he calls "branded" dealers. Think of the Gagosian Gallery or White Cube. He has a taxonomy of dealers. Branded dealers are the top. They exist primarily in New York and London, with subsidiary locations (or reciprocal arrangements with mainstream dealers in secondary markets). Next are what he calls mainstream dealers. The most successful of these are still in art capitals like New York, London, Los Angeles, or Berlin, but they can exist anywhere. I think something like the McClain Gallery in Houston would count. But Thompson writes, better to be the 50th gallery in New York and to be number one in Baltimore. (This is yet another example of the clustering of particular industries and trades in certain geographic locations, despite globalization and the internet. A recent Harvard Business Review article discussed this phenomenon and why it was good thing for those industries, and why outsourcing was therefore bad.) A mainstream gallery is likely to be where an art career really begins. Below that are "High Street" galleries--artists rejected by or not yet ready for mainstream galleries and artists cooperatives. At the bottom are the vanity galleries. He discusses the chances for success for a gallery (low) and how each show by a new artist is a huge risk. The initial shows won't pay for themselves, and the odds that any given artist will still be showing (or worth showing) five years after her initial show is slight. Given this, for mainstream galleries, most of their investments in new artists are dead losses. But one blockbuster makes up for it.

But of course, a real blockbuster will be stolen away by a branded gallery. It may be better for a mainstream gallery to have an artist who never achieves blockbuster status, but reaches a certain level where he can expect reasonably good prices for his work for an entire career. Think of artists like Jim Nutt or Karl Wirsum (two of my favorites). They have their collectors and can command decent prices for their galleries, but are in little danger of being stolen away by Larry Gagosian.

The branded dealers do a lot of work to preserve their brand. The value of their brand is visible purely in the additional prices they can command for the art they sell. If it sounds like the difference between buying Tums and chemically identical store-brand antacids, it is. But a branded gallery, even though it is selling things, is more of a service. For example, let's say Gagosian is going to have a show by Cindy Sherman. You are a wealthy collector. Before the show, someone from the gallery might call you up and say, "Larry thinks you need this piece for your collection." Of course, Larry is intimately familiar with your collection. So you buy it sight unseen before the show even opens. Then, to keep you happy about your million dollar purchase, Larry does a lot of publicity for the show, buys lots of ads in Artforum and other magazines, etc. This publicity is not to help sell the art--it has been presold. It is to use the gallery's brand to reassure the collectors they made the right decision. Given a show can generate millions of dollars in revenue, a $10,000 display ad is a small investment in continued relationships with wealthy collectors.

So dealers--the powerhouses of the art world, right? Wrong. From Thompson's point of view, certain "branded" collectors have more effect on the price of a work (if it is known that an artist is being collected by Charles Saatchi, for example), but most especially, Sotheby's and Christie's affect the price of art tremendously. Thompson goes into great detail about how auctions work and the types of deals they arrange, as well as detailing some of the things really big collectors do. Saatchi has been quite innovative as a collector (see for example http://www.saatchi-gallery.co.uk/yourgallery/), but more common things are to endow museums or collections within museums or specific art projects/installations. Obviously here in Houston, one thinks of the Menils.

What's missing here? Well, the art itself, for one thing. Thompson has some aesthetic opinions that leak through, but he keeps them to a minimum in the book. The quality of the art is irrelevant--a fact made completely plain by the fact that conceptual pieces which require no particular talent to create the physical part of the work can sell at auction for hundreds of thousands. He used the examples of Felix Gonzales-Torres's Lover Boys and Fortune Cookies. The first is a pile of candies meant to be eaten by viewers, the latter a pile of fortune cookies. They went for $465.000 and $520,000 in 2000 and 2003. Obviously anyone could recreate these pieces. They don't have unique existences--indeed, they are meant to either be eaten or be continually "refilled."You or I could make exact physical duplicates of these pieces easily.

Now folks who have read canonical works of art theory may be realizing that this "branding" thing is starting to sound a whole lot like Walter Benjamin's "aura" from the seminal "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction". Benjamin posited that original, unique artworks had a value that derived from their uniqueness. But once it became easy to reproduce artworks (through printing, photography, etc.), that value was diminished. He said the difference in value between an original and a reproduction was a result of the "aura." "That which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of the work of art." The "aura" was Benjamin's catch-all term for authenticity, uniqueness, etc. So if I buy a Sol Lewitt wall drawing (which means I have bought instructions on how to make a Sol Lewitt wall drawing), it's worth a lot of money. But if you just do it yourself, it's not worth so much (although it may be lovely to look at). The difference in value is the value of the "aura," which will be carefully maintained by the owners of that "aura" and their consignees. I think we can easily substitute the word "brand" in there. One of the on-going tasks of the art trade is to carefully nourish "auras" to keep values high. (The same is true with all culture industries. For example, the presence of a movie star adds to the value of a film. It doesn't make the film in any objective way better--but a star is a brand or aura that has inherent value.)

If an artwork was owned by a branded collector, or a branded collector is known to collect works by a given artist, it will be worth more. If an artwork is auctioned by a branded auction house, it will sell for more. If it is sold by a branded dealer, it will sell for more. And if the artist herself is lucky enough to be a brand, her work will sell for more. But Thompson seems to be saying that galleries, auction houses, and collectors are more important than artists. You want to know who is the least important? Critics.

Thompson goes into great detail about the mechanics of the art market, and how auction houses have come to dominate and threaten dealers, and how art fairs have risen in importance in response to the dominance of auction houses.

From a financial point of view, all this "brand" talk seems kind of touchy-feely. Where is the Black-Scholes model for artwork pricing? Obviously, there can't be one. For one thing, it can't be built out of market data, the way models cna be built for securities. This is because the art trade is opaque and largely unregulated. A researcher like Thompson can't get complete, reliable data about the prices for artworks. He can't create a Case-Shiller index for them--as interesting as that would be. It's frustrating for a data and models guy like me.

Be that as it may, it is interesting how a modern economist with a specialty in marketing in 2008 reaches (through a totally different approach) more-or-less the same conclusion as a Marxist philosopher from 1936. The question of price discovery is always important to economists, and always fraught with difficulty. Thompson doesn't provide a model, but a useful framework with which to think about art values.

Recent Acquisitions

Comics comics comics by three American masters...


Walt Kelly, Pogo, 8-9-1954


Harold Gray, Little Orphan Annie, 5-31-1958


Peter Bagge, Bat Boy, 2005