I have a great job. It's definitely not getting any easier but it is a great job. There is a saying in the trade that antique dealers share two things in common, we have problems with authority and we are all essentially unemployable and I would say that the shoe fits me pretty accurately. I get to sit at my desk and play on the computer and strum my guitar and idly waste my day between sales and that beats clipping widgets in a factory any day.
I have worn a lot of hats in my life - sign painter, general contractor, project manager, developer, my last gig was running a financial research company in 1995. I hated it. As nice as I tried to be to the employees, the more they seemed to hate and resent me. The boss was a sociopath and I got to act as his henchman/consigliere. I couldn't take it and the Blue Heron hatched out of it's egg and has been flying around ever since.
Being an art dealer allows me to research, something I enjoy immensely, and to find and surround myself with beautiful things. I love buying paintings and objects. Selling, not so much. I think that it is every dealer's dream to hit the lottery and be able to keep all the good shit. But the reality is that I am just a temporary caretaker, looking for good homes for my pets and hopefully operating as a trusted mentor and advisor to those clients that put their faith in me.
You never stop learning in my business, although the scholarship of my forebears is sadly lacking today. We have lost a lot of institutional knowledge, since many so called antique dealers have rarely opened a book in their entire lives. They sell what is known in the trade as decorative arts. Decorators are another group that I mostly despise, since they tend to be uniformly stupid and only really concerned with the size of their client commission. Although I admit to having met a few that were top notch.
Things were a lot easier before the crash, as you might expect. People were making obscene fortunes speculating on art in the last decade, especially American Impressionism. But as the top rung artists' works disappeared or were priced out of the booming market, dealers started trading in substandard and frankly awful painter's canvases. With straight faces and little conscience. And the public was too dimwitted to care.
Askart.com started giving the price of an artist's work per square inch, something I always found funny and slightly obscene. Whereas an 8 x 12" Vermeer's worth is recognized as basically priceless, it was nevertheless deemed okay to establish a sliding scale for an artist like Granville Redmond. An 8 x 10 is worth this much, a 16 x 20 this much, and so on. Which is so foreign to the notion of a painter capturing an idea on a canvas or a board. Smaller usually is better, there is a "sweet spot" for every artist, and larger paintings often get blown out and fail to capture the magic of smaller studies.
But this is America after all, so bigger has to be better, doesn't it? So paintings get sold like broccoli heads or commodities, oftentimes by tin eyed car salesmen with a real talent for recognizing signatures. Askart is a subscription art service with detailed auction records and has made a major impact on the business. Because artists used to really appreciate so dramatically but now to be tethered by their auction histories. Which is unfortunate in a way because sometimes lesser known people just really nail it and also people with little output or auction history can be unfairly penalized by this all knowing market.
Things have slowed down and in a way it's good. I find that the great majority of people buying art these days genuinely love the artwork they are selecting and aren't thinking about the five year hold and flip. I am selling more on time, to people from all income levels and stations, and people seem to have a bit more discernment aesthetically. I think that my eye is my strength so it makes my job easier.
I have survived due to the patronage of some very loyal and devoted clients and I appreciate them all for their faith and business. Like in any business there are people that you find that you are able to work with and some that you are not. For some clients it is about proving that they are smarter or superior to the dealers and buying from me would be a tacit admission that we are on a similar level so they do not. Every dealer can tell you stories of clients who have paid exorbitant prices at auctions for paintings that they have offered to sell the very same clients at a fractional cost.
I will never forget sitting next to an upper crust couple at a birthday party some years ago for one of the elites of San Francisco. They let me know that they were looking for a Hockney, one of my least favorite painters. It just so happened that I knew where to find one of his decent early paintings for a song, a little under 100k. They would barely speak to me the rest of the night, they wanted to spend at least a half a mill. I had insulted them.
Yesterday, I almost got pissy. A very, very wealthy woman who I have known for years came in and wanted to know what I had new in works by San Diego painters. I showed her some very lovely examples, a nice early Fries, an Espoy of Northern San Diego County. But I was half hearted, not wanting to give her the whole dog and pony show because she has never bought anything from me in the last 10 years I have known her and never will. I didn't want to waste a sales job on her that I could offer a real client who might actually have the intention of buying a painting some day. I know that I am cheap entertainment but I just didn't feel like dancing.
If at all possible I would rather remain poor and humble and not have to deal with these assholes. A woman came by with 10 minutes to go and saved my show yesterday. Bought a painting that another hondler had just tried to cut my price in half on, for full pop, because she liked it. Imagine that?
