I was sitting on the lawn at the Shidoni Gallery this morning, with the sprinklers going and the lawn guy weed whacking around the legs of a bronze turtle. It was such a quiet ordinary day, and I wondered what it would be like to choose a piece of art to go in your lawn.
Looking at one of the first pieces that caught my eye, it was clear that I'm not nearly rich enough to collect art. $7,500 for Philip Glashoff's "Lion" and $22,000 for Jospeh Fichter's "Cutting Horse." That's precisely the amount of money that I earned my first year out of college when I worked as a legal proofreader (with all the other starving artists, writers and actors)!
Even though I swallowed my middle-class tongue when I saw the five figure price tag, I can't imagine paying less. Glasshoff's Lion was like a fantasy lion and Fichter captured the horse as it was running and leaning into a sharp turn. Even though it was made of two dimensional slabs of bronze, it was full of life and vigor. It may have taken a whole year to make it, and who can even calculate the time and money that went into developing the talent to sculpt a horse at that impossible angle.
Anyway, artists should make as much money as humanly possible, so they can sit around dreaming of sweet stuff to make. It's not good for artists to actually starve, wasting their time and talent working as legal proofreaders.
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This is why I like small art pieces like tiny animal sculptures, perfume vials, or jewellery. They may be orders of magnitude smaller and cheaper but when you look at the fine detailed work that goes into that type of object, it's hard to say that they take less skill than the big millionaire market stuff.
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