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09/29/2008: "The Dichotomy of Rare and Plentiful" by Barney Davey
Can art, a singular creation, be both rare and plentiful? Unquestionably, any work in its original medium would automatically be rare. When a piece of art is reproduced, what happens to the value of each piece?
Obviously, singular, rare and well respected will always be valuable. A recent notable high example is the Picasso Cubist work, Arlequin. Not seen in public since 1945, it will go under hammer at Sotheby's this November with an expected price of $30 million. Purchased for $12,000, it makes the work an incredible investment.
It goes without saying the vast majority of artists will never see a fraction of such monetary appreciation of their work in their lifetime or thereafter. Given the level of competition, (I've seen estimates of 10,000 new fine art students graduating annually. Looking at ArtSchools.com list of nearly 2,000 art schools in its database, such an estimate seems plausible.), and the realities of the marketplace, it is to be understood making millions from one's art is a rarity in itself. Add all those newly minted artists to the tens of thousands already in the pool and a crowded competitive marketplace exists.
Regardless, it is still a daunting challenge to make a full-time career as an artist. It's the one thing they don't teach in art school. That is, "How do I make my art pay?" Fledgling artists may be ready to artistically test their wings, but when it comes to business acumen, they are firmly grounded by lack of knowledge, experience and training.
To some degree or another, many visual artists are further impeded in business by an imbalance of right brain dominance, which is to be expected in creative people. Take this fun visual test to determine if you are right or left brained. I saw the figure start to go anti-clockwise and then it jerked back clockwise and I can't see how anyone would see it going otherwise.
It is understandably natural for those who pursue a career as a fine artist, or even a decorative artist, to wish for fair compensation. Who could blame them? We all seek to approval for our endeavors and want to be paid as handsomely as possible for them.
Collectors are the lifeblood of any artist's career. Without them, there simply is no career. So it behooves the artist to make work with appeal to collectors and to work at building and nurturing a base of collectors. This is so easy to say, much harder to do, especially in light of the aforementioned large pool of talent.
I have long proposed one of the ways for artists to increase cash flow from the output of their creativity is to make reproductions of their work. This is a time honored aspect of the art business going back to at least Rembrandt and likely back to whenever the first person recognized there were ways to make reproductions. It makes sense. If you create something with market appeal, the likelihood is there will be more collectors who want to own the piece. Also, some may not have the budget to afford an original, but can swing the cost of a reproduction.
Reproductions can be done in virtually any original medium. The range encompasses pricey limited edition sculpture down to inexpensive posters printed on a four-color offset lithograph press. To the beholder, the collector, it is all art. Up until the development of high speed offset presses, most art reproductions were made in relatively small numbers. The idea of numbering the pieces and creating a limited edition from them was a logical extension of the process.
The notion of limited editions stayed with the industry and is still widely used today to market art reproductions in a variety of media and price points. In those editions, whether contemporary or aged, where the process naturally limited the number of pieces, the low numbers in the editions are quite often more valuable than the higher numbers. Ostensibly, this is due to the belief the printing fidelity was crisper at the outset and thus the piece more alike to the original.
Fidelity aside, there is a natural inclination among collectors to appreciate and value the lower numbers. As humans, we are to some degree competitively obsessed with being first, numero uno, number one and so on. Such sentiment spilling over to collecting art is an extension of us in other aspects of our lives.
When thinking of collectors and what they hold valuable, it becomes obvious it is not always the intrinsic value that matters. For example, take first edition books. They are exactly the same in every way as later editions except for the front matter page indicating the book is among the first edition. Nevertheless, because they have come before their exact reproductions, they hold much greater collectible value. Does this make pure logical sense? Probably not, but collecting is emotional and perceptual as much as it is logical, really more so as one looks at it.
When one begins to ponder the range of things, objects and such people collect, it goes from astounding to humorous. A surfing safari through eBay ought to be enough to convince most folks that others are a little daff when it comes to their penchant for collecting things such as vacuum cleaners, motor oil cans (full), latex paint cans (full), Wonder Bread NFL Legend bread wrappers, pre-1970s sponges and so on beyond your wildest imagination.
Some of these items are more valuable because of their manufacturing date, while others are more valuable because of limited numbers being made and still others merely because they are deemed more desirable by the collector collective. To read more about this mania go to: http://www.theonion.com/content/node/38830.
Collecting automobile license plates has evolved from a quaint pastime where the display was most often seen on grandpa's garage wall to something altogether different. This is one that proves the dichotomy of rare and plentiful. The CBS Evening News ran a story on April 4, 2008 about the $675,000 Delaware automobile license plate. Seems the lower the number, the higher the esteemed value. In this case, number 11 went for that astounding sum.
Let's bring this discussion back to the art market and reproductions. Today, the most widely used form of reproductions is not what you might guess. If you thought giclée, you would be wrong. Number one in numbers produced remains the venerable offset four-color poster. Despite the poster publishing segment of the industry undergoing dramatic changes, it still produces more prints than any other medium by a large margin.
One only needs to assess what primarily sells on Art.com to begin to get a grasp of the scope of the poster market. Or, take a look at the size of catalogs by publishers such as Bruce McGaw Graphics, Winn Devon or many others. They are enormous and they fill a vital need in providing a decorative art component for individuals and corporations with a need to put art on their walls.
This is not to downplay the importance in the development and continuing growth of the giclée market. It is without question the single most important technological advancement in the last century. Giclée means more than a print output on a digital printer. It involves the merging of technologies including digital capture, digital enhancement (if not digital creation) and then digital printing on a growing number of substrates. When you include digital photography and digital painting, you have a new medium which I call convergence media, but that is another post.
What makes the giclée important is it frees the artist and publisher who seek to create reproductions from having to make a huge upfront investment (gamble if you will) on producing an edition. Further, it provides a range of color not previously available. And, it allows reproductions to be made according to the need (size, color, and substrate) of the buyer. The latter is not used nearly as much as it could be. It should be a major selling point. But as an industry, we continue to cling to that which we know well. We continue selling in one size, perhaps two, maybe paper or canvas and in numerically limited editions. But, coming no where near to what is possible.
In the age of the ability to faithfully recreate limitless editions, this notion of using limited editions effectively caps an artist's income and that alone is enough for me to champion ridding limited editions, which for the giclée market are really nothing more than a marketing gimmick.
Now, we are finally beginning to see some changes as poster publishers are including giclées in their product mix. Their markets demand open editions and often need large editions to fill their needs. Additionally, poster publishers can now inventory every piece of art they ever produced. Formerly, when an image began to lose sales, it was retired because it became dicey to go back on press because doing so came with the high probability of being stuck with a large amount of paper.
The relatively new, but well-heeled, publisher, Artaissance, which is owned by Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway company, came on the scene straightaway offering giclées in open editions and in many sizes. I applaud the wisdom of this choice. There are underlying reasons why, but don't matter for this post.
It seems to me today's artists using the giclée medium can have it both ways. That is, make their editions open and at the same time, number them sequentially. The numbering convention can be whatever they choose. It could be 1/oe, 2/oe (oe= open edition), or anything else that made sense. The only admonition would be to publish and use the same numbering convention consistently.
I argue if the print has perceived value, that is the collector or buyer want to own it because they like it and want to live with it in their home or business, they will pay a fair price and not be distressed over whether the edition is limited or not. Further, just as with Delaware plates, you can make hundreds of thousands of them and if some collectors decide the lower numbers are more valuable, then you have a collectible edition in the lower numbers. Wouldn't it be nice to have your art both plentiful and rare? That is my wish for all the visual artists reading this post and beyond. Can I put my dibs on #11 now?
Barney Davey
www.artprintissues.com
