The Dichotomy of Rare and Plentiful
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.
Barney Davey on 09.29.08 @ 08:34 AM EST [more..]
I’m finding myself rather mute during this political season in the U.S. I think I’ve grown tired of the hype in the presidential elections. I have a friend who says simply that to really change anything politically in the U.S. one must start first at home in ones own community, ones own city, ones own county and finally in ones own state. What happens at the national level is so complicated by party politics, compromise and even corruption that nothing you hear will be true. Most of it is just hype to get elected. I agree that little happens from the top down. 
In 1989, a close friend and extraordinary artist, Alex Fournier, told me to take in a show at the IBM Gallery of Art and Science in Manhattan. “Joaquín Sorolla y Bastida is an incredible painter,” Alex told me. I happened to be in NYC shortly thereafter, a rainy cold winter mid-week day, and recalled my friend’s suggestion. I don’t remember what I thought before I entered the Gallery, but the paintings I saw that day changed my life. I was literally high on color, light, the mastery of a great master. I bought every book that I could get my hands on and that summer fortuitously went to Spain on a planned family vacation to seek out Sorolla’s work in person. As luck would have it, Sorolla’s home in Madrid is a museum of his work. He also painted murals in the Spanish Institute in NYC. However, it was in Spain that I could have an inkling of the light under which Sorolla painted to create his impressionistic “luministic” (as Henri Rochefort described the paintings) masterpieces. And throughout the experiences I had that year, the name Anders Zorn kept popping up. Sorolla and Zorn were friends (and friendly with John Singer Sargent, as well) as well as colleagues who sought to capture their worlds in Spain and in Sweden, respectively, using light, color and the impressions that they garnered from their environments.
Although I have already done so in previous blogs usually I would prefer not to talk about my paintings, because the meaning that I attach to them is then transformed over time in the eyes of the spectator, into the thoughts of those who imagine something that the painter has not conceived, but which is still a perfectly legitimate way of interpreting the painting. Despite this, since I have recently spent a good deal of time reconstructing the meaning of my work (a reasonable task you will probably agree for an artist who will be eighty very soon) in this blog I will describe how almost twenty years ago I came to create a group of paintings (reproduced here alongside the blog) which I consider quite significant to understanding not only how my own work but also how a painting is born and how from this others may unexpectedly come into being.
Managed to avoid the excess heat of the Dubai summer this year by spending much of July and August contemplating the infinite shades of grey and green in a very wet Europe. Got back to Dubai to find that I no longer have a job! 
