A Six-Step Guide to Caring for Photos

Published: December 27, 2006
NEW YORK— The packing instructions on your newest art acquisition read: “Handle with Care.” But how much do you really know about how to maintain and preserve your personal collection?
“I certainly think custodians of works of art, artifacts and material of historic or cultural value should do what they can, given their particular resources,” said Lee Ann Daffner, conservator of photography at New York’s Museum of Modern Art.

Yet for collectors of photography and other new media, the challenge of conservation is compounded by the ever-evolving nature of the medium, which can surpass even most preservationists’ understanding.

To that end, ArtInfo offers this six-step instruction guide with valuable information gathered from two of the leading experts in the field of photo conservation. Not only will these tips help maximize the longevity of your artwork, but also protect its appearance for future generations.

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Step 1: Get Informed

Photography may be a popular choice for emerging collectors, but the mistake many newcomers make is not knowing what they are getting, warned Nora Kennedy, conservator of photographs at The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

“Large contemporary color photographs are often treated like paintings, which they are not,” she said. “Most color images are made from dyes which are inherently unstable, often both in the light and dark. This does not mean that they will disappear in a matter of weeks or months, but it does mean that a greater awareness is required to preserve [them] into the future.”

So before making a purchase, obtain all the details possible about the work. A dealer should have access to the specifics: the type of work, whether a chromogenic photograph, inkjet print, or other; the manufacturer of the materials; the conditions under which the work is expected to last; and the name of the person researched the specifications.

And to take your research even further, Kennedy suggests going straight to the source.

“[The Met] also asks the artist for their view on the preservation of their work,” she said. “This information will be instructive over the short term, but should also travel with the work into the future, as it will be critical to its long-term preservation as well.”

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Step 2: Seek Smart Storage

“The storage facility and storage enclosures are really important,” said MoMA’s Daffner. “Cool and dry are the best conditions.”

Both MoMA and the Met have special temperature-controlled storage rooms for photography (MoMA maintains a “cool” room at 50 degrees Fahrenheit with 40 percent relative humidity, and a “cold” room at 32-34 degrees Fahrenheit with 35 percent relative humidity).

“Obviously, cold storage is not an option yet for many private collectors,” Kennedy said. “This will be a solution that the private sector turns to increasingly in the future, just as museums internationally have done.”

She recommends instead using a special storage facility outside the home. (But before handing over your artwork, request temperature and humidity records covering at least a year and check those to make sure proper levels are being maintained.)

But for collectors who want to keep works in their home, there are still options, offered Daffner. “With temperature, go as low as you can go. If you can only cool a room with an air conditioner, certainly that’s better than room temperature.” And never store photographs an area that might get damp or moldy, such as a basement, she cautioned.

Collectors should also look for products that have been subjected to a photographic activity test (PAT), and, when in doubt, consult with an expert at an archival supply store.

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Step 3: Go Easy on the Light

Most collectors don’t store their photographs 100 percent of the time—after all, half the fun of acquiring them is showing them off. But the more light the photographs see, the more they will deteriorate.

“They are sensitive to light and they will change over time; there’s no getting around that,” Daffner said. “Direct light is the death toll of photography.”

To minimize fading and color shifts, make sure photographs are always framed under UV-filtering Plexiglas; exhibit them under low light levels; and rotate your collection periodically.

“Museums tend to rotate their photography exhibitions every three or four months,” Kennedy said. “UV light filtration is important, but keep in mind that all wavelengths of light are damaging to color images. Although color is best seen under bright lighting conditions, these will be the most damaging over time.”

And, of course, for an obvious tip: Always avoid direct sunlight.

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Step 4: Don’t DIY

You might have framed those family snapshots just fine, but when it comes to fine art photography, matting and framing is best left to the experts, Daffner explained.

“Call a museum conservation department and ask them what framer they use, if they don’t have an in-house framer,” she said. “Even if they do have an in-house framer, they can recommend someone based on their reputation. Dealers can also make recommendations.”

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Step 5: Deter Damage

If the worst happens—a photograph gets wet, moldy or scratched—don’t panic. Instead, get in touch with a photography conservator and leave the difficult job of repair to an expert.

But do act fast, cautions Kennedy. “Photographs have gelatin and paper in their composition, materials that are very attractive to mold and mildew. If the damage proceeds to this stage, very little can be done to reverse it.”

If you don’t know of a conservator, contact the American Institute for Conservation, which has an online referral service at http://aic.stanford.edu/.

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Step 6: Rally Your Resources

In addition to the AIC, these other organizations offer up-to-date advice and care guidelines, news on cutting-edge technology and publications from the experts.

Nine Tips for Collecting Photography

NEW YORK—“The difference between someone who collects and someone who doesn’t collect,” says WM Hunt, cofounder of Chelsea’s Hasted Hunt gallery and a 35-year collector himself, “is committing. You like a picture, you’ve got the money, buy the damn thing. Commit.”

Hunt offered this tough-love call to action at a panel called “Collecting Photography: What’s Hot,” at the debut New York Photo Festival, which took place in Brooklyn’s Dumbo neighborhood May 14–18. Joining him were fellow gallerist Yancey Richardson, collector (and record exec) Kent Belden, and Patrick Amsellem, who is associate curator of photography at the Brooklyn Museum. The discussion was organized by AIPAD (the Association of International Photography Art Dealers).

Like many of photo-world professionals and enthusiasts who attended the new festival, dedicated to “the future of contemporary photography,” these four talked about finding that perfect work — a work that compels you to collect — as a visceral, pulse-raising experience.

“Look at the hair on the back of your hand,” advises Hunt. “Listen to your heart. Commit.”

Here are some more tips from the panel to help you get started.

1. No Trust Fund? No Problem
You might not be a nouveau riche Russian billionaire or the heir to a family forture, but that doesn’t mean you can’t be a collector. “There are many areas of the market to collect in," says Richardson. "You can buy Struth and Gursky and be ready to spend a hundred thousand to half a million dollars, but you can also buy strong young artists for, say, $2,000 to $3,500.”

2. Let Dealers Help
“A lot of dealers are collectors at heart, so they share this excitement and enthusiasm for finding a piece that’s fabulous and wonderful and right for you,” says Richardson — even if that fabulous piece is in another gallery. “Part of the excitement of the photographic community is that a lot of sharing goes on.”

3. Be Sneaky
If you find a work that you love but can’t afford, look around a bit, advises Belden. You may be able to find a smaller version of it being offered somewhere else. Belden does most of his searching online, trying auction house, gallery, and artist Web sites.

4. Look in the Closet
If you go to an art fair, says Richardson, look in the closets. “I’ve found some of the best pieces for myself and my clients in the closets of the exhibition booths. They’re for sale, but they’re tucked away for one reason or another.”

4. Don’t Rely on Fairs
Go to art fairs to see a range of work, but go to exhibitions at galleries to learn about a particular artist’s range, says Richardson. “You’ll have a much better understanding of who that artist is.”

5. And While You’re There…
If you find an artist you like at a particular gallery, ask to see work by other artists it represents, since it could be that your taste overlaps with the gallerist’s. You can also browse through a gallery’s stable of artists online, though Richardson warns that there’s a good chance the images posted there are not necessarily the newest work.

6. Do Not Fear the Gallerina
Those chic, bespectacled young aesthetes behind the desk at the gallery may not be the most welcoming, but they’re there to help. “I know people find galleries intimidating,” says Richardson, “but we’re always trying not to be.” She suggests the following approach: “If you’re interested in something, walk up to the gallerina at the desk and say you’d like some help, or point to something on the wall and say, ‘Who is that, can you tell me about that?’ In many galleries, someone will happily get up and talk to you about the artist.”

7. Stop By in the Summer
“Summertime’s a great time to look at photographs,” says Hunt, “because many galleries will do a summer show that features talent that the gallery’s trying on to see the response. The price point is pitched a little lower, because you get a different kind of traffic in summer. And I think dealers behave a little differently.”

8. Give a Little, Get a Little
Charity auctions can be a great place to find bargains, says Richardson. Galleries are unlikely to offer up their very best gems, but “often a lot of very good pieces are donated. It’s also a great way to get exposed to a lot of work.” Hunt adds that it’s also “a great way to see a mix of photographs that may otherwise never be seen together.”

9. Be a Joiner
If you can afford it, join the support group for patrons of the photography department of your local museum, suggests Richardson. “Curators and directors will talk with you about work they’ve seen that they think is important. They’ll take you through the art fairs and help you understand what you’re looking at.”

Price Realized (Set Currency)
$1,142,500
Price includes buyer's premium
Estimate
$1,200,000 - $1,800,000


Lot Description
Wayne Thiebaud (b. 1920)
Napa Valley Ridge
signed 'Thiebaud' (lower right); signed again and dated 'Thiebaud 1986 1997' (on the reverse)
oil on canvas
36 x 48 in. (91.4 x 121.9 cm.)
Painted in 1986-1997.
Pre-Lot Text
PROPERTY FROM A NORTHERN CALIFORNIA COLLECTION
Provenance
Gift of the artist to the present owner
Lot Notes
Recreating the late afternoon sunshine on a tree-tipped Napa precipice, Wayne Thiebaud's Napa Valley Ridge is a masterwork of contemporary American landscape painting. Knowingly painting in the tradition of the early American landscape painters like Albert Bierstadt, Thiebaud uses the extreme Californian topography to his advantage, shrinking the human scale against the awe-inspiring precipices that are unmistakably of this region.

Thiebaud's work is inseparable from its Californian origins. From his sun-filled pastry-shop windows to his San Francisco streets to the Sacramento-area landscapes he began painting in the late 1960's, each of his works are at once vivid exaggerations of west coast style and exercises in realism. Easily identifiable to locals, Thiebaud's landscapes depict pin-point geographies and mappable destinations. First painting his study en situ, and then retiring to his studio to complete the work, one can imagine Thiebaud stationed on the ridge across from this one, and in all likelihood, visit its exact location.
In Napa Valley Ridge the soft, mountainous topography and the rich farming fields that have made the region a culinary destination are unmistakable. Spending time as a child on his grandfather's ranch in southern California, Thiebaud himself had tried his hand at farming and the experience was a major influence on his painting. As the artist would recall: "I plowed, harrowed, dug, and hitched up teams. and planted and harvested alfalfa, potatoes, corn and I loved it it was such a great way to grow up. These paintings have something to do with the love of that and in some ways the idea of replicating the experience." (W. Thiebaud quoted in S. Dalkey, "Wayne Thiebaud's Rural Lanscapes," Wayne Thiebaud, Rural Landscapes, exh. cat., San Francisco, Campbell- Thieubaud Gallery, 1997, n.p).

But while Thiebaud's Napa is undeniably real, the artist cannot resist the influence of art history before him. His wont is to depict the ordinary with a myriad variety of sources, and the result is a singular style of abstract realism which, at the time that his colleagues on the east coast were engrossed in theories ranging from pop to minimalism, Thiebaud pioneered and refined in his own, quiet reactionary way. That Thiebaud was once a cartoonist himself is no surprise. Like his rows of perfect confections, the towering bluffs and the helium-filled clouds of Napa Valley Ridge are romanticized, simplified versions of themselves. Meanwhile the ground, reduced to a bold series of colorful shapes and shadows and compressed into a single tilted plane that squeezes out the sky-- is a study in both impressionist color theory and cubist abstraction.

Theibaud owes debt too, to the great British painters before him; the cloud studies of Constable, and the romantic Joseph Mallard William Turner, who personified the British landscape with an aura of mystery. Finally, his treatment of the trees and the line of the ridge itself is derived from the Persian notion of miniature painting as well as Japanese ink drawings. He devotes his scenery to the depiction of a purified nature that despite being shaped by the markings of man, is placidly devoid of human presence. He has explained: "I tried to steal every kind of idea - Western, Eastern - and the use of everything I could think of-atmospheric perspective, size differences, color difference, overlapping, exaggeration, linear perspective, planal and sequential recessions-and to do that with the kind of vision I talked about before with as many ways of seeing the same picture-clear forms, hazy, squinting, glancing, starting, and even an inner seeing." (S. A. Nash, "Unbalancing Acts," exh. cat., Wayne Thiebaud, a Paintings Retrospective, San Francisco, Fine Arts Museum p.33).

The real and the imagined combined, Thiebaud reproduces not only what can be seen; but also the halo that he senses his subject to project. That the bluffs of Napa Valley Ridge glow at the edges with his signature rainbow of oil paint is fitting. The technique is at once an ingenious means of showing us the refracted light of sun's setting, and on the other hand, a metaphor for describing the unique aura that leads Thiebaud to choose, again and again, an exclusively Californian subject matter.

Christies Sales results

http://christies.com/LotFinder/lot_details.aspx?from=salesummary&intObjectID=5143569&sid=943cbd58-47cb-442e-8f9c-367e30ea086d


Price Realized (Set Currency)
$902,500
Price includes buyer's premium
Estimate
$900,000 - $1,200,000

Lot Description
Damien Hirst (b. 1965)
Afterworld
signed, titled and dated 'Afterworld 2007 Damien Hirst' (on the reverse)
Butterflies and household gloss enamel on canvas
diameter: 48 in. (121.9 cm.)
Executed in 2007.
Provenance
White Cube, London
Department Information
Post-War & Contemporary Art
Keywords
Hirst, Damien (b. 1965)
2000s
Paintings
Great Britain
Contemporary

Style Conscious or Style Conscience?

Style Conscious or Style Conscience?
By Craig Kellogg
Published: April 14, 2008
Today’s question: What is design? Is it a bottle of drinking water that seems ordinary enough at first glance but turns out to be pure Singapore sewage filtered through a revolutionary high-tech membrane so fine that bacteria and any other impurities bigger than water molecules can’t squeeze through? Or is it something exotic and unfamiliar or even willfully decorative that you buy from the likes of Murray Moss?
On a disturbingly warm afternoon this winter, Moss attempts to answer that question. He is perched on a sleek rolling conference-room chair in his spartan office in SoHo, just next door to the rambling design emporium that bears his name. The white walls of the high-ceilinged third-floor space are bare—the better, perhaps, to highlight samples of his merchandise: an opulent new six-foot-six-inch Fornasetti folding screen with gilt solar and lunar motifs on red lacquer ($18,500) and the industrial designer Tom Dixon’s experimental copper-over-Styrofoam CU29 chair, a prototype for the version (edition of eight; price upon request) that was given superstar full-page treatment last fall in the New York Times style magazine.

The store’s atmosphere—that of a carefully curated museum—might discourage some visitors from inquiring about unpublished prices. But that vibe is clearly intentional. In 1994, when Moss opened his industrial-design boutique on Greene Street, he sandwiched it between two art galleries: PaceWildenstein and Metro Pictures. He was betting, he says, that “in a moment of craziness, people would look at my fruit bowls and ashtrays as art.”

That epiphany took a while. America does not have the advanced design culture of a country like Italy, so collectors here had to get comfortable with the idea that design might push the same buttons as paintings and photographs. Over the past five years, Moss says, his customers, many of them art collectors, have started to develop a taste for design that provokes in the way contemporary art does. Manufacturers have responded with exotic surfaces and esoteric materials, such as jet-black Swarovski crystal—and also with futuristic forms. According to Moss, it’s as if they’re saying: “I’m going to make a lot more money if you focus on the shape, Mr. Designer. Go do your thing, please!”

Moss sells Ezri Tarazi’s New Baghdad table, with a welded aluminum top that suggests a map of the Iraqi capital, for $39,500. The store also has an exclusive on the Campana Brothers’ Banquete chair covered with stuffed pandas ($75,000), and it carries Venini’s five-foot-wide black glass Esprit chandelier, which weighs some 800 pounds. Priced at $145,000, it makes Gabriele Magro’s elaborate $9,440 Anthurium tabletop vase seem a steal.

As the market leans toward opulence, some experts seem to be wondering what happened to plain old function. Paola Antonelli, the Museum of Modern Art’s chief curator of design, contrasts “humble masterpieces” such as the century-old Gem paperclip with new objects she calls “overdesigned on purpose.”

“There are camps now,” Moss tells me, explaining that the design community can feel threatened by change and evolving ideas. What makes this an important, if confusing, historical moment for collectors is that some in this field have not enthusiastically embraced the shift away from function. “You have designers whose work is being talked about as art who are screaming at the top of their lungs,” says Moss. In their minds, the luxury market is not king, and they certainly don’t want to be considered courtiers.

It goes without saying that the world outside design stores is not all shiny lacquer and gilt. In fact, a small but growing number of avant-garde designers are looking past the big money offered by collectors to edge their profession off its current pedestal and back toward reality. Is a revolution brewing?

In what can only be described as a rediscovery of progressive ideals, the San Franciscan Yves Behar has designed $100 laptops that are distributed through the nonprofit One Laptop per Child (olpc) program with the goal of getting even the poorest communities online. Last December, the laptops made a surprisingly egalitarian display at the Design Miami fair. “See what happens when some of the finest minds and design talents of our time set out to change the world,” proclaimed Miami’s Luminaire gallery. (On opening night, the assembled design elite couldn’t keep their hands off the functional little machines.)

Behar’s computers are far more noteworthy for their hand-cranked power source than for their green-and-white color scheme. A hallmark of this latest movement is that its proponents typically sidestep the “look at me, I’m priceless” aesthetics of high-end design. Some of them even embrace a kind of design grunge. During the London Design Festival last October, visitors to the Liberty department store viewed “Trash Luxe,” an exhibition of objects made with castoffs and recycled bits by designers such as Majid Asif and Max Lamb. Dealer Paul Johnson, of Johnson Trading Gallery, in New York, had already noted the emergence of this trend, but he reports that the London festival was “the first time I saw it for sale.”

Others hope designers will push recycling further. “We have to think about how we manufacture things,” says Susan Szenasy, the socially conscious editor of Metropolis, the progressive New York–based design magazine. Szenasy adds that design should help reduce environmental impact over the life of products by, for instance, easing disassembly and limiting exposure to toxic components by the workers in India who recycle electronics we send there.

Cynthia E. Smith, a curator at the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, in New York, foresees a time when useful objects for the poorest parts of the developing world will begin to influence products sold here. Such rough-and-ready offerings as sugarcane charcoal and a bicycle that carries hundreds of pounds of cargo, included in “Design for the Other 90%,” Smith’s Cooper-Hewitt exhibition last year, underscore the point. “Designers have a unique opportunity to use their skill to provide solutions for 5.8 billion people,” Smith says. “Think about that number.”

For his part, Murray Moss is finished with what he calls phase one. By this he means, essentially, standard-issue modernism. That started with the Bauhaus and flourished through the 1970s—think minimalist Braun countertop appliances and sleek Japanese cutlery—when design existed primarily to solve ordinary problems for the home-furnishings and housewares markets. Until the 1990s, objects with any cultural or intellectual content were rare. Moss believes that the current fascination with designers who use the trappings of art to add value to design and create more exotic wares constitutes phase two, now in full flower. That explains all the Carrara marble used in objects such as Marc Newson’s six-figure chairs and tables and Michael Anastassiades’s $2,800 polished-bronze bowling-ball vases. Moss sees himself offering collectors the deluxe “souvenirs” that might one day be considered emblematic of this perfumed moment in design history.

Which brings us back to that filtered Singapore sewage. The Canadian designer Bruce Mau—who shot to fame in 1995 for his collaboration with Rem Koolhaas on the architect’s book S, M, L, Xl — performs a stunning parlor trick with the bottled water, which he calls a design object. At a press preview a couple of years ago in New York for his big-tent exhibition, “Massive Change,” Mau cracked a bottle open, took a swig and then passed it around to the crowd. There were no takers that afternoon, perhaps more from fear of the designer’s germs than of the sewage.

The “Massive Change” show, which debuted at the Vancouver Art Gallery and then traveled to the mca Chicago, included geneticist Avigdor Cahaner’s featherless broiler chickens, among other ideas. And of course, the drinkable sewage—“that’s phase three,” says Moss, contemplating a future when design will not need the trappings of luxury to prove its worth. As cultural values and the very definition of design evolve, the field will expand. Aspects of what we term design today may even become the basis for new fields as yet unnamed. It was not long ago, after all, when the term design failed to embrace decorative arts.

Kerry Beauchemin, owner of the B4 20th Century Design gallery, in New York, suggests a vintage parable from the small screen to illustrate the way values shift. In the final moments of a 1961 Twilight Zone episode known as the “Rip Van Winkle Caper,” an outlaw time traveler is stumbling through a desert in the future, toting a load of stolen gold bars but no water. The dehydrated man dies as citizens approach him, and they are puzzled by the gold. You see, in the future, precious metals are made in factories.

In our own time, gold has passed from glittering object to mass-market material: You can already buy functionally superior 24-karat-plated Monster cables to hook up a 100-inch flat-screen television. Our factories produce such once-unimaginable luxuries as featherweight iPods and polybags of arugula. Shift the rules a little, and it suddenly seems possible that someone will find customers for Bruce Mau’s designer sewer water after all. Perhaps that person is the one who ushered us into phase two—Murray Moss.

"Style Conscious or Style Conscience?" originally appeared in the April 2008 issue of Art+Auction. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Art+Auction's April 2008 Table of Contents.

Seven Tips for Beginning Collectors

Seven Tips for Beginning Collectors
By Caroline Kinneberg
December 2007

NEW YORK— Starting an art collection can be intimidating for a number of reasons: financial constraints, lack of a formal art background, or the attitude beginning collectors can be greeted with at certain galleries, a standard of customer service W.M. Hunt of the (friendly) Hasted Hunt Gallery describes as: “You could be set on fire and no one would give you a glass of water.” Last week, Hunt moderated a panel at Aperture Foundation’s gallery about the first steps to creating a photography collection. In principle, the advice applies to other sorts of art as well, though Hunt told ARTINFO, "Photography seems like a smaller field of dealers and auction houses. As overwhelming as it is, it's easier to negotiate and, at least in the past, the financial consequences weren't so huge." At the panel, Hunt talked to beginning collector Gael Zafrany, who works at Charles Schwartz Ltd., preserving and creating museum and personal collections; longtime collector David Kronn; Modern Art Obsession blogger Michael Hoeh; and designer Todd Oldham about their experiences as fledgling collectors. ARTINFO gleaned the following pieces of advice on amassing pieces of art:

1. Focus on the future
Oldham forewent food for a week, he recounted, when he bought a pair of Cindy Sherman film stills from a Houston gallery before both either he or she was famous. “I knew that it would be worth it, and I had to have it,” he says, and was right: “In 1980 it was worth $500, and now it’s worth at least two—almost three—zeros more at the end of that.”

2. Be selfish
Hoeh, who works in finance in New York City, focused early in his collecting career on pieces that reflected his interests: industry and the city. Kronn amassed 11 photos by his “early obsession,” Irving Penn. The panelists agreed: A personal collection is for personal enjoyment, and collectors should buy what appeals to them, not what’s in fashion.

3. Do your homework
Although some collectors buy impulsively, Hoeh called purchasing “a methodical process,” especially for collectors with limited financial resources who need to be selective. Kronn said he has a collection of art books that rivals his collection of actual art; he also advised potential buyers to “look at as much work as possible.”

4. Have patience
Kronn suggested collectors develop a list of works and artists that interest them so they’ll be poised to acquire when opportunities present themselves. Oldham suggested to “show up wherever you can” (auctions, galleries, or anywhere else art is sold) and noted that the interesting works at Art Basel Miami Beach were not, in fact, in the convention center but at the satellite fairs.

5. Avoid the “gallerinas”
Those “glorified shopgirls,” as Oldham jokingly called them, are notoriously intimidating. Many of the panelists avoided them by buying their first pieces at benefit auctions, where, Zafrany said, museums donate works by under-the-radar artists to increase their exposure.

6. Get bang for your buck
“I can’t collect what I really love because I can’t afford it,” Zafrany said, but her young collection is edgy and noteworthy nonetheless. She bought one of Thomas Allen’s pop-up pulp fiction pieces long before Aperture published a book about them. Another find was a New York City streetscape by Walker Evans that isn’t representative of his work but that Zafrany characterizes as a sweet, simple photo of the city she loves.

7. Haggle
While Hoeh said negotiating at galleries was uncommon even until the recent past, Oldham divulged that bargaining a sticker price down 10 percent is now “pretty standard.” Either way, there are other ways to manage price points: Kronn bought an Edward Weston on eBay; collectors can put down deposits over time; and it never hurts to have friends in the art world (and access to their insider discounts!). In the end, though, Hunt told ARTINFO the most important thing to do when buying art is to "commit, commit, commit! Look at the hair on the back of your hands, listen to your heart, figure out if you can afford it, and then commit!"

Art in Bermuda

http://www.bermuda4u.com/Attractions/bermuda_attractions_bermuda_national_gallery.html/

Spent time at Bermuda National Gallery in Hamilton and Masterworks Museum of Bermudian Art - in the Botanical Gardens. Highly recommend it!

http://www.bermuda4u.com/Attractions/bermuda_attractions_bermuda_national_gallery.html/

Spent time at Bermuda National Gallery in Hamilton and Masterworks Museum of Bermudian Art - in the Botanical Gardens. Highly recommend it!

Tuesday, July 01, 2008

Women Collecting Women
Be there or be square: 7:00 pm until 9:00; A.I.R Gallery (511 W 25th Street & 10th Avenue 3rd Floor)
Event Description: Ladies of Manhattan host a private gallery tour and talk for emerging and aspiring women art collectors. Event includes a wine reception, gallery tour and Q&A given by Kat Griefen, A.I.R. Gallery Director and Kristen Accola, an independent curator.
How to score your tickets: Admission is $10.00, RSVP is suggested, but not required. RSVP to Air@Ladiesofmanhatttan.org.

Tuesday, July 1, 2008
New York Times article on Collecting Original Comic Book Art

Taken from June 30, 2008, New York Times article, "From Trash to Auction, Faster Than a Speeding.. Well You Know".


Comic-book collectors like their numbers. They know that the first issue of X-Men, which introduced Marvel’s mutant superheroes, was published in 1963 and had a cover price of 12 cents. They also know that today a copy of that issue, in near mint condition, is worth $16,500. (Parents, take note.)

And while the market for back issues is well established, more and more collectors are turning their attention to the hand-drawn covers and interior pages that make up a comic book. This original art has become the focus of auctions with sales in the five and six figures. It’s a surprising turn of events for work that in the early days of the industry, was considered so unimportant that it was used to sop up ink or spilled coffee, given away to fans or even destroyed outright.

The art eventually stopped being discarded, and in the 1970s it generally became policy to return the covers and pages to the artists, many of whom began selling it to fans and collectors, who are hungry for it. Last month the cover of Weird Science No. 16, from 1952, drawn by Wally Wood, sold for $200,000. In February an inside black-and-white page from the 1963 X-Men No. 1, by the influential Jack Kirby, sold for $33,460. Late last year two color paintings by Alex Ross, used as covers for a recent Justice League story, were sold by his art dealer for $45,000 and $50,000. In 2005 an auction for the black-and-white cover of Batman No. 11, from 1942, by Fred Ray and Jerry Robinson, closed at $195,500. (read more)
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Read the rest of this New York Times article here.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/30/arts/design/30comi.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
Posted by Burtons at 11:41 AM