I think Van Gogh's squishy ear is the real prize here (easily obtained off
eBay, too)
An eSpree of Art Buying Makes a Believer
By DEBORAH SOLOMON
New York Times
July 30, 2000
ANDRÉ BRETON, who was almost as famous for his French arrogance as for
founding Surrealism, enjoyed playing the role of the anti-snob. He once
said that the most interesting artistic experience in Paris was going to
the flea market.
I thought of Breton the other night while sifting through the riotous
jumble of merchandise offered at eBay, the online auction site. It lists
some 3.7 million items organized into 2,900 categories, one of which is
fine art. To try it out, I typed in the name of Vincent van Gogh. The
search yielded 617 items ranging from a supposed original painting (price:
$1 million) to a mass-produced souvenir of artistic torment: a curvy,
pinkish rubber objet described with typical eBay poetry as "Van Gogh's Ear
-- squish it, squeeze it!"
I placed a bid on the ear. The next morning, an e-mail message arrived:
"Congratulations on winning Van Gogh's ear. The total is $2.75."
Actually, I was at eBay not to accumulate pop-culture artifacts or the
anatomical parts of Dutch masters, but rather to purchase original works of
art. Curious about the growing and radical phenomenon by which people are
buying art they can't see from sellers they can't see, I decided to shop
for art online and assemble my own art collection. My budget: an even
$1,000 (make that $997.25, after the ear).
Naturally, I hoped to find a few sterling works and believed I possessed a
sharp enough eye to pluck some rare and lovely gems from eBay's ocean of
indifferent merchandise. But there was also a real possibility that I could
wind up with a fake. In May, an abstract painting passed off as a Richard
Diebenkorn made headlines after it was purchased on eBay for $135,805.
Although the sale was stopped, it serves as a cautionary tale about the
hazards of buying art on eBay, which, not unlike the classified ads,
enables any Joe with a bogus Grandma Moses to post a listing.
At present there are at least 50 Web sites offering art for sale. Typical,
perhaps, is IncredibleArt.com, where you can type in "landscapes" or
"angels" or "fish" and view an array of sincere efforts by living artists
in the requested category. At the high end of the trade, sites like
Artnet.com are stocked with work by brand-name artists, all of it furnished
by reputable art dealers. It's doubtless very convenient if you live in
Reykjavik or Tirana and suddenly crave a Nan Goldin photograph for the spot
above your couch.
EBay, by contrast, is a virtual flea market, the e-flea, with all the
unevenness of quality that implies. It might seem to represent the end of
the tradition of the collector as connoisseur, but you can also view it as
quite the reverse. In an age when collectors are willing to drop $14
million for a classic Rothko and when $2 million gets you a not-so-great
Pollock, there is something appealing about an auction site that offers
vast availability as well as the chance to buy a work of art for $200 or
even $20. Here, you can comb through tens of thousands of works culled from
the attics and corner junk shops of America -- and respond to the values
embodied in an object rather than to a wall label or a brand name.
Until the day when I clicked onto www.ebay.com, I had never purchased a
work of art. This negative achievement was no doubt related to my
profession: art critics are obligated to carp, not consume. Instead of
putting my money where my mouth was, I put my mouth where other people's
money was. In the 80's, the tax cuts at the heart of Ronald Reagan's voodoo
economics sent art prices soaring, and critics felt predictably miffed as
sky-high records set in the auction rooms of Manhattan brought on an age in
which money seemed to be the sole arbiter of cultural worth.
EBay, too, is an auction room, but of a vigorously plebeian stripe. Works
of art are treated as priced-to-go merchandise, as if they were bowling
balls or Hawaiian shirts. So what was I doing here? When I first clicked
on, there were listings for 37,814 fine-art objects, and I found it
fascinating to browse through them. I liked the openness, the lack of
pretense of a place where a signed Christo photograph, a Malevich
exhibition poster from the Tate Gallery in London and a Raphael Soyer
charcoal sketch appeared in the company of pictures that were variously
described as "Original Impressionist Oil Painting, $5.99," or "Original
Painting Signed Alice $9.99" or "Artist Has Same Astrology Chart as Picasso
$50."
What sort of art do Americans display in their homes? EBay offers an
unofficial survey of everything out there, an impromptu sociology lesson on
American taste. A large percentage of eBay's holdings consists of
reproductions of celebrated works -- for instance, a plaster replica of
Degas's sculpture "The Little Dancer" for $24.95, a reminder of the link
that Americans seek with museum masterpieces.
There is also an abundance of amateur paintings, so many that you may feel
you are living in Kafka's "nature-theater of Oklahoma," a place where every
citizen can be an artist. I saw countless scenes of the idyllic
countryside, pictures of cows and verdant green hills that were probably
painted in musty basements in the suburbs and reflect a nostalgia for the
reassuring past.
In the course of a week, I placed bids on about 20 works that struck me as
particularly inspired. Most were minor pieces by known artists -- prints
and smallish drawings that are too inexpensive to merit wall space in a
big-city gallery. They included a Leon Golub lithograph of a political
martyr rendered in strident red and black, an elegant charcoal drawing
circa 1905 by Arthur B. Davies and an etching of an intensely craggy
mountain by the German artist Lovis Corinth. I also bid on an Op-Art print
by Victor Vasarely and Damien Hirst's delectably besmirched "Home Sweet
Home" (1996), a porcelain dessert plate designed to resemble an ashtray
overflowing with butts.
To bid, of course, is not to buy and, as eBay's auctions each last 10 days,
many of my early bids proved futile. From one day to the next, a stream of
e-mail messages arrived: "Heads Up! Another eBay user has outbid you on the
following item . . ." My initial interest in eBay's art-for-everyone
democratizing possibilities promptly evaporated when my own needs came into
play. Who were these rival bidders? And why wouldn't they go away? The
elation of placing a high bid was invariably followed by the despairing
realization that I was not the only e-aesthete in cyberspace.
Would I ever score? Finally it happened. The theme song of "Chariots of
Fire" played in my head as I read the victorious news: "You won the
Vasarely litho." Price: $225 for a signed and numbered print, frame included.
The e-mail message, sent by the seller of the work, requested that I call
him to discuss details of payment and shipping. He turned out to be Michael
Levy, a dentist in Phoenix, married, gregarious, audibly suntanned. He
volunteered to build a wooden shipping crate at no charge.
"You're so handy," I told him without irony.
"Everyone in America outside of Manhattan is handy," he replied with a
chuckle.
How fast could he ship the work?
"I have 22 extractions to do tomorrow," the dentist replied, "but I'll try
to build the crate in the evening."
And thus I secured my first purchase, appropriately titled "Vertigo."
Granted, Vasarely is not exactly in the same league as Cézanne, and the
Op-Art movement, which flourished in the 60's, is snubbed by most serious
collectors. But I loved the print -- a thrillingly jittery blue-and-white
checkerboard that appears to keep moving -- and figured besides that
Vasarely could one day come into vogue, rescued by the same rotation of
cool that has lately enshrined the martini and the Fontainebleau Hotel.
My next purchase was the drawing by Arthur B. Davies, who, much like
Vasarely, does not have what dealers call a strong market. Although once an
important figure on the New York scene -- he was an organizer of the
historic Armory Show of 1913 -- the mention of his name today tends to
elicit blank stares. As I studied his drawing on eBay, a tiny, charming
sketch of a woman in a long dress, her lowered gaze hinting at her hidden
interior life as she walks up some steps, I wondered why every artist in
the world is either vastly underrated or even more vastly overrated.
Of course, to see a drawing on a computer screen is not to see a drawing at
all, only a bright facsimile, a picture of a picture, pixel dots by the
millions. Digital reproduction strips art of essential subtleties of scale,
color and texture, as cultural conservatives are fond of bemoaning. But
that's beside the point. You look at art on the Internet not to have an
aesthetic experience, but to gather visual information. It's no more
compromising than the use of slides in art history classrooms. The study of
art would be most inconvenient if you had to trek to the Louvre every time
you needed to check the precise upward tilt of the Venus de Milo's torso.
The art trade, too, has long been dependent on reproductions; art dealers
habitually consult 8-by-10-inch color transparencies, holding them up to
the light to see them.
Anyhow, I placed an early bid of $177.50 on the Arthur B. Davies drawing.
Days passed; no one else seemed interested. But then an hour before the
auction closed, other bidders emerged out of nowhere and the price started
jumping up in $5 increments. Suddenly, I came to understand the frenzied
emotion that accompanies auction-itis. Normally I'm such an indecisive
shopper I can't even buy a shirt at Bloomingdale's without agonizing for an
hour and soliciting the opinion of 13 saleswomen, but here I was, quickly
and boldly typing in ever-higher bids. A drawing that I had never even seen
until four days earlier now seemed essential, and I could focus on nothing
but my hunger to own it.
So I went a bit high on the Davies drawing, all the way up to $380, frame
included. Big spender. The seller was Robert Keil, a New York art dealer.
After the auction, I mentioned to him that I found the frame garish. He
offered to replace it. "The Davies drawing is en route to you," he wrote
the next day by e-mail. "I hope you like the new frame. I thought I'd
really get into the spirit of the democratization of the art market, so I
bought it at Bed, Bath and Beyond."
It turned out to be my final eBay purchase, although there were other
objects I very much wanted.
I had hoped to get the Damien Hirst plate-cum-ashtray but couldn't bring
myself to bid more than $400 for it. It was painful to drop out of the
auction, but I had to consider the risks of buying art on eBay: the work
could be a fake, it could be damaged, it could be stolen property. If
you're buying art for investment, eBay is a pointless gamble, but it's fine
if you're buying art for fun. And fun, for me, stops at $400.
So, in the end, I came away with the Vasarely print, the Arthur B. Davies
drawing and van Gogh's ear. Taken together, they don't exactly amount to a
major collection, and I harbor no hope that the Metropolitan Museum of Art
will offer to name a wing after me in exchange for the donation of my art
holdings. But I treasure my acquisitions nonetheless. They arrived at my
apartment within a week, and it was a bit startling to see the various
packages -- physical objects with scale and real heft sprung from the
weightless ether of cyberspace. The crate built by the dentist came nailed
shut, and I had to call him for tips on how to open it.
Collecting is famously addictive, and before long I saw how my modest
beginnings as an eBay art collector could lead to a more ambitious
enterprise. One recent Saturday, I was making the rounds of the Manhattan
galleries when I paused before a contemporary photograph, admired it and,
to my surprise, inquired into the price.
As I stood in the gallery, it seemed that the world and the visible things
in it could all be owned. Momentarily, I became someone else, imagined
myself as the acquisitive equal of world-class collectors like Chester Dale
or Albert C. Barnes. Clearly, my stint as an eBay collector had altered me
to the core, allowed me to become the sort of woman who feels at ease in
that realm where costly and beautiful objects circulate, a woman who
relishes the game of questing, of competing, for masterworks. But my
fantasy was interrupted when I glanced down at my shoes, which had a hole
in them; I needed to get to the shoe repair shop before it closed. I knew
then that my collecting days were over.
That said, I should probably confess that I recently did a search on eBay
for Cindy Sherman. Six items came up, five of them books of her
photographs, the sixth a profile of her that appeared in The New Yorker
last spring. I wondered why anyone would want to buy a copy of a magazine
that was neither new enough to be timely nor old enough to be an antique,
but my bafflement did not prevent me from placing a bid: 25 cents.
The next day I was outbid. The article went for 55 cents. So no, alas, I
did not get the Cindy Sherman profile, though it still pleases me to think
that I played a small but decisive role in inflating the market for
articles about art. For right now, as you are reading this, I am cutting
this article out of the newspaper. Look for it later today on eBay.
