Squishy ear?
I'd much rather a freshly autographed cork, sum stamps, an' a photograph.
An' a beer.
(After I bot the above)
(Preferably a Guiness,
um, or maybe a Crazy Ed's Chili Beer)
Cheer
(s)
PK
allen bukoff wrote:
> 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
>
> ANDR� 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 C�zanne, 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.
