Some have observed that this trend may have been overdue anyway. New York dealer Richard L. Feigen was quoted as saying, “The disparity in price rises between Old Masters and contemporary has been crazy…Some Old Master pictures haven’t increased in price in the last 20 years and there are people with a lot of cash at Tefaf looking for a place to park it..” Feigen referred to Tefaf Maastricht art and antiques fair, where, according to Emily Waldorf of ArtsEtoile, recently prices for contemporary works were being cut up to 20% while Old Master prices held steady.

Age over beauty? I'm not so certain it's as simple as that, anyway. Beautifully crafted antique pictures have the ability to communicate their best qualities to any observer. One need not be a trained academic or cultivated collector to judge (at least to some degree) the quality of craftsmanship and execution in a traditional figure painting, still life or landscape. It may be that contemporary art, especially the most experimental, “avant-garde” work, being more opaque to many collectors, seems speculative and risky to the collector compared to art and objects where craftsmanship, aesthetics and pictorial goals are more central and self-evident.

This is perhaps more than just a shift in taste to the conservative or nostalgic, but rather collectors insisting on standards increasingly not being met by contemporary art, which often seems to have the central (maybe sole) function of being expensive to buy.

Matthew Kinsey
www.matthewkinsey.com

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