Plus 24
Works without quality don’t last
When excanges fall off, the medium segment of the market suffers more, while high quality works always find a buyer. Besides, recognizing this quality isn’t easy; very important elements are documents, origin and exhibition curriculum of the artist and of the work.
The market usually rewards works that mark the starting moment of the artist’s research, it expresses the taste of the most and never follows the critics.
Guido Galimberti, chief executive and founder of our company of art advisory Opera, says “only an enlightened élite can recognize the artists’ value at their first appearance. The market follows the taste of the mass; the collective culture needs more time, about 30 years. Quality stands in a wellestablished aesthetic that describes works as beautiful, easy and encouraging, as in the case of Francis Bacon, whose top price ‘Triptych’ (1976), sold for 86.281.000 dollars last may in New York by Sotheby’s, shows how his works of the Seventies and Eighties are valued, while his first experiments of the Sixties have a higher cultural weight.”
But how can a well-educated and brilliant collector recognize innovation, beauty and originality out of the shared aesthetic rules? The artists themselves, who collect art, can often tell it.