Fine Art and the Great Wealth Transfer

I can’t remember where I read it, but over the next two decades something like $70 trillion will be passed down from America’s Baby Boomers to their kids and grandkids. About $40 trillion of that will go to the top 2% of households. That group, the upper 2%, is basically the fine art market. And that should be good news for brokers and dealers and associated professionals that make their living in the art world.

But there’s a problem. It turns out that many of the Boomers’ children aren’t all that fond of their parents’ art. And so, when they inherit it, they will probably sell it. The Boomers don’t like that idea – that their kids would sell their treasured collections just to put a few extra millions in their pockets. So they are changing their wills and putting their art into museums and other non-profit institutions for a write-off on their taxes.

For details on this story (from Art News), click here.

The Art Business Is Still Booming

Both Fine Art and Forgeries!

In this age of digital information, you’d think forgeries would be easier to detect. They should be. (And they will be when NFTs come into common use.)

But when the art market is hot, and particularly when the contemporary art market heats up, forgeries soar for three obvious reasons. (1) They are contemporary and can’t be carbon-dated. (2) They tend to be easier to forge than representational paintings. (3) The prices they are fetching are so great that it’s impossible for forgers and crooked dealers (of which there are plenty) to resist the urge to cash in.

But there’s another reason, too, that Julie Belcove writes about in a recent issue of ARTnews. She says it is “mysterious” and “unique to the art world.” She calls it an “idiosyncratic, unspoken code of conduct.”

Read about it here.

 I rarely get drunk anymore. I can’t remember the last time I did. Still, I like to drink. A cocktail at 5:30. Two glasses of wine at dinner. And a Cognac with my cigar afterwards. But, in an effort to lose 25+ pounds to “make weight” at a recent Jiu Jitsu competition, I devised a diet that consisted of depriving myself each day of one of three enjoyments: cigars, carbs, or alcohol.

In terms of pounds lost, I would attribute none of it to giving up cigar smoking, since I managed to do that on only a single occasion. As to carbs and alcohol, I found that I could give up either one with the same moderate amount of effort. But giving up the drink was more effective because (and this was a surprise to me) I was consuming nearly 1,000 calories of alcohol a day! (Pre-prandial cocktail: 250 calories. Wine at dinner: 450 calories. Post-prandial Cognac: 300 calories.)

What I’ve decided: (1) Cigars seem to be good for me as a pleasure and a stimulant. (2) I can enjoy pasta without Chianti. And (3) when I don’t drink, I do almost everything better, including, as Ernest Hemingway knew, writing.

Which brings me to this…

From Letters of Note: Ernest Hemingway – a PPS to a letter to Ivab Kashin, Aug. 19, 1935

“Don’t you drink? I notice you speak slightingly of the bottle. I have drunk since I was 15 and few things have given me more pleasure. When you work hard all day with your head and know you must work again the next day what else can change your ideas and make them run on a different plane like whisky? When you are cold and wet what else can warm you? Before an attack who can say anything that gives you the momentary well-being that rum does? I would as soon not eat at night as not to have red wine and water. The only time it isn’t good for you is when you write or when you fight. You have to do that cold. But it always helps my shooting. Modern life, too, is often a mechanical oppression and liquor is the only mechanical relief. Let me know if my books make any money and I will come to Moscow and we will find somebody that drinks and drink my royalties up to end the mechanical oppression.”

Kids Write the Darnedest Things 

From 11-year-old Emily Dickinson

A letter to her brother, April 18, 1842

“[T]he chickens grow very fast I am afraid they will be so large that you cannot perceive them with the naked Eye when you get home the yellow hen is coming off with a brood of chickens we found a hens next with four Eggs in it I took out three and brought them in the next day I went to see if there had been any laid and there had not been any laid and the one that was there had gone so I suppose s skonk had been there or else a hen in the shape of a skonk and I dont know which.”

From 6-year-old Virginia Woolf

A letter to her mother, 1888

“We went out for a walk with Stella this morning up to the pond and there were a lot of big boats. Mrs Prinsep says that she will only go in a slow train cos she ways all the fast trains have accidents and she told us about an old man of 70 who got his legs caute in the weels of the train and the train began to go on and the old gentleman was draged along till the train caute fire and he called out for somebody to cut off his legs but nobody came he was burnt up. Good bye”

From 12-year-old Charles Darwin

A letter to a friend, Jan. 4, 1822

“You must know that after my Georgraphy, she [his sister, Caroline] said I should go down to ask for Richards poney, just as I was going, she said she must ask me not a very decent question, that was whether I wash all over every morning. No. Then she said it was quite disgustin, then she asked me if I did every other morning, and I said no, then she said how often I did, and I said once a week, then she said of course you wash your feet every day, and I said no, then she begun saying how very disgusting and went on that way a good while, then she said I ought to do it, I said I would wash my neck and shoulders, then she said you had better do it all over, then I said upon my word I would not, then she told me, and made me promise I would not tell, then I said, well I only wash my feet once a month at school, which I confess is nasty, but I cannot help it, for we have nothing to do it with, so then Caroline pretended to be quite sick, and left the room, so then I went and told my brother, and he burst out in laughing and said I had better tell her to come wash the herself, besides that she said she did not like sitting by me or Erasmus for we smelt of not washing all over, there we sat arguing away for a good while.”

From 10-year-old Louisa May Alcott

A letter to her mother, Oct. 8, 1843

“I have spent a very pleasant morning and I hardly dare to speak to Annie [her sister] for fear she should speak unkindly and get me angry. O she is so very cross I cannot love her it sees as though she did every thing to trouble me but I will try to love her better, I hope you have spent a pleasant morning. Please axcept this book mark from your affectionate daughter.”

(Source: Letters of Note)

Congratulations to the Lionesses, England’s women’s soccer team, for making history Monday night! 

Their win over Germany in the European Championship final – after a 56-year title drought for the UK – would have amazed the man who wrote this letter to the editor of the Pall Mall Gazette in 1895:

“[A woman] is physically incapable of stretching her legs sufficiently to take the stride masculine… the smaller a woman’s foot is the prouder she is of it, and very naturally. I dearly love to see her feet come peeping in and out of her skirts, as the poet says ‘like little mice’ (delicious simile!).

“I don’t think lady-footballers will ever be able to ‘shoot’ goals. In order to score a ‘point’ they will find it necessary, I fear, to charge the enemy’s goal en masse and simply hustle the ball through… Sir, I have seen two women fight and never wish to witness a like scene again, and I think that the aspect of two lovely girls, flushed and mud-bespattered, causing their rounded shoulders to collide ever and anon with brutal force, would be a most deplorable one. The whole thing is so foreign to the poetry of life – if poetry can be said to exist when an educated and refined lady urges her sisters to don men’s attire and play men’s games.

“Women may boat, women may ride – they can do both gracefully – but women may not, with an advantage to themselves, ride a bicycle or kick a football. These pastimes are beyond them… Let women ‘keep’ books, write books, paint pictures, ride horses and row boats, but for the love of heaven stay them from making sights of themselves on the football field, or objects of ridicule on the bicycle saddle.”

(Source: Girls With Balls, by Tim Tate)

Long before Girl With a Pearl Earring, I was a huge fan of Johannes Vermeer. Here is a short lesson about him from an art historian, with a few comments about why his art was so great. Click here.

When You Can’t Sell a Stolen Work of Art

A Dutch historian known as the “Indiana Jones of Art” recovered ancient Catholic relics when the pieces were left on his doorstep a few weeks ago. The relics were stolen in early June from the Fécamp Abbey Church in Normandy, France, where they had been housed for the last 1,000 years. The lead vials are said to contain drops of the blood of Jesus Christ, taken when he was hanging on the cross. Click here.

Claes Oldenburg (1929-2022) 

Claes Oldenburg, the pop artist that became famous for his super-sized replicas of ordinary objects, died July 18. He was an interesting character. You can read about him here. One thing I didn’t know: He produced a lot of his work with his wife

Harvey Dinnerstein (1928-2022)