It’s easy to sell great art, but only the very wealthiest can afford it. You won’t find many customers for that enormous Picasso painting among the inhabitants of a New York tenement, although I have met a few eccentrics who challenge that rule.
I’ve got hundreds of $400 paintings. Can’t sell a one of them right now, although they were selling well enough a few years ago to actually support me. The reason isn’t that people suddenly stopped liking paintings. They just can’t afford them.
So if they MUST have a painting, it will come from a five-and-dime store, with a laser-carved frame on the high end, at $89.95, or a blow-mold plastic frame at $29.95.
It might even be an oil painting, but it will have been painted on an assembly line, and there are hundreds, thousands or even millions of them, all more or less exactly alike.
Now, the question arises, “Do the very wealthy actually buy the artworks?” and the answer is, of course, “No”. They have people to choose art and furniture and silverware and all sorts of things, why should they disturb their fragile social atmosphere just for that minor detail of house management?
Just so long as the decorator doesn’t embarrass the Mistress by choosing the wrong artist-of-the-month, because that’s about as long as the average artwork in seriously wealthy homes will last.
Boredom is the greatest curse of extreme wealth. There really isn’t anything to do. You’ve done it all.
So you collect things, things that the poor can’t possibly buy, and even the moderately rich can barely afford, and finally, you collect things that are strictly one of a kind. There isn’t another one like it on the face of the Earth.
That’s the kind of stuff I like to be buying and selling in the face of violent social upheaval, which I’m expecting any moment, aren’t you?
If you can just keep perfectly calm and clear and serene in mind, body and spirit, it’s very clear that you really don’t understand the situation, and you need some serious medical intervention.
In short, there’s no sense peddling donuts and making just enough to stay alive so you can repeat that same thing the next day and the next.
Selling art to the Very Rich is actually impossible. You’ll have to sell it to their professional collector or art consultant, and believe me, they’ll have one, if they can afford what you’re going to try to sell to them.
Keep in mind that in order to sell things to the Very Rich, they have to be things that they really want, or that their decorators think are really cool and client-satisfying for the moment.
So where in hell can YOU get hold of anything with that sort of value? A high-ticket item that has lots of sizzle?
First of all, calm down. You won’t get rich with this stuff, you’ll be lucky to make a decent living. You take a very small cut, sometimes down to 1%, to make the deal, but the reason you deal in high-end merch is that at those prices, nobody’s strapped for cash.
That’s the most important point to remember, that the price and quality and scarcity of the merch is what makes it work for the high-end market.
Finding an entire collection or merch store of high-end art and jewelry and fashions is going to always be the hard part of any deal.
Some of the collections I offer took me decades to complete, and you’d have to learn to work the buying end of that market if you hope to succeed for any length of time, including any legacy action you have in mind for grandkids.
By the way, art is a very good way to pass on wealth and to keep property in the family.
If you notated the “last trade” prices of major artworks, you’d see a graph resembling a stock graph.
Renoir charts — and I have made them from reference tables — generally resemble that of Amazon and Intel. In short, they may dip, but they never quite crash.
Really great art by really great artists can bring any price, if they are desired enough by collectors and museums.
I have several dozen such pieces, and several collections of highly desired collectibles of various kinds.
While it’s true that you will probably never connect with wealthy art and collectibles collectors, you may very well reach their decorators, and the decorators are making the decisions anyway, so that’s as far as you ever need to get.
If you can’t afford a collection or a merch shop, you can try selling something from our gigantic merch offerings, which includes easy to sell items like books, audio, video and downloads.
If you’re concentrating on finding a buyer for entire collections, it takes your sale out of the used car category, even if the sale only involves one item out dozens in the collection.
There are a number of other merch type shops that I could offer, and I’ll list them as they come to mind, like the high-ticket antiquarian bookshop I’ve assembled over a period of some 60 years, my first collected item being two plays bound in leather of the Shakespeare Second Folio of 1632.
Ultra-rare books are a specialty of mine, at least back when I was actually a bookseller, which was a heck of a long time ago, and the books have wildly increased in value since then.
I would put a price of $1 million dollars on that collection, and I’d be well within my rights to do so. There are books in that collection that are one of a kind and signed books from people’s autographs you wouldn’t believe I could find.
I have a photo collection of flat-signed original photos of many Hollywood stars, and photo albums from WW I and WW II (Trump calls it “World War Eleven”).
If you can connect directly with wealthy people, you’ll find that they have a definite appetite for art, but only GREAT art, and the same with cars, fashions, hair styles and jewelry.
Art on the walls is a statement about the Mistress of the House, and usually it is the mistress that gets the better art, I’m not exactly sure why that is.
We’ll come up with some plans to reach the Very Rich with our fine art offerings — get there early!
Must dash, it’s time for breakfast & meeting.
See You At The Top!!!
gorby