The True Value of Art: Buy it Because You LIKE it!

Recently, I sold one of my pieces of art.

No, this wasn't actually one of my personal works, it was a painting from my personal collection, originally acquired while I had the gallery in Austin, Texas.

Painting from my collection, now sold

There was another Art Gallery next to mine; they carried art in a somewhat different style from what we had, and there was a particular painting there that I really liked and wanted to hang in a spot next to my kitchen where we had a little breakfast nook.

The piece was painted by Jay Worth Allen, an up and coming regional artist who subsequently went on to achieve a moderate amount of fame as a painter. I got to know him a little bit while he lived in Austin, before he returned to his home state of Tennessee.

Since we are in the process of slowly downsizing our life and eventually moving to a smaller house we've decided that we're going to get rid of some of the art.

Of course, you'd think that selling a piece of work by a relatively well-known artist would not be that difficult, but quite the contrary turned out to be the case.

I suppose it serves as a bit of a "cautionary tale" that a art is never really that much of an investment, except if you are investing in internationally well-known artists, but beyond that, art is never worth as much as you think, nor as much as the artist thinks.

After about two years of offering this piece for sale and doing extensive research to chase down some of the artist's current work and some of the places where he currently has it for sale, I ended up selling the painting for $500.00.

Maybe that sounds pretty good and some level, but I sold it for $500 against finding numerous Gallery listings for the same artist's work listed for sale between $4,000 and $12,000.

The bottom line lesson here is that simply having something for sale at some price doesn't mean it's worth that much, and ultimately a piece of art is only "worth" as much as somebody is willing to pay for it, not as much as you're asking for it.

I'm not actually upset at the fact that I only got $500 for the painting, because it went to a nice lady with whom I was previously somewhat acquainted and I know it is now in a happy home where it will be enjoyed on a regular basis.

Ultimately, my reasons for writing about this are actually two-fold.

Part one is that valuing a so called art collection is a nebulous endeavor at best. We can certainly say that something "has a value" based on what we can find it listed for sale for somewhere, but that doesn't necessarily mean that there are any buyers standing by waiting to drop that amount of money.

The other point takes me back to having had two art galleries and never quite being able to adequately answer the people who asked whether a particular artist work was "a good investment." You know, in all honesty, if you want a good investment you should probably be buying stocks and bonds or even cryptocurrency, not art!

I can already hear those in the peanut gallery who are going "but art goes up in value!" And that may be true if you're reading the newspapers and follow what sells for a great amounts of money as reported by the New York Times but there we are talking about maybe a thousand artists worldwide who are well known and have a solid and large following, and an active aftermarket.

The vast majority of what I might call "ordinary artists" who have little more than an "ordinary" following that number maybe in the hundreds don't typically enjoy such appreciation. Likely, those "followers" each has one piece rather than being a collector, and it is simply not enough to support an artist's work becoming an "investment." Or, at least, it is pretty much a shot in the dark that you may get lucky but most likely you won't!

Regardless, I was able to swallow my attachment to the painting, and let it go for about one-quarter of what I originally paid for it. And now that I've had a couple of weeks to sit on that, I'm actually glad that I did!

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