Invite Mark Dahle to your group to present a dynamic talk about art.
What Makes Art Valuable
Houses in California along the coast can be worth $10 million. But some paintings are worth more than ten times that. What could possibly make a painting worth more than ten houses?
You'll probably be surprised at the answer – it's not what most people think. (It's not the artist's reputation, or the style, or the technical difficulty of the piece. It's not even how much the public likes the artwork.)
This entertaining and helpful lecture will let you know what's going on with current prices for contemporary art – and how a painting can be worth more than $100 million.
Frauds and Thieves
Everybody likes a good crime story. Unless they're in it.
You don't want to end up in a newspaper headline like Steven Spielberg did: "Stolen Norman Rockwell painting found in Spielberg collection."
Even an artist as great as Michelangelo tried to cheat people at the start of his career by selling things he had carved and pretending they were antiquities. Become aware of some of the pitfalls of collecting in this entertaining lecture.
Do you think "that would never happen to me"?
Scot Levitt, director of Fine Arts for Bonhams & Butterfields, an auction house that offers appraisals, says, "Probably 30% of what we see is not real." Some European police experts believe as much as half the art in circulation on the international market could be forged.
Art and War
Sometimes when you buy a painting, all you've done is thrown away your money. The painting still belongs to someone else.
Some of California's biggest art institutions have purchased art that they later lost in court. Learn why individuals and museums are losing art from their collections to prior owners, and what you can do to minimize your risk.
You'll get a lot out of this thought-provoking talk even if you don't collect art.
Questions every art collector should ask before investing in art
For all its beauty, the art world is surprisingly dangerous.
Seven questions will help art investors avoid traps that have caused other collectors and art institutions to lose their investments (and their art!). Some of these are traps that you may not hear about from your art dealer.
For example: Many top artists use assistants. A painting recently attributed to Leonardo da Vinci was valued at $100 million or more. When people thought it was painted by Leonardo's best assistant, it sold for $1,000. If paintings in your collection have been created by assistants, that's something worth thinking about! How will future generations value your assistant-created work?
This entertaining and helpful lecture will give you lots to think about while you are investing in art.
Invite Mark Dahle to your group to present a dynamic talk about art.