The best reason to buy art is the joy of living with it. The next best reason is good art is a good investment in more ways than one. You get the joy of living with it and the knowledge that it will appreciate in value as time goes on. If you are good at managing your money and take few chances on bad choices, therefore art is something you enjoy but would never consider for yourself; think again. You have built up a good business reputation in your few years and you are being looked up to as one who knows a good thing when you see it. Art is a good thing.
Good art is everywhere; so is bad art. It is up to you to distinguish between the differences. Why not walk into that gallery and instead of looking around, buy something. Take it home with you and live with it for a while. Listen to what it says to you and take stock of how you feel seeing something so meaningful around you day after day.
Listen to your voice as you describe this small oil painting by a relatively unknown artist to your family. You know deep down it does not mean as much to them as it does to you but since you paid little for it, they can live with it if it makes you happy. You try to convince them that this artist is on his way up and you want to buy now while you can afford to buy.
The artist does not know you are interested in his work but you have seen how shabbily he is dressed. Your business is only across the street and you see him carrying in loads of painting and you have developed an interest in him, as well. He could very well your grandson, had you any. As it is you are a grandmother in spirit only. Strays have always had a place in your heart and you suspect that is why this person’s art appeals to you.
His art gives you the feeling there is more around the corner and you, for one, want to know what it is. In other words when you first saw this picture, it reminded you so much of yourself peeking through the blinds in your upstairs jewelry shop. Just like in this painting there’s a window with white crosses against a drab and occasional dab of bright blues and yellows background, suggestive of blinds, and a shape of a figure looking out. The rest is stark.
You identify with this figure. Oh, not really, but you know what I mean. Even unknowingly, he seems to be saying something about you. Art has opened a door for you. You are appreciative. And you believe this artist will go to eventually become very successful. How can you convince your husband and daughter that you must have more?
The above is a bit of folly I invested with a few minutes of my time. I wanted to paint a picture of how art is not an inanimate picture on your walls but a beautiful truth that keeps on urging you onward. In other words, Art is responsive to our many moods. Judy Nagle, author of a text by that name (Alfred Publishing Company, 1980 Sherman Oaks, California) knew that.
As I browse through the book I am amazed at how no one seems to understand that we as a society live surrounded by the arts in one form or another. Art meets all our needs in one form or another: Art as a business consists not in just the selling of painting and sculptures and art objects, but in the advertising and the promotion and education. Art says to us our business sense is all wrong, or it says to us, yes, that is the right proportion. It is as life itself is; both are programmed toward balance of our emotional states.
This book starts out by telling what art is, then it shows us its many facets: The arts are theatrical productions; films, paintings and sculpture and what can been seen and understood by the eye; interactions with it in the form of dancing; it is in poetry and it is in the everywhere, even in our business dealings.
Every prospective business man is a prospective art dealer. A business man or woman knows how to sell and if they are art dealers they know art. (Or they want to know art) Why are the two so often separated by unseen but known barriers? The two, when combined need not take over the other’s territory, only enhance it.
More good business people need to get involved in collecting good art and genuine artists and art dealer need to become better business dealers. Why is this so? So the broad line separating them will shrink. As it now stands art is so overridden by the ridiculous and those out to shock that genuine art suffers; likewise, business people are so straight laced that they need the relaxation and new ideas that only art can bring. In other words, each can help rid the other of its immoral and uncouth and degrading habits.