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Toronto building boom

Re: Hirst etc. How much is anything in the art market actually worth? What someone will pay for it, I suppose - however much one has to throw at the problem.

Getting back to the Chicago comparison that Ladies Mile sets up - between the American and British/Canadian collecting pattern of the 1880s and beyond, when the States was flush with robber baron wealth and Toronto was a colonial city - I believe that the old French salon system was actually rather good when you consider that it packed large numbers of people into the exhibitions. But the independant dealers, like Durand-Ruel, were smart in the way they targeted collectors by setting up smaller, more intimate galleries and catering to their clients that way. Our rich American cousins, who looked to France for cultural leadership, hoovered up brand new Impressionist paintings in large numbers ( and all but ignored earlier works by these artists ... ) that way, and that forced up prices for those artists in Paris for those who were the true progressive patrons and had bought in the 1860s and '70s. There's also the question of how to put together a good collection at a considerably later date ( the Courtauld in London, for instance ) when a fuller picture of the art of a particular time is available. There are advantages to taking that approach because the collection can acquire a range of works that simply wouldn't have been available without that "bigger picture".
 
... and on that point, and getting back to the subject of this thread, I believe that the passage of time will allow us to see connections within our present "building boom" that we can't fully appreciate because we're so caught up in the moment - connections between the mainstream neo-Modernists and those we've considered to be outside of that group, maybe.
 
Urban Shocker said:
Re: Hirst etc. How much is anything in the art market actually worth? What someone will pay for it, I suppose - however much one has to throw at the problem.

Getting back to the Chicago comparison that Ladies Mile sets up - between the American and British/Canadian collecting pattern of the 1880s and beyond, when the States was flush with robber baron wealth and Toronto was a colonial city - I believe that the old French salon system was actually rather good when you consider that it packed large numbers of people into the exhibitions. But the independant dealers, like Durand-Ruel, were smart in the way they targeted collectors by setting up smaller, more intimate galleries and catering to their clients that way. Our rich American cousins, who looked to France for cultural leadership, hoovered up brand new Impressionist paintings in large numbers ( and all but ignored earlier works by these artists ... ) that way, and that forced up prices for those artists in Paris for those who were the true progressive patrons and had bought in the 1860s and '70s. There's also the question of how to put together a good collection at a considerably later date ( the Courtauld in London, for instance ) when a fuller picture of the art of a particular time is available. There are advantages to taking that approach because the collection can acquire a range of works that simply wouldn't have been available without that "bigger picture".
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And who were the true progressive patrons? Not the British and the Canadians, that's for sure. Buying later is better because then you know what's good? How does that jibe with the increase in price that comes one everyone knows what's significant? American artists were just beginning to make their mark int he international scene and Whistler, Sargent and Mary Cassatt had their early successes in Paris, not London. And plenty of American collectors such as the Cone sisters and Isabella Stewart Gardner visited, hosted, lived with and maintained close friendships with the artists and curators they collected or worked with. It didn't simply fall off the back of a truck.
 
You will keep droning on about the British and Canadians, won't you petal? Obviously, Paris wasn't the centre of their universe, as it was for the rich Americans who were so cleverly groomed by the Paris dealers and the artists who sold them still-wet canvases, that's all. Everyone was trying to separate wealthy Americans from their money in those days - the Brits by marrying them, the French by selling them paintings. Americans were the late-19th century version of what the Chinese and the Indians are nowadays. It was open season on them.
 
Ladies Mile said:
And who were the true progressive patrons?
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Jean-Baptiste Faure, who bought Manet's 1862 Le déjeuner sur l'herbe ( the Courtauld in London has an earlier version ) and his 1866 The Fifer, as well as 50 or 60 early Monets done many years before the artist began cranking out haystacks for Americans, is one.
 
Victor Chocquet and Ernest Hoschedé also collected early Impressionist paintings before the French dealers opened up the American market.
 
Urban Shocker said:
You will keep droning on about the British and Canadians, won't you petal? Obviously, Paris wasn't the centre of their universe, as it was for the rich Americans who were so cleverly groomed by the Paris dealers and the artists who sold them still-wet canvases, that's all. Everyone was trying to separate wealthy Americans from their money in those days - the Brits by marrying them, the French by selling them paintings. Americans were the late-19th century version of what the Chinese and the Indians are nowadays. It was open season on them.
Click to expand...

You are simply unable to admit that the 19th Century British had trashy, ugly, deeply vulgar taste in all forms of art even in comparison to *gasp*choke* Americans. As for Canada, we were pretty much a blank slate at that point, so less at fault.
 
Ladies Mile said:
Buying later is better because then you know what's good? How does that jibe with the increase in price that comes one everyone knows what's significant?
Click to expand...

Oh, petal, all kinds of bargains are to be had in the secondary market, Samuel Courtauld being a good example of a collector who bought low, when he could, and at a later date, when certain artists were no longer the high-fashion thrills your beloved, rich American art wraiths hoovered up. Undervalued late works by artists ( Monet and Picasso being excellent examples ) also provide collecting opportunities during their lifetimes.
 
You have failed to negate a single point I have made about American collectors. Fact is, Americans went in for significant art in a major way and the UK (and its empire) did not. 100 years after the fact MoMA is significant in a way that the Tate just isn't and no Canadian museum could be. Canada did not have the actual capital to fund acquisitions, but the UK had no such excuse and drivel about how picking through the remains is somehow superior is ridiculous.

There is very little--indeed, pretty much nothing--I admire about the US, but the notion that none of them knew what they were buying is absurd.

Your version of history has any way they acquired work being somehow the wrong way. Your ignoring the fact that American artists, as well as architects, were far more at the avant-garde themselves is equally telling.
 
It's not about negating anything, merely putting into context the different collecting patterns of different cultures, based on the example of the big shiny bean, raised earlier. You're the one who brought the Impressionists and Post Impressionists into the discussion, so it's fair to locate their American collectors in that context: they weren't the earliest collectors, nor the smartest.
 
Ladies Mile said:
Fact is, Americans went in for significant art in a major way and the UK (and its empire) did not.
Click to expand...

Well, they certainly loaded up on Impressionism, and forced the prices up, because that's what the French dealers were selling them. But if you want to play some silly nationalist game, Impressionism owed much to Turner, who was British and painted earlier, and Monet encountered and was influenced by his art when he and Pissarro lived in London.
 
Ladies Mile said:
Your version of history has any way they acquired work being somehow the wrong way. Your ignoring the fact that American artists, as well as architects, were far more at the avant-garde themselves is equally telling.
Click to expand...

Not the wrong way, just their way. And a reasonable case could be made that the collectors, and the artists who were cranking out canvases for them to buy while still wet, expressed the intersection of a cultural industry as much as an avant-garde.
 
American visual art didn't really come into its own, internationally speaking, until the post-WW2 years, though the 1900 Paris Universal Exposition has been seen as a bold early attempt to package their work as distinctively American.
 
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