My #1 rule with art collecting is that there is absolutely nothing found in museums that cannot also be found in a living artist somewhere, no matter how impossibly high quality or talented you think it is.
Discussion
Therefore what upsets me is when collectors or patrons not only settle for less, but pay extraordinarily high prices for things that are of lesser quality. In my view it’s creating a market for things that do not deserve the highest prices.
Always a pleasure to hear about your art patronage, Stephen. Perhaps you will inspire more art patrons over time.
It's far more beautiful and uplifting to see voluntary art patronage in the free market, rather than seeing artists allowing themselves to become dependent on government funding, and the compliance trap they enter, in exchange for blood-sweat-and-tears money stolen from taxpayers.
In the background of all of this is the opportunity cost of not buying Bitcoin with this money. So I am looking for something that is so high quality that I am willing to sacrifice a gigantic amount of Bitcoin for it. Otherwise I would be buying Bitcoin, right? I am going out of my way to support certain artists, because that’s how meaningful I find their work to be, and how much I don’t want to take their time for granted. It’s probably hard to convey just how much careful considerations go into these decisions to set aside thousands of dollars for a certain artist and say, “Do what excites you.”
I remember you had a fair amount of rare books. Do you have a decent size painting collection as well?
The website below is what I would consider the most important part of the collection (this is constantly being upgraded) but there’s probably 15 other works.
Since around 2014 the collection went over ten objects, so I started to say, Okay nothing else can enter the collection unless it is good enough to replace the #1 spot and bump everything else down a notch. And that website is the result after 8-9 years of doing this.
2016 was when I lost interest in the second-hand market, because it became a competition of who happened to have more money in order to be the winning bidder, and that had nothing to do with the quality of the art. So I decided to focus only on living artists and do something that no one else was willing to do, which was to take huge bets on artists by myself, and if it didn’t work out then that was my fault. I like how dangerous that is. I like how it scares away other people from wanting to do what I’m doing 😂
Supporting proof of work
Agreed.
Like how this 🟠🟣 is showing me about creativity.
Gonna take a will to encode that and removing the scarce creativity OS I was so used to.
I guess I have a pretty cynical view which is that the commercial art world helps sometimes with money and attention, but it doesn’t really fulfill the artist’s most ambitious dreams, the kinds of things that they would do with unlimited resources. There is still a scarcity for opportunities to do that level of work, but Bitcoin does make it easier for patrons to fund those kinds of projects, if they want to.
That’s a great perspective 🤔
For some reason people just expect new musicians and athletes to always be greater than anyone in history, but with visual artists it’s like, “Oh we’ll never be better than the Old Masters so we just do what we can.”
Some insight there.
I understand that it’s not easy (at all) to find these artists, but I know it’s possible and I’m trying to demonstrate it one commission after the other.
It’s a kind of defeatism both in artists and collectors/patrons that I just do not see as being the reality of the situation. I think there are possibly hundreds or thousands of visual artists alive right now who can be at the top of their field/medium given sufficient patronage. I have no idea who most of them are, but I believe they must be out there and can be found 😂
But I do think specifically with athletes and musicians there are much better support systems in place for scouting talent and rewarding them early. Once they have a big enough stage they can usually make a living because their audience scales up. But for visual artists that are working in physical mediums, it probably takes a small number of extremely devoted patrons to provide that same level of support, because the objects of art don’t really scale in digital formats. What makes a visual artist great seems to be lost in translation digitally compared to music or athletic performance. Or the audience is not really there that would appreciate it at a large enough scale.
Athletes, yes because their achievements are measurable, quantifiable.
Musicians, not so much. And that’s why new music is rarely impressive.
I think people with formal musical training will recognize quality music immediately, but that’s a small percentage of the total audience
People know their own limitations as athletes, but then you often hear things like this is a drummer’s drummer or this is a painter’s painter or this is a goldsmith’s goldsmith. And what do they mean by that? I would say that it’s because it would take years of study or practice or appreciation to understand why what those exceptional people are doing is exceptional.
Especially as the population expands. There are sooo many people someone has the talent.
tell me, what's the equivalent today of building something like that 500 years ago, considering lack of cheap energy and subsitence economy?
All of these guys are in India building temples 😂
ha sure they do a great job. but we have to come to our senses and recognize that we're just not able to build anything equivalent, considering limitations they faced at that time. And i don't see that being solved anytime soon.
I mean in Boston a lot of very beautiful stonework was being done just 120-140 years ago. Stonecutting by hand is not really an industry in the US like it was back then, with generations of talent available at all times
Europe is another level though. Walking around you are regularly reminded of what people achieved before the Industrial Revolution.
Yes you could have all the money in the world and probably still have a hard time finding the people who know how to build that and do it in a beautiful way
absolutely, that's my point, in particular without cheap energy and in a subsistence economy with little surplus. How do you get stone extracted from the quarry and then brought on site and then cut to the millimeter and then elevated and attached in an exact fit? How do you manage mutli generational team and architects to do something like that? These freaking cathedrals are still here 900 years later, that's just crazy!
Watkins Glen state park in NY has an incredible stone trail that was built as a make work project during the depression.
Maybe we’ll get back to stone work in America in Q3 when the recession kicks in…
Incredibly beutiful
I’d like to be able to pin this if I can:
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At least I can bookmark it for now