Brian - buy Old Masters now!
March 30 2015
Picture: The Times
There was a good piece in the Mail by Sarah Oliver looking at the giddy end of the contemporary art market. It had some good lines from the Great Brian:
‘I don’t think we should worry about it from a cultural aspect because what’s being exported are a lot of tenth-rate works of art by people who are always going to be irredeemably tenth-rate when we look back on them.
‘They are selling for huge amounts of money and we should say “Whoopee!”. It’s an utterly absurd market for poor-quality, high-fashion oligarch art.
'I have no worries about this disappearing from view because the people who create it do more and more of the same.
'If you’ve seen one Rothko you’ve seen them all, Jeff Koons had one silly idea and then another, Warhol could be painting Chairman Mao or Marilyn Monroe, it’s the same picture.
‘It’s a fashionable fraud and if people want to waste their money then let them because what they are buying is of no historic importance.’
And Brian adds that if he had $50m, he'd go out and by Old Masters, for as Philip Hoffman, chief executive of The Fine Art Group, says:
‘Now is the time for buying great old masters which have gone out of fashion.
'There are only 20 or 30 artists every century whose name everyone knows and who remain collectable.
'There are thousands of contemporary artists out there: the key question is which of them will be among the greats?’
I agree!
