Calculating the real value of the art you own

By Howard Chua-Eoan

At this year’s Frieze Masters, the annual arts fair in Regent’s Park, nine prints of spiders made me catch my breath. The arachnids were a complete set of Ode à Ma Mère by Louise Bourgeois, who used the creepy-crawlies to illustrate her relationship with her mother. Her most famous expressions of the theme are the gargantuan sculptures in museums like the Guggenheim in Bilbao and the Tate Modern in London.

What made me gasp was the image at the lower right corner: a tall spider, either languid or exhausted, in some sort of conversation with a tiny member of her species hanging by threads. It’s almost identical to a Bourgeois print I’d purchased at a charity dinner almost three decades ago. I didn’t know of its link to her larger work, of which only 90 complete sets were made. The Frieze series was priced at £62,000 ($80,000); I paid a few hundred dollars for mine.

Momentarily, I felt like an Antiques Roadshow participant at the moment an expert passes judgment on a dusty keepsake. But, very quickly, my expectations deflated. My spider is a test print. Though bearing an autograph, it’s an out-of-context artifact separated from its eight other eight-legged kin. It might pay for a month’s rent, if that. As they often say so consolingly on the show, it’s a priceless tale to pass on to your children. Alas, my spider has a very thin storyline.

Grousing about artistic windfalls — or the lack thereof — has a corrective: Vincent van Gogh. During his lifetime, he managed to sell only one work, Red Vineyard in Arles, for 400 French francs in March 1890. And the sale may have been a sympathy purchase by the sister of a friend. A few months later, van Gogh shot himself in the chest. The amount initially paid for Red Vineyard, translated into current prices, was about $2,000. In 2022, it was auctioned for $117 million.

Much of the credit for his posthumous fame goes to Johanna van Gogh-Bonger, the widow of his brother Theo. She inherited not only most of the surviving paintings but, with Vincent’s letters to his brother, helped propagate his now legendary status as the unappreciated outsider.

She provided not just the “provenance” — the expert term for the documentation that authenticates a piece — but the stories that enhanced them, the sort of narrative afterlife that admirers pass along. Walking through the beautifully curated National Gallery’s current retrospective in London, you also waft through a memory cloud of van Gogh’s stories.

So is there a way of weaving van Gogh into my spidey story to augment the lowly status of my print? Bear with me as I try to find the minimal degrees of separation.

Van Gogh’s impasto — his thick, textured application of paint — is echoed in the work of Frank Auerbach, who may be the world’s greatest living painter. Coincidentally, more than a score of his London cityscapes are on exhibition at the Offer Waterman Gallery in Mayfair, not far from the National Gallery. In the 1990s, Auerbach found himself to be the partial basis for a character (originally called Aurach) in The Emigrants by the novelist W.G. Sebald. Unamused, the painter got the writer to rename the character.

A lot of the material Sebald used to assemble his portrait of the artist was taken from a 1990 book on Auerbach by Robert Hughes, perhaps the preeminent and certainly the most thunderous art critic of the late 20th century. I used to work with Hughes at Time magazine. Around Christmas 2000, while working there, I found a small plastic sculpture dumped outside his office. The piece, by Japanese pop artist Takashi Murakami, had been sent to Hughes as part of the annual holiday gift program by the family of philanthropist Peter Norton (of antiviral software fame). It was an edition of 1,000 pieces. Hughes didn’t care to have one in his sight, with or without a Murakami autograph. Philistine that I am (and recognizing Murakami’s anime style), I scooped it up.

So my Murakami sits in a room a few steps away from ma petite Bourgeois in New York. I’ve checked the prices online over the last quarter century. At one point, the toy (which opens up to a mini-disc) seemed to be worth nearly $7,000 — though I can’t seem to find that valuation now. While there are asking prices as high as $3,000, sales seem to be in the $1,500 range. The trend seems to be downwards as the rest of those 1,000 plastic monsters go to market. Is mine worth more because Hughes the fearsome art critic hated it enough to throw it out? Or is it worth even less because he literally trashed it? I’m not testing the market to find out.

Van Gogh to Auerbach, Sebald to Hughes, Murakami to Bourgeois: My art story is priceless, provided you don’t care about money. For now, Murakami’s Oval will remain steps away from my bedroom spider. It is sitting atop the toilet tank in my bathroom in New York.