Benjamin Moser: evaluation

Transcript context

…Some of the old master ones, I looked at. Yes. The old masters auction. Well, the top, top of the top of the top is very, very expensive. It’s going for three or four times the estimate, but half of the paintings are not being sold. That means that whereas, with these contemporary auctions, you have this totally hideous-looking stuff that sells for $50 million, and you think, for $50 million you can buy a lot of Dutch paintings. You can buy paintings from the greatest masters. What you see is that the scholarly approach to painting, what the French called amateur, the person who does it out of love and who does it out of study and out of historical scholarship and all that — those people are disappearing. Prints and drawings are the ultimate nerd thing in the art world. That’s for people who really know what they’re doing, who are really scholarly. You can hang a drawing on your wall, but it doesn’t have the what I call — it’s not my phrase, but in the book I say “wall power.” It’s not like having a big Picasso on your wall that everybody thinks, “Wow.” You really have to have gone to grad school in art history to really know what all this stuff is. Maybe if educational standards continue to collapse, by the time I’m a little bit older, the prices will also collapse, and I can afford them. Do you think the growing size of homes and walls and sofas has hurt the market value of a lot of Dutch art? It looks better in a small home.…

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