The Everyman’s Guide to Buying Art

(page 1 of 2)

SEEING ART IN A GALLERY can be an overwhelming experience that churns up waves of emotion, broadens the mind, lightens the soul and occasionally moves a person to tears. Buying art in a gallery can be an overwhelming experience that churns up waves of nausea, boggles the mind, lightens the wallet and occasionally moves a person to tears.

It’s hard to put a warm-fuzzy spin on the openby- appointment world of hushed white rooms and discreetly placed price lists—an arena that, rightly or wrongly, has a bit of a reputation for making regular folk feel like they’ve just tracked in mud. But the tectonic plates are shifting in our little swath of Southern California’s art scene. San Diego painters, sculptors and other creative types are banding together to put on crowd-pleasing group shows, and those in the business of selling art are doing the unthinkable: They’re being very gentle.

Case in point: On a recent Friday night in La Jolla, a pair of synchronized gallery openings boast (on the surface, at least) all the snobby accouterments people have come to expect from blackturtleneck events. Vintage photographs by the late Andre de Dienes line the walls of Joseph Bellows Gallery, almost all of them featuring the fashion photographer’s one-time fiancée, Marilyn Monroe.

According to a laminated price sheet next to the giant flower arrangement at the front desk, the prints sell for a gasp-inducing couple thousand dollars each.

Directly upstairs at R.B. Stevenson Gallery, people are sipping wine as they cluster around 11 oil paintings by Jason Godeke, an artist who creates lush, fantastical still lifes full of fruit, flowers, small nude figures and Fisher-Price Little People.

Sure, there are some esoteric mysteries, some shocking price tags ($1,000 to $7,500) and more than a few people wearing intimidating little librarian glasses. At the same time, the featured artist is surprisingly down-to-earth, the gallery staff downright charming, the bartender friendly and generous with his pours, and . . . hey, this is kind of fun.

Clearly, an olive branch has been offered here, and we’re seeing similar gestures all around town. San Diego isn’t one of those big pretentious gallery hubs dominated by an art-selling cartel, but it’s no cultural backwoods, either. A person can hardly walk down the block on a Friday night without finding himself in the middle of a neighborhood gallery crawl. Plus, we’re home to several emerging artists and art genres—but not a lot of bloodthirsty art buyers, which is why some people (wealthy out-of-towners in particular) refer to San Diego as one of the best-kept secrets in the art world these days. (We’ll get back to that, but suffice it to say that you’d be wise to buy art right here, right now.)

The many, many local artists who want to place their work in the hands of appreciative collectors, and the gallery owners who need to make a living, have done their part to remove some of the mystery in putting original art on your walls. Now it’s your turn to step up to the plate.

But how do you pick the good stuff? Glad you asked, because there’s no hard science to this. If you’re the kind of person who needs validation, on-line services such as ArtNet.com, AskArt.com and ArtFact.com provide everything from artist bios and works for sale to price databases and e-mailed market alerts when any of the pieces come up for sale in a gallery or auction house.

A good old-fashioned Google search will also clue you in to past shows and possible reviews. But in the end, your critique— your visceral reaction to the work itself, minus the artist’s back story—takes precedence over anyone else’s scholarly opinion. So trust it. You could be on to something.

“The more you educate yourself, the more confidence you’re going to gain,” says Patricia Frischer, coordinator for the arts information database San Diego Visual Arts Network (another great source for local gallery information). To that end, SDVAN offers occasional workshops that cater to fledgling buyers, with lectures, collector roundtables, even practice auctions using play money. In one of the first exercises, students are asked to respond with a simple yes or no to about 30 works of art flashed on a digital screen. The object of the exercise is “to instill the confidence in them that they can say, ‘I know what I like,’ ” Frischer says.

WHICH BRINGS US TO THE FIRST STEP to becoming a happy art collector: identifying your tastes. Do you dig the crazy splashes of abstract expressionism? Does the exquisite detail of postmodern art suck you in? Are you highly impressed with the impressionists? If you’re not sure—or if your brain went numb just now— then you need to get out a little more. No, really. The more art you see, the more trained your eye will become for spotting work that is a cut above.

Opportunities to browse abound, beginning with some type of gallery opening or artist’s reception for practically every night of the week in the city. Basically, if the gallery lights are on after dark, consider it an invitation to pop in and have a look around —no strings attached.

Once you’ve signed up for a few of the gallery mailing lists and become part of the marketing matrix, the invitations will come flooding in. The fêtes are as mainstream as the San Diego Art Institute’s massive juried shows, where hordes of art enthusiasts stand shoulder-to-shoulder and stroller-to-stroller inside the Museum of the Living Artist in Balboa Park, and as funky as the artist parties at Magpie, a vintage clothing boutique and gallery in South Park that has featured the art of Pamela Jaeger, Tim Mc- Cormick, Jason Sherry and a host of other edgy up-and-comers.

Do you like what you read? Subscribe to San Diego Magazine »