A Fine art expert should be able to help somebody to build a fine art collection. BUT: - does he has the experience of buying - does he has the experience of auctions and the auction after sales..very common all over the world - does he has the experience necessary to discern the quality - does he has the experience to guess what will be sold at higher prices
I can go on and go on for pages. A good art expert needs a lot of experience in multiple domains.
Buying fine art requires experience, more or less, depending on who you are buying. If you buy from a gallery exhibiting a painter named X - he needs the skills to bring the prices down from the asked prices, since the sales prices of an item in a gallery usually reflects 50% of it for the gallery and 50 % of it for the artist. If you buy from an auction, you need to have the best relationship with the auction house to know the provenance, the hidden problems with artwork, etc. This info will be given to known experts to the auction house, or to experts with a strong CV. If you buy from a collector, the expert needs to know if the seller is aware of the real value of an item if this is not a chapel ( a house or condo where some merchants displaying impossible to sell merchandise). He does need to know how to act with a seller who is not willing to let go of his item below his reserve price. In this first chapter, we immediately understand that an expert needs to have extensive experience.
Experience with auction houses.
An auction house wants to sell your art, no matter what. To do so, they want the lowest reserve price possible, this is negotiable, and of course, the experience will help to obtain the highest possible reserve price. The auction houses taking a minimum 25 % of the sales prices from the seller and 25 % from the buyer, yes, that's correct 50 % !!! For high-value paintings, the % is decreasing, but still, no wonder that you have so many auction houses in Good shape or Bad shape. I will explain later if you have a high-end value painting ( more than 10 M $ ), you can negotiate the sellers premium with an auction house. Also, with art value above the 1 M $, you can ask to receive an advance on sales. All this will happen easier if you deal with an experienced art expert.
You have excellent and bad auction houses! Bad auction houses are the ones who can't pay to the seller for the sold item. Weird? Yes, it's weird since they have only their functioning money to invest in a sale, publicity, catalogs, etc. It happens more than we think. I had to deal with an auction from the East coast a couple of years ago; I don't want to mention their name since they are starting all over recently after having been one of the oldest auction houses in the US. I was a regular buyer and seller at their auction house, until this auction where I had for 150K $ items sold and could not receive my money.
Of course, sometimes you have bad customers who are not paying their debt to the auction house, and it becomes tough for an auction house to pay the seller since they didn't receive their money. It happens, but it's often an internal problem to the auction house: too high reserve prices, too much communication publicity, not enough quality merchandise, etc. I did wait almost seven months to be paid, but I was paid. When you have experienced it, you know what to do before you buy or sell in an auction house. You need to do your homework. Recently an auction house in Belgium, 2 months before Xmas, made a lot of publicity, news articles in the newspapers, announcing a prestige end of year sale, and they were still accepting high-value consignments. This auction house existed exactly one year, and attracted a lot of buyers and sellers, also online. Xmas auction was an enormous success with exceptional furniture, fine art, books, jewelry, etc. The auction house announced that the payments to the sellers would occur after the new year 2014. After the new year, the auction house had disappeared, all items have gone since the buyers came to pick up their items and paid the auction house, but money, auctioneer, employees, desks, room everything was empty! I learned that this auctioneer did the same thing a couple of times at the four corners in France. We had the same sad story a couple of years ago in Scottsdale, AZ ... one day all gone. The reputation of an auction house has to be verified, even if this is one of the oldest auction houses in the country.. always make your homework, and who better than a fine art expert can do this.
