Contrast this with the world of twenty, fifty, or a hundred years ago to truly understand the difference. At the turn of the twentieth century, for example, people were still riding horseback in many places (and not primarily for recreation), Pierre and Marie Curie had just a decade before accidentally stumbled upon a mysterious substance with unusual properties (uranium), the Daguerreotype was in fairly common use as an inexpensive way to reproduce the likeness of its subject through a photographic-like process, in many places in the United States roadways were still largely unpaved dirt, and, if you can believe this, the whole of Paris was still surrounded by massive fortifications. It was a very, very different world. In the 19th century world an extremely exposed and marketed artist, and multitudes of exquisite works of art, were very rare indeed. For artists of that period, life's challenges (survival) rather than the challenges of business (today's intense competition) made it, oddly, both more difficult and much easier for artists of that time to succeed.
Now, in our twenty-first century art world, this is both the worst and the best of times -- for the collector and, surprisingly, for the artist. The buying public as well as private collectors sometimes find that confusion reigns, especially when it comes to selecting and purchasing art from the vast pool of artists and artwork available these days. The problem is that people don't have a way (except perhaps through certain informed art dealers) to discern (beyond the blue-chip world) what's worth collecting and what's not. To make sense of it all requires taking a look at the various levels of the artworld.
Copyright 2015 Eric Jonsson. All rights reserved.
U n i t e d S t a t e s E u r o p e S o u t h A m e r i c a A s i a
Direction for the 21st Century p.2
BY ERIC JONSSON
