Selling Art, Antiques and Collectables

The Impacts of Where You Sell and When

Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

A question often asked by owners and collectors who want to sell their art, antiques and collectables is “what will this be worth in the marketplace now?” (That is the Market Value).

In many instances, the answer is that it depends on condition, rarity, and provenance. However, there are two other crucial variables to consider: where you are buying and selling, and when.

The Geography of Desire

Markets are not neutral. They are made of people who carry their histories, aesthetic allegiances, and cultural memories into the auction room. A colonial-era needlepoint sampler made in Pennsylvania carries the particular domestic life of the mid-Atlantic and one that resonates most with buyers whose own sense of the past shares those environs. Offer the sampler at a Philadelphia sale, where the period it represents mirrors cultural memory, and you will find bidders for whom it is not merely decorative but personally meaningful. Offer the same thing in California and you are asking buyers to feel something for a history that was never theirs.

The same principle operates wherever objects and their origins are bound together. Pueblo pottery and Navajo jewelry achieve prices in the Southwest that their counterparts in New England may not approach. Not because the work is any less fine in Connecticut, but because the collectors with the deepest knowledge and the most personal connection to the tradition are concentrated in the region that produced it. The great Southwestern auction houses understand this, and they schedule accordingly.

Wmpearl, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons

Similarly, Nineteenth-century French and Italian decorative arts find their most competitive bidding on the European continent, where the cultural inheritance is direct and the pool of specialist buyers dense. American furniture, the great case goods of New England and the painted country pieces of Pennsylvania travel poorly to England, even though individual pieces would be recognized anywhere as fine work.

The online revolution has flattened some of this as major auction platforms reach bidders worldwide. Top of the market items are less influenced by regional impact, where sophisticated buyers find their quarry wherever it surfaces. But beneath that level, in the middle range where most collectors actually operate, geography still exerts its pressure. The buyer who knows the local market has an advantage over the less seasoned collector.

Time is of the Essence

Time, the second variable that impacts the value of objects, plays a consequential role.

Andy Warhol is the most thoroughly documented case study in the posthumous realm. During his lifetime he was famous, widely collected, and already expensive by the standards of living artists. In 1970, a Campbell's Soup Can painting set the auction record for a work by a living American artist when it sold for $60,000 at Parke-Bernet. By 1978, another early canvas had reached $95,000, purchased originally, in 1962, for $1,300. While significant, these were numbers that belonged to the market for a living artist, a market subject to the fluctuations of fashion, the possibility of overproduction, and the ordinary contingencies of a career still in progress.

Monsieur a l'interieur, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons

Then the artist dies, after which there will be no new work, and this transforms their market. Warhol died in 1987; by 2022, the 1964 Shot Sage Blue Marilyn brought $195 million at Christie's New York, the highest price ever achieved for a 20th-century artwork. The painting had not changed. What had changed was everything surrounding it: the supply, the consolidated reputation, the passage of enough time for the culture to decide, definitively, what Warhol meant.

Within a year of Warhol’s passing, Sotheby’s had conducted the sale of his personal collection and buyers paid sums for his mundane possessions that would have been incomprehensible attached to anyone else's belongings. This personal-effects phenomenon is distinct from the artwork phenomenon, though related. When a figure of genuine historical or cultural significance dies, the objects they owned acquire a weight they did not carry before. This is what anthropologists describe as the "magical law of contagion," the impulse to feel contact with the residue an extraordinary person leaves in the things they handled. It explains why the personal estates of figures like David Bowie, whose family auctioned roughly a third of his art collection in 2016 for approximately $40 million, or Yves Saint Laurent, whose collection with Pierre Bergé realized a record $350 million at auction after Saint Laurent's death.

The practical question for the collector who can’t afford top-tier market acquisitions, is “how do I apply this principle in the market level where I do collect?”

It may look like the signed guitar of a musician whose reputation is still being formed or the personal letters of a writer whose work is just finding a permanent place in history. The working drawings of an architect, or the costume jewelry of a film star, or the annotated books of a thinker, all of which are objects that carry the trace of a significant life and whose value will be determined by what history eventually decides about the person who owned them.

The Discipline of Reading Both

These nuances require the collector to think about time and place not as immutable conditions but as forces in motion. In 20 years, the sampler that finds no audience in San Francisco today may find a passionate one if the cultural landscape shifts. An artist whose prices have plateaued during his or her lifetime may be re-evaluated after his or her death. The collector who bought early may find they can no longer afford it or they may have amassed a treasure trove.

Collectors who understand this learn to ask not only what something is worth today, but where it would be worth the most, and when. And what significance did the object play in the cultural landscape of our existence. Those questions, asked consistently and answered honestly, have a way of changing what you buy, and why, and where you sell and to whom.