Illustration auction @HA 0

[tth2]

Elvgren is considered to be the pinnacle of cheesecake art. He's not some nobody in the field.  If illustration art is rising, it seems strange to me that the leading name in that genre is not.  Wouldn't you think if it was weird if comics were red hot except for Action 1, Detective 27 and AF 15?  Or if Ditko ASM pages were plunging while all sorts of mediocre OA was skyrocketing?

Sure there are tons of stocks that are not doing well amidst the stock market boom.  But Elvgren is not the equivalent of some niche stock that most stock investors have never heard of.  In the illustrated art field, he's Apple, Google or Amazon, and those stocks are not sucking.

The only equivalent I can really think of is prime London real estate, but there are obviously political reasons why that sub-asset class is down when real estate across the world is generally up.   

[delekkerste]

1 hour ago, tth2 said:

Elvgren is considered to be the pinnacle of cheesecake art. He's not some nobody in the field.  If illustration art is rising, it seems strange to me that the leading name in that genre is not.  Wouldn't you think if it was weird if comics were red hot except for Action 1, Detective 27 and AF 15?  Or if Ditko ASM pages were plunging while all sorts of mediocre OA was skyrocketing?

Sure there are tons of stocks that are not doing well amidst the stock market boom.  But Elvgren is not the equivalent of some niche stock that most stock investors have never heard of.  In the illustrated art field, he's Apple, Google or Amazon, and those stocks are not sucking.

The only equivalent I can really think of is prime London real estate, but there are obviously political reasons why that sub-asset class is down when real estate across the world is generally up.   

No, there is no Apple, Google or Amazon equivalent in vintage illustration. It is simply not a growth market that is attracting fresh capital like it was when Heritage was promoting and selling the Martignette Collection.   If you have to compare him to a stock, Elvgren is GE or IBM (both of which have been sucking for some time, but have the history and critical mass to potentially reinvent themselves for a new audience/generation...maybe). 

You talk about London real estate being down despite being the world leader for much of the past decade due to sub-sector specific reasons (its still in bubble territory nonetheless).  How is that different from Elvgren?  Obviously there have been some Elvgren-specific headwinds given that the market not only lost its biggest buyer, but his collection was messily dumped on the market almost all at once.

And London real estate is not the only exception...just look at retail, oil, media, etc. which all have their own sector-specific woes causing them to not participate in the Everything Bubble.  

At this point, you are surely just messing with me. 

[delekkerste]

It's not like we haven't seen similar instances before in a hot OA market.  DKR art for example - there was a time when it wasn't ubiquitous, and B+ pages were worth $40-45K.  Then the big sales early in this decade unleashed a flood of supply and suddenly B+ pages were in the teens and $20Ks.  Yes, despite the hot hot hot OA market this decade, there are probably DKR pages worth less today than they were back in 2010/11.  

Same with the McSpidey market, which had a huge hangover after the summer 2012 blowout auctions (including the ASM #328 cover sale).  Again, supply came out of the woodwork after that sale and killed all the demand at higher prices, sending prices lower to clear the market (this is a preview of what the entire market will likely look like during the next generational change-over).  My #299 cover had traded hands at $100K before then, and, after the July 2012 sale, I would have pegged the value at $120-$125K (I bought it for ~40% less during the hangover and I doubt it's back to 2011-12 levels - though, if someone wants to pay me $125K for it, hit me up!)

[PhilipB2k17]

9 hours ago, delekkerste said:

It's not like we haven't seen similar instances before in a hot OA market.  DKR art for example - there was a time when it wasn't ubiquitous, and B+ pages were worth $40-45K.  Then the big sales early in this decade unleashed a flood of supply and suddenly B+ pages were in the teens and $20Ks.  Yes, despite the hot hot hot OA market this decade, there are probably DKR pages worth less today than they were back in 2010/11.  

Same with the McSpidey market, which had a huge hangover after the summer 2012 blowout auctions (including the ASM #328 cover sale).  Again, supply came out of the woodwork after that sale and killed all the demand at higher prices, sending prices lower to clear the market (this is a preview of what the entire market will likely look like during the next generational change-over).  My #299 cover had traded hands at $100K before then, and, after the July 2012 sale, I would have pegged the value at $120-$125K (I bought it for ~40% less during the hangover and I doubt it's back to 2011-12 levels - though, if someone wants to pay me $125K for it, hit me up!)

I wouldn’t give you $125 for it. Or, if I did, I’d immediately flip it. But, I actually do not like most McSpidey art at all. And that cover is not one of his better efforts. But, that’s just me! Obviously, a lot of other people like it, otherwise it would not command the prices it does. 

[delekkerste]

17 minutes ago, PhilipB2k17 said:

I wouldn’t give you $125 for it. Or, if I did, I’d immediately flip it. But, I actually do not like most McSpidey art at all. And that cover is not one of his better efforts. But, that’s just me! Obviously, a lot of other people like it, otherwise it would not command the prices it does. 

There are only a few black costume McSpidey covers, and very few McSpidey covers overall with great, full body, front-facing action poses.  Not one of his better efforts?  There are actually very few McSpidey covers that I would personally rather have than this one! 

Edited October 15, 2017 by delekkerste

[PhilipB2k17]

35 minutes ago, delekkerste said:

There are only a few black costume McSpidey covers, and very few McSpidey covers overall with great, full body, front-facing action poses.  Not one of his better efforts?  There are actually very few McSpidey covers that I would personally rather have than this one! 

Maybe it looks better is black and white, then? I actually like the #298 cover better. 

But, I’m one of those people who isn’t a McSpidey fan. So....

[tth2]

12 hours ago, delekkerste said:

No, there is no Apple, Google or Amazon equivalent in vintage illustration. 

It's all relative.  Elvgren is the rockstar of the cheesecake illustration art world in the same way that Apple, Google, Amazon, Facebook etc. are rockstars of the stock world.  Are you telling me he's not?

[tth2]

12 hours ago, delekkerste said:

You talk about London real estate being down despite being the world leader for much of the past decade due to sub-sector specific reasons (its still in bubble territory nonetheless).  How is that different from Elvgren?  Obviously there have been some Elvgren-specific headwinds given that the market not only lost its biggest buyer, but his collection was messily dumped on the market almost all at once.

  It's a totally different situation.  London real estate is down because of a very specific political event with huge economic consequences.  Absent Brexit, I doubt London real estate, and particularly prime London real estate, would be down.

An equivalent situation would be if laws were passed restricting the ability of people to own cheesecake art.

[delekkerste]

2 hours ago, tth2 said:

It's all relative.  Elvgren is the rockstar of the cheesecake illustration art world in the same way that Apple, Google, Amazon, Facebook etc. are rockstars of the stock world.  Are you telling me he's not?

I'm telling you that this is one of those analogies that breaks down because of a false equivalence.  Amazon, Google, etc. are rock stars of the stock world and are trading at bubble valuations because they dominate both the here and now and expectations for the future.  They (as well as London real estate) are huge, deep, liquid markets, and so it makes all the sense in the world that, if there is a surfeit of liquidity in the system, these markets would get a big share and valuations would soar.  That is not at all the case with regards to cheesecake pin-up art, which is essentially a dead art form that has a very very very very very very very niche collector base that almost surely skews older.  No reason to believe that macro factors would necessarily dominate the niche-specific factors for this sub-market (or other sub-markets with similar profiles, like fantasy art - aside from the Frazetta market, which has its own dynamics, I don't see the rest of that market participating in the art bubble and that's largely due to specific micro factors as well).   

You also seem to assume that the rest of the cheesecake and illustration art market is on fire (implying that it is getting its fair share of the easy money out there) and it's only Elvgrens that are depressed, which is not accurate at all.  And, I don't know why you think only a macro factor like Brexit can cause a market or sub-market to correct; why not a huge run-up in price followed by the death of the largest buyer and the subsequent dumping of his entire collection?  Surely you can see how that could fundamentally disrupt the supply/demand balance in a very very very very very very very niche market for some period of time.  Like I said, we've even seen it happen in the more liquid DKR and McSpidey markets this decade.

[PhilipB2k17]

Comic book OA is very susceptible to the kinds of bubbles and price fluctuations Gene is talking about. It only takes 2 or 3 well is off collectors to create a price bubble for certain OA art categories. And if a Category gets ignited by a high roller, all the pieces start coming out of the woodwork to cash in. This floods the market and you get a price correction. They aren’t commodities like Comic books that are regularly traded and sold, so you can get accurate prices. It only takes a few “comp” sales to drive up prices for a particular artist run across the board. 

By the same token, when one or two of the big guns leaves the Hobby, those remaining have less competition for the best stuff so it becomes a buyer’s market. 

Edited October 16, 2017 by PhilipB2k17

[delekkerste]

As a somewhat related aside, I was listening to a BBC 4 radio program this morning about IKEA furniture, and one commentator thought it was kind of crazy that people are buying IKEA furniture and then taking steps ("IKEA hacks") to make it look like vintage furniture - at a time when the vintage furniture market is hugely out of favor and prices on, say, Victorian furniture, are, in the commentator's words, "cheap". 

Just because money is easy doesn't mean that markets that don't have a large buyer base with critical mass (or, worse yet, that are in a secular decline due to changing tastes, habits, technology and/or social norms) are going to benefit like the things that do have critical mass, are of the present and/or future, and have a deep pool of buyers.  

[ESeffinga]

At the risk of going completely off the rails with the topic, I thought the deal is that the vintage market for certain kinds of furniture is in the toilet. Since that stuff tends to run in fashion cycles, much the way that comics have their hot and cool trends. I confess to not being an expert, or even paying half attention to that market closely at all, but as a casual observer, I would think the IKEA market is driven by a certain aesthetic. That aesthetic being clean simple lines, and hard geometric shapes. In the school of mid-century, Bauhaus and nordic styles, which kind of feed back and forth these days in modern furniture design. I would personally expect that people that tend to shop at IKEA are looking for that type of stuff.

From what I've seen casually, that style of vintage material with real value has been doing pretty darn well price-wise. Certainly well enough that the IKEA version of a given product is many multiples cheaper than it's vintage counterpart or source of inspiration. So for the same reasons someone may want a cover recreation of a Kirby cover because the real thing is out of reach, people buy an IKEA bookshelf and work it over?

An old Victorian bookshelf, or a Louis the XIV side table, while infinitely better made, and altogether higher quality material will never look like a Kirby Cover.
Or well, I'm guessing I made my larger point.

I'm sure if a real equivalent can be found from the genuine article for cheaper than the market would actually bear, someone would be capitalizing on that all day long.

And so to bring it back around to the topic. Until the Elvgren and larger pinup market becomes a "thing" again, those pieces will continue to lag in price. I can't help but wonder in today's environment and evolution of societal norms, if/when the (arguable) objectification of women as voyeristic "pinups" will ever come back into fashion. Especially in the long term as younger folks age into their collecting years. I'm sure they will continue to be a niche item, but at what price?

As an aside: How are the prices of Avengelyne comics? Shi? Warrior Nun whassername?

 

Edited October 16, 2017 by ESeffinga

[vodou]

22 minutes ago, delekkerste said:

Just because money is easy...

Somebody please tell the CBs that easy money does not create demand, it only marginally (at the margin, speculators) lures back existing demand that was backing off at price equilibrium.

[vodou]

6 minutes ago, ESeffinga said:

Until the Elvgren and larger pinup market becomes a "thing" again, those pieces will continue to lag in price. I can't help but wonder in today's environment and evolution of societal norms, if/when the (arguable) objectification of women as voyeristic "pinups" will ever come back into fashion. Especially in the long term as younger folks age into their collecting years. I'm sure they will continue to be a niche item, but at what price?

As an aside: How are the prices of Avengelyne comics? Shi? Warrior Nun whassername?

 

Our porn (real hardcore and everything up to and including in 2017) trumps handily (err, no pun intended?) your grandfather's (Elvgren and the like), as it's really just about getting the job done. Right? Just the way it is. Not to mention the complete lack of $$$ needed for today's too.

The fact that the art is art is nice, but does not compel anybody without that vintage nostalgia to pony up...six figures for a single figure

Edited October 16, 2017 by vodou

[tth2]

1 hour ago, delekkerste said:

As a somewhat related aside, I was listening to a BBC 4 radio program this morning about IKEA furniture, and one commentator thought it was kind of crazy that people are buying IKEA furniture and then taking steps ("IKEA hacks") to make it look like vintage furniture - at a time when the vintage furniture market is hugely out of favor and prices on, say, Victorian furniture, are, in the commentator's words, "cheap". 

Just because money is easy doesn't mean that markets that don't have a large buyer base with critical mass (or, worse yet, that are in a secular decline due to changing tastes, habits, technology and/or social norms) are going to benefit like the things that do have critical mass, are of the present and/or future, and have a deep pool of buyers.  

It cracks me up that you're running around yelling "We're in a bubble! We're in a bubble of everything!" and then at the same time you keep pointing out all these things that are not in a bubble. 

Methinks thou doth protest too much. 

[delekkerste]

 

53 minutes ago, ESeffinga said:

And so to bring it back around to the topic. Until the Elvgren and larger pinup market becomes a "thing" again, those pieces will continue to lag in price. I can't help but wonder in today's environment and evolution of societal norms, if/when the (arguable) objectification of women as voyeristic "pinups" will ever come back into fashion. Especially in the long term as younger folks age into their collecting years. I'm sure they will continue to be a niche item, but at what price?

 

47 minutes ago, vodou said:

Our porn (real hardcore and everything up to and including in 2017) trumps handily (err, no pun intended?) your grandfather's (Elvgren and the like), as it's really just about getting the job done. Right? Just the way it is. Not to mention the complete lack of $$$ needed for today's too.

The fact that the art is art is nice, but does not compel anybody without that vintage nostalgia to pony up...six figures for a single figure

A lot of this material was/is supposed to transcend both present societal norms and nostalgia because it's become "Americana".  It's a not dissimilar argument used by comic book/comic art aficionados who insist that at least the good stuff will continue to be in demand and rise in value despite the fact that fewer and fewer young people are reading comics (and, to the extent they are, it's not the vintage material we collect). To an extent, the art does stand on its own and, objectification or not, many will always appreciate a well-crafted image of a beautiful woman.  But, at what price...who can say for sure. 

The more I think about it, the more I think just about everything that we collect here is going to take a big hit due to changing tastes, demographics, etc. in the coming decades.  It's surely going to happen at some point - I mean, will the biggest thing in 100 years (the year 2117) be this stuff we so revere from the 1960s-1980s?  C'mon, really (that means you, Comic Connoisseur )?  Seems far-fetched, much as the things that were popular in 1917 are, by and large, not popular today (and there is an infinite amount more content being created these days than back then to compete with things from the past).  So, if time is going to win out in the end (seriously, who is going to care about all the trivial things that comic collectors these days obsess about in a hundred years...please), it just becomes a question of when, not if, things start to fall by the wayside.  

Edited October 16, 2017 by delekkerste

[delekkerste]

3 minutes ago, tth2 said:

It cracks me up that you're running around yelling "We're in a bubble! We're in a bubble of everything!" and then at the same time you keep pointing out all these things that are not in a bubble. 

Methinks you are interpreting "Everything Bubble" too literally. 

[vodou]

38 minutes ago, delekkerste said:

The more I think about it, the more I think just about everything that we collect here is going to take a big hit due to changing tastes, demographics, etc. in the coming decades.  It's surely going to happen at some point - I mean, will the biggest thing in 100 years (the year 2117) be this stuff we so revere from the 1960s-1980s?  C'mon, really (that means you, Comic Connoisseur )?  Seems far-fetched, much as the things that were popular in 1917 are, by and large, not popular today (and there is an infinite amount more content being created these days than back then to compete with things from the past).  So, if time is going to win out in the end (seriously, who is going to care about all the trivial things that comic collectors these days obsess about in a hundred years...please), it just becomes a question of when, not if, things start to fall by the wayside.  

No real disagreement, just want to add that I don't think any of us should really care what the game is in 100 years. We're all dead. Now, the next 20-50 years, that covers just about everyone that would read this thread now or in the next couple of years, that's worth sweating out a bit.

There was plenty of content in 1917 too (they're called books, magazines, records, pamphlets, flyers, handbills, etc). It's just that absolutely everybody except a handful of specialists (and the occasional themed-gallery or museum exhibition lol) doesn't give a flying fig about that old perma-outta-step-with-today's-aesthetic material. There are a few standouts - Sarah Bernhardt posters by Mucha & Friends, and others I can't think of off the top of my head (I just don't care enough to think that hard) but sure there are some categories that we now allow to define an era. Or rather History (as generally agreed by those that don't care enough to disagree!) tells us this stuff is representative of and relevant to an era. But who's got that stuff actually hanging on their walls, not reprints but the real vintage $$$ stuff...not too many people. And we're back to that handful of specialists situation again. Elvgren & Friends are poised to be that for the 40s-60s, if not already, but the masses are not paying up for examples. Art students might want cheapo Target posters for the dorm though...in 50 years

[delekkerste]

17 minutes ago, vodou said:

No real disagreement, just want to add that I don't think any of us should really care what the game is in 100 years. We're all dead. Now, the next 20-50 years, that covers just about everyone that would read this thread now or in the next couple of years, that's worth sweating out a bit.

There was plenty of content in 1917 too (they're called books, magazines, records, pamphlets, flyers, handbills, etc). It's just that absolutely everybody except a handful of specialists (and the occasional themed-gallery or museum exhibition lol) doesn't give a flying fig about that old perma-outta-step-with-today's-aesthetic material. There are a few standouts - Sarah Bernhardt posters by Mucha & Friends, and others I can't think of off the top of my head (I just don't care enough to think that hard) but sure there are some categories that we now allow to define an era. Or rather History (as generally agreed by those that don't care enough to disagree!) tells us this stuff is representative of and relevant to an era. But who's got that stuff actually hanging on their walls, not reprints but the real vintage $$$ stuff...not too many people. And we're back to that handful of specialists situation again. Elvgren & Friends are poised to be that for the 40s-60s, if not already, but the masses are not paying up for examples. Art students might want cheapo Target posters for the dorm though...in 50 years

I only mentioned 100 years to dispel the notion that what is popular today is going to remain so indefinitely, let alone for "even" just a century (how many people have posted here that Disney will keep all of Marvel in the spotlight forever?)  Most people only look ahead in small enough increments that their human nature/intuition linearly extrapolates little or no change.  My intention was to overcome that bias by asking people to imagine life in 2117.  If you accept that this is a long enough period for what is popular to change dramatically, then it's only a question of arguing when, not if this will occur.  Not unlike this old joke!

I think you and I are talking about different things when we reference "content".  I am not just talking about things that are tangibly collectible, but everything that can occupy share of mind and/or wallet (of which there are orders of magnitude more things today than a hundred years ago). 

I saw a wonderful Mucha exhibition in Liverpool this summer, including all the Bernhardt posters...great stuff.  Now you have me wondering where I put that Mucha print I brought back home.  

Edited October 16, 2017 by delekkerste

[vodou]

17 minutes ago, delekkerste said:

I think you and I are talking about different things when we reference "content".  I am not just talking about things that are tangibly collectible, but everything that can occupy share of mind and/or wallet (of which there are orders of magnitude more things today than a hundred years ago).

We're not. Humans are humans, now and 100 years ago. I've written and deleted a ton of examples in writing this of how nothing has changed but why bother...I think you will not be convinced anyway. But my opinion is that most people are experience-oriented (sports, vacations, etc) and a smaller minority are hoarders, of objects. That will not change (human nature), but what they will hoard (are presently and will in the future)...that I don't know, particularly. It's an educated guessing game (for the speculators at least). But can you argue that hoarding will just disappear because gate-keeping did?