Sometimes I feel as though my house is just an endless list of things we have to do: wardrobes I need to clear out, paintings I need to hang, doors I’d love to paint (but am nervous to even start), countertop epoxy I bought and own, now need to carve out some time to get done…
Today we did get one thing ticked off that list, and hung up two pieces of art I bought at Target a few weeks back, and afterwards I took a picture, thinking I’d share it to Instagram, before I paused… and felt slightly embarrassed at the idea of sharing “art” that I bought at Target, of all places.
But why?! If I like them, and am happy to hang them on my wall where I’ll look at them several times a day… why do I care what other people think, or even what they’re “worth”, whether they’re “authentic” or what they say about me and my “taste”, whatever that even means?
It’s a question that’s come up a lot in our family, over the years. Not only did my sister Beatrice study art at NCAD and is now an incredibly successful designer, but our cousin, Blaise Smith, is a renowned, prolific and very in-demand Irish artist, and our other cousin, Abigail Smith (his sister, damn that family of creative overachievers) is an artist and award-winning musician.
Abigail’s husband John O’Reilly was one of Ireland’s first (and best) graffiti artists; he is now a fine artist, too, with his work featuring in the RHA and the British Royal Academy of Art.
And quite aside from the artists in the family, our family has always been very interested in art, too; one of the things I remember most about my grandparents’ house in Kimmage was an enormous print of Jules Breton’s The Song of the Lark, a painting I found a smaller version of recently in a vintage shop in Fort Wayne, and bought to hang in my own bedroom (pictured, above, to the right of the bed).
Growing up, I never thought to wonder where the painting in my grandparents’ living room came from; whether or not it was “original” (a definition I probably had no understanding of until I was in my early twenties, honestly); what it meant about them, that they had hung this large-scale replica in their living area, right in front of the dining room table and to the left of the (probably postage stamp-sized) television. It was just there, and as much a feature of the room as my grandfather himself, who I remember as always being in his armchair, elbows on the arms, thumbs circling one another in a soothing, steady rhythm throughout the day.
Blaise painted him, actually, in that very same pose, a print of which I have in my own home, hanging above my fireplace; it’s never occurred to me to wonder about its value, at least in a practical or objective sense, maybe because that value is so clear to me (priceless) and would be so whether it was an original or not…
We have a lot of art in our house now, too: digital prints, photographs, some original artworks and a lot of prints, or replicas. We have an original painting by Hayley Morée, given to me as a gift from my sister. We have an art print by Rachel Joy Price that says Grá (above), a gift from a friend in Ireland who ordered it from April and the Bear. We have a Jan Do print of Liberty Hall. In our bedroom hangs a nude portrait of me (who else!) painted by Lucy Cullen, from a photograph I took when I was pregnant for the first time.
In our living room, there are two original paintings by Liu Weishui that Brandin and I bought for one another for our birthdays, which are two weeks apart, neither of us knowing of the other one’s plans (he one-upped me by commissioning Weishui to do a painting of Vinny, our dog, while I bought one “off the rack”, so to speak, which is enraging).
We have paintings and drawings Beatrice did for us (or for herself, which were then pilfered by me). In our nine-year-old’s room hangs a huge painting his Mum, Kasey, did – she happens to be an artist, too, as well as a Fort Wayne wedding photographer and writer. And we have prints – two graphic pieces I bought from Home Goods, the two new arrivals from Target, a replica of the Irish Constitution, hanging in our entryway (lest anyone think I’m no longer a patriot or, worse, an American).
I can’t really afford to be a snob about art, or at least that’s what I’ve always thought. I buy (or pilfer) and hang art based solely on what I like and don’t like, on what I think would add to the colour and whimsy of our otherwise very blank canvas of a house.
(When we moved in, the walls had all been painted the same very light grey-blue, and we’ve never changed them. Somehow, the fact that every wall in the house is this same nothing shade has made me think it would be too much of an ordeal to start repainting, as if I’d need to cover every square inch of it to truly feel as though I’d made a difference. And if you take a quick look at my Pinterest board on interiors, you’ll see that very, very light grey-blue walls are very much not my vibe.)
But my Target related to-share-or-not-to-share dilemma made me think again about my own art snobbery, or perceived lack thereof – why is it that this mass-produced art (although even Target doesn’t call it art, which might contribute to the problem; on the website, they’re described as “Color Blocks Framed Wall Canvases”) doesn’t pass muster, while I’d have no hesitation sharing something I picked up in a random vintage shop, regardless of its provenance?
It reminded me of a conversation Beatrice and I had this week, about art and its value; we were talking about all the art we have in our houses, or, more specifically, all the art she has in hers, a collection that dwarfs mine both in quantity and, I’m not ashamed to say, quality.
She has this thing that makes buying art a cinch, ditto shopping for clothes somewhere like TK Maxx or Marshall’s; she has what my mother would call “a great eye” and, as well as being able to pick out the one nice thing in a rack of tat from a distance of 100 feet or more, she’s great at envisioning how a space will look with that great thing in it (or with the counter tops moved from this side to that, or with this wall painted blue… a skill we do not share).
A lot of Beatrice’s art has been collected over the years, from this or that market in Paris or Milan, when she lived there; from Everything But the House, a site she, unlike me, has great patience for; and, in the case of one particular piece, from a dumpster she simply passed by, and managed to spot, within, a piece of art she now hangs on her living-room wall.
“You know,” she told me conspiratorially, one day last week, “I’ve often thought about throwing that particular piece away – and I don’t think I’ve ever thought about throwing any other art away. But the fact that I know I found that in a skip… Somehow makes it feels less valuable.”
There are two truths that can be gleaned from this conversation: the first is that, for reasons that are perhaps slightly obvious, we place a higher value on things that cost us more, even if they are no better made than items that cost us less. Think about designer leather handbags that are kept in their dustbags, while their equivalent, off-brand leather sisters are tossed in the back of your wardrobe, or that dress you bought for a wedding that cost €250, compared with, say, a little gúna you picked up randomly because it was reduced to €15… I can guarantee I know which one we’re paying to have dry-cleaned.
But the second truth is this: the only value anything has, from art to fashion to writing to time, is however much someone else is willing to pay for it. In other words, the very concept of value itself is subjective, and is entirely dependent on the desires, budgets, needs and, yes, whims of the “buyer”.
Of course, there will be people who buy art specifically for investment purposes, and for those people the “value” of that art is not just what they themselves paid for it, but what they can anticipate to be paid for it at some future date when they decide to sell.
According to Artelier.com, by the way, investing in art is actually a good investment because, unlike other things – say, property, which we’ve all seen fluctuate massively in price over the past 20 years – art holds its value over time. “Unlike stocks or other investments, art does not tend to go up and down in value based on market fluctuations. This was especially true during the 2020 pandemic where other markets fluctuated significantly while the art market remained stable.”
Mind you, Investopedia – which may just have less of a vested interest in promoting art as investment than a site like, say, Artelier.com – says that investing in art is actually quite a risky endeavour, as “the art market is fickle, and there are no guarantees of profitability”.
But if, like me, your art purchasing decisions are made with only your own taste and budget in mind, it really doesn’t matter what “return on investment” you’re likely to get in years to come, whether or not other people like your artworks, or even where you bought them (or whether or not they’re originals). So I can be just as proud of my Target “wall canvases” as my original Hayley Morée, or the painting Blaise did of one of the Lord of the Rings ring-wraiths when he was 11, which I pilfered from my parents’ house before I moved.
It makes no difference how much any painting is worth if I’m never going to sell it… and times aren’t quite that desperate just yet. (Besides which, I’d be better off waiting til he’s dead, because the one thing more valuable than a piece of art by one of Ireland’s best living artists is a piece of art by one of Ireland’s best dead artists.)
If you’re interested in art, value and how the latter is assigned, this Guardian podcast on Damien Hirst’s fudging of dates is a really interesting look behind the curtain at the Great and Powerful Hirst (or, you know, just an ordinary man trying to get the most moolah for his work):
