Just in case you were laboring under the delusion that wealthy collectors buy expensive contemporary art at auction, impelled by their unerring connoisseurship and in-depth art-historical knowledge, Amy Cappellazzo, quoted in Sarah Thornton’s fascinating new book Seven Days in the Art World, will put you right.
According to the co-director of postwar and contemporary art at Christie’s, cheerful colours are the thing: “Brown paintings don’t sell as well as blue or red paintings.” Then there’s the medium: “Collectors get confused and concerned about things that plug in.” Finally, size matters (doesn’t it always): “Anything larger than the standard dimension of a Park Avenue elevator generally cuts out a certain sector of the market.” This is confirmed by a collector, speaking anonymously to Thornton during a sale about Warhol’s Mustard Race Riot: “It’s a great historical piece, but it’s not a very appealing colour and it’s too large to hang easily in one’s home.”
Quoted wholesale from the Guardian
Interesting — she’s probably right, given her experience, although I’ve known a few collectors who have employed a crane to get around the Park Avenue elevator problem….
I’ve had conversations with a few fellow painters and they too have agreed that brown is not really a well selling color for paintings, even though when you open up an interior design mag, the paintings you usually see within them are usually a lot of brown paintings. So what a few people say cannot be listened to with the bulk of art collectors.