I
want to share a scenario that happened yesterday that will hopefully
have an educational effect for some people. I am not trying to poke fun
at any one, but I run into this problem on a regular enough basis that I
believe it should be addressed.
My day job is at a custom
frame shop. All day I help people pick out matting and frames. Most
people have interesting stories that go with their art, but
some people are woefully uneducated about what they have. That is not
necessarily a bad thing, you don't have to know everything about a piece
of art or photograph to appreciate the beauty of it and want it to look
nice in your home, just use some common sense.
A customer, a
very nice lady, came in the other day with a beautiful canvas print. It
is a very nice, high quality giclee print with painting done over the
top of the print to add brush strokes and dimension. This is commonly
done and most of the higher end fine art printers offer this over
painting as an option. Usually on staff artists will do the over
painting, but sometimes the artist themselves will do it too. (Commonly
not, as they are busy working on their next masterpiece.) Anywhoo,
through conversation I compliment the quality of the print and the
customer interrupts me with this.
"Oh, no. We paid nine thousand dollars for this. It's signed and numbered, we didn't pay that much for a print."
I stopped and stared at her, a bit dumbfounded. I started to explain to
her that the very fact it was numbered meant that it, in fact, was a
print. But she continued on about how awesome it was and how happy they were
and how much they loved it and I couldn't bring myself to burst her
bubble.
It's an unfortunate part of the framing business that
people bring in all kinds of things that they are completely misinformed
about. Sometimes things end up being more valuable than a person thinks
but usually not. We are not art appraisers, but we love our business
and usually know a thing or two.
I mostly just want to end with a few general rules of thumb.
1. If it is numbered it is a print. It does not matter if you can see
and feel brushstrokes. No artist sits down and paints 500 editions of
the same painting. Yes, some prints will go for thousands of dollars.
Print prices are usually (not always!) About 10-40% of the price as the
original. If you find a painting you love and the original has a $90
thousand price tag. You can expect to pay $9 thousand for a print.
2. If your ancient antique sword is made of stainless steel, I'm sorry,
you were lied too. Stainless steel weapons have only been around for
about 60 years.
3. Movie posters have a bunch of fine print on
the bottom. In that fine print you will find the year the poster was
printed. If the autograph of a person who died in 1973 is on a poster
with a date of 1992 you have been scammed.
Like I said. I'm not
trying to poke fun, I'm seriously trying to give people a heads up on
some of the more common issues I see in my adventures of framing.
