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 The New York Times reports that as the financial markets skid wildly, some collectors are waging bets that art will be viewed as a safe haven.
Among them is Lars Ulrich, a songwriter and the drummer for the
heavy-metal band METALLICA, who has consigned Untitled (Boxer), a 1982
painting by Jean-Michel Basquiat, for sale by Christie’s in New York
next month. “Of course it’s an awkward time to sell, but I’ve always
been about taking chances,” Mr. Ulrich said.
“I have a lot of faith in the art market,” he added. “It’s perhaps the
last frontier where the best of the best will not go the way of the
rest of the economy.” Recently his collecting has gone in a different
direction, he said. Rather than relying on auctions, he has begun
scouring galleries, buying the work of emerging artists.
The Basquiat, which goes on the block Nov. 12, depicts a victorious
black boxer, his hands waving in the air, against a richly painted
background filled with the artist’s signature graffiti scrawl. The
figure is part hero, part warrior, part victim. It is also said to be
autobiographical.
The artist, who died of a drug overdose in 1988 when he was just
27, grew up in Brooklyn, where he liked to while away time at the
Brooklyn Museum. “I realized that I didn’t see many paintings with
black people in them,” he once said, adding, “The black person is the
protagonist in most of my paintings.”
Untitled (Boxer) was one of the centerpieces of the 2005 Basquiat
retrospective at the Brooklyn Museum, which also went to the Museum of
Fine Arts, Houston and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles.
Mr. Ulrich bought it in 1999 after seeing it in a show in Vienna.
Read more here.
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