Art inevitably draws inscrutable horizons. After all, even those who participate in minor auctions, even those who compete for works for a few hundred euros look with a complacent eye to major international awards. Convinced that, perhaps, sooner or later, it might also be up to them to witness a marked rise in the trade of some work in the collection and, perhaps, realize the blow of life.
In fact, on closer inspection, these are often artistically improvised people who do not read the specialized magazines, who document little but cultivate an infinite passion. They often and willingly love local artists, those linked to a sectoral market. Someone even chases them, trying to progressively get into their guard, waiting to become a friend. To be admitted, then, to the extreme threshold, the study of the master, where you can choose unique and special works, rarely visible on the market.
And, then, there is the ancient ritual of portraits, the desire to put down his wife, children to preserve an eternal presence of the master, immortalize a moment of creativity to pass on to posterity, who knows. Without thinking that the portraits of the ancestors, if all goes well, eventually end up in the attic and, perhaps, in the first useless market, unsold. Art, however, at least in part, also holds up on these architraves. It’s not just top-lots and international showcases. It also lives thanks to this hard base of enthusiasts who, through a thousand sacrifices, maybe inventing, time by time, a different payment model, collect and keep small collections. A network structured and dusty thanks to which coexist small galleries, modest auction houses, dealers, windows born on the web, wanderers of art.
Because the market, beyond everything, also generates this sediment that settles on the sandy bottom of various negotiations, representing a real army of enthusiasts who observe, in thousands, teleshopping, buying occasionally even through television channels, preferring then to go hunting for the deal, that mythical, obscure object of desire that animates their searches.
Art is also this Dante’s bolgia that goes on, daily, all over the world, contaminating dreams, hopes and illusions linked to the future of every collector. A giant wargame to be practiced with lucid imagination.
