Andy Sjarif has an almost weird, man-crush on Google. No matter what crazy things Eric Schmidt may promise shareholders, Sjarif is in no doubt that the great and mighty Google can achieve them. Self-driving cars? Trips to the moon? Wind farms? All in a day’s work at the Googleplex. Google with its execution, its Ph.Ds and its algorithms is Sjarif’s mahaguru.
But – all that said – he still wants to slaughter them in the Indonesian market.
To that end, his company Sitti has indexed more than 20 terabytes of data; comprising 12 million articles, 12 million Twitter accounts, 800 million pages of websites and blogs, 10 million Facebook conversations, 20 thousand words of slang and 2.7 billion Google search terms– all in Bahasa Indonesia and all to make mathematical sense of Bahasa language context, so that it can match ads to content better than Google.
Google has been supporting an Indonesian language version of Chrome for a few months, but it only launched Adwords and announced it was ready to serve the market October 8… about a week after Sitti just launched a trial of its contextual ad engine consisting of that consisted of 2,700 individual ads for 529 brands. It must be doing something right; not only did Google come into the market almost immediately but, the day after the campaign launched, Google bought the keyword in Bahasa for “Sitti.” See the screenshot, grabbed by Sjarif below.
A few weeks later, Google sent a team to Indonesia and held dozens of job interviews. Sjarif claims a few candidates were told that Google was going to crush the small upstart. They are said to be hiring a local team of about a dozen employees in 2011.
Of course, the timing could all be coincidence. Indonesia is a hot market that, as I’ve argued before, only a fool would completely ignore. But, if nothing else, it certainly makes Sitti look good to the locals. There’s that nationalistic pride issue of Google making more than anyone else when it comes to Indonesian Web advertising, but not employing many locals and not paying much in local taxes. Sitti is undoubtably a gnat in the Google universe. But every once in a while, a gnat gets your attention and you swat at it, right?
Whether he helped provoke it or not, Sjarif is thrilled Google is coming into the market, because he thinks it’ll drive more professionalism, attention and revenues for the ecosystem as a whole. Google Adsense tailored for Indonesia means local Web companies can better bootstrap companies with Google ads, the way the early Web 2.0 wave of companies in the United States did. The two could co-exist the same way mass players like Google and more tailored ad networks like Federated Media did for US startups.
Google brings heft to the market, but it will never get as deep into the nuances Bahasa indexing as Sitti is. Sitti cites the example of ZAO Begun in Russia, which Google tried to buy for $140 million before it was blocked by the Russian government, as evidence that language can be a powerful differentiator on the Web.
More than a year ago, Sjarif tried to raise funding from Valley VCs and one very well-heeled one he asked me not to name said, “It’s not that your technology isn’t hot, it’s the fact that you’re here. In the Valley, people would be fighting over you.” So Sitti raised money from a handful of local angels instead. They were offline moguls who didn’t know a thing about the Web, but backed him anyway. This is a running theme among Jakarta Web companies I met this past trip. Knowing the big families is important as entrepreneurs shape a new industry in a country with infrastructure issues and little local venture capital. One of these angels called him the day after he committed the money and said, “Andy, do two things for me. The first is don’t die, because this is going to be big. Now, explain to me what you do.”
Indonesians complain about a lack of sophisticated Web expertise and mentorship, but it’s one of the only emerging markets where I don’t hear complaints about a dearth of angel money. Sitti’s angels have given the company a long leash, deep pockets and helped open doors to the country’s old media elite. Sjarif now turns down traditional venture firm money, bootstrapping the company’s growth by giving big brands local media consulting advice for digital campaigns. “I want to talk to VCs when I don’t need their money,” he says. Smart plan. Venture money can come and go quickly in markets that don’t have a track record of returns.
But back to the product. Sjarif is so deep into how, when, where and what Indonesians say on the Web that he can tell you a lot about this phenomenon. He says three things drive the Indonesians love affair with Tweeting and Foursquare for instance: They’re narcassists; they love to gossip about one another (more than celebrities, unlike the US) and they get bored during urban traffic jams. He says he can map the traffic flows in Jakarta based on the volume of Tweets he indexes at any given time.
Here’s a visualization Sitti did of part of my Bahasan Twitter connections, created in part to embarrass me at an event. In true polite Indonesian style there was little embarrassing on it, except for the fact that ARRINGTON is the biggest hub on this map. And, what the hell is Mashable even doing on there? I might get fired for that if the big yellow dot ARRINGTON sees it. Interesting that @katharnavas in India is the same size dot as @arrington. Thanks for the links, whoever you are. The yellow dots are my connections; the red dots are connections to them or connections with smaller networks that have mentioned me; and the size of the dot indicates how frequently.
And this is a relation of most common words associated with “Sarah Lacy” into Google.co.id’s engine:
It’s certainly different than the words most related to me in an English-language search. It seems in Indonesia, haters don’t gotta hate quite as much. Good to know. The company also did a visualization of topics on my personal blog and conversations over Twitter they’ve indexed that relate to me.
Sitti wasn’t the only company I met trying to build a business out of social media sentiment in markets that were ignored by companies like Google up until recently. There are several companies in Asia generally seeking to make sense out of the wave of pages being created on the Web in Asian languages in order to turn all that traffic into actual cash. Since, most of those pages are being created over social media, it takes a company that can understand slang, context, and meaning in just 140 characters. And a lot of these companies put the Valley’s self-proclaimed “social media consultants” to shame with highly scientific and proprietary approaches.
Two very different examples are Brandtology in Singapore and Scraplr in Indonesia. Brandtology promises to make better sense of what social media is saying about a brand by hiring an army of smart college grads to sit and parse queries so the machines don’t mis-read things like sarcasm and local slang. While, I’m sympathetic to the idea that there are certain things an algorithm doesn’t get, the economics of this company didn’t quite sense, and didn’t quite hold up the more questions I asked. How do you hire enough college-educated locals to filter all those keywords and still have a cost-effective solution? The answer is it’s not a free product. It costs between $1,000 and $10,000 a month depending on what percentage of keywords you want examined. Without paying extra, you don’t really get better relevance. I’m not sure that scales as the cost of talent rises.
Scraplr takes a totally algorithmic approach, that is specifically tailored to Bahasa, not emerging market languages broadly. Because it takes a machine-only approach it has a freemium model. That means more people can see how good the site is, but making money will be a bigger challenge. There is probably room for all three, as long as they perform as advertised. Indonesia and social media are both black boxes the West is struggling to understand.
When reading the otherwise rosy stories in the mainstream media, the most glaringly simplistic and attention grabbing subsegments of which continue to proclaim the recession over, while conveniently ignoring that despite $4 trillion in monetary and fiscal stimuli underemployment is at 17%, foodstamp recipients are at all time highs (but who cares about that social stratum), discretionary purchases are continuing to be funded primarily from millions of delinquent homeowners who refuse to pay their mortgage (now on average between 18 and 24 months behind), companies are refusing to hire, capex spending is at all time lows, banks are hoarding cash for the imminent perfect MBS putback storm, commodity price inflation is threatening to collapse profit and net income margins, half of Europe is locked out from capital markets, rampant Chinese inflation is threatening to recreate Tianenman square, investors are pulling cash from markets for 29 weeks in a row, hardship withdrawals from 401(k)s surging, and the muni mess is one political decision from an avalanche of city and state defaults, one may be excused to have a comparable simplistic perspective of the economy. After all stocks are up. Which of course is precisely the response that Bernanke is hoping to elicit from these same simplistic interpreters of economic and market data, who are next supposed to take money procured from selling newsletters and other top and bottom-line declining products, and buy (Chinese) trinkets they don't need. It is these same people who will also conveniently ignore the sad reality that America's small business find themselves increasingly in: and for the most vivid example of this is the latest Reuters report which informs that small business are now calling of Christmas en mass. "The 2010 holiday season represents the worst
slump since the firm began polling 22 years ago, she said. Of 103
leading businesses queried, those holding a celebration of any kind fell
to 79 percent, down from 81 percent both last year and the year before,
during the height of the economic recession." Obviously Wall Street is not among those polled: the country's bankers are preparing to spend over $140 billion in compensation this year. Good luck booking a restaurant, club or lounge in New York in the next month.
Alas, it is small businesses that create economic prosperity in America. Bankers only take it away. Which is why how the small business segment feels might have been relevant if anyone still cared for America as a going concern. That's no longer the case: it is now obvious that the country will persist in its current form only for so long as it can continue to roll its $13.8 trillion in debt (we forgot to add record debt in the list above): an mount which will never be repaid.
From Reuters:
bench craft company managementPortland terrorist bomb plot: <b>News</b>, opinion from The Oregonian and <b>...</b>
Return to OregonLive later today for more from The Oregonian on the terrorist arrest.
Minecraft dev explains sales transparency PC <b>News</b> - Page 1 <b>...</b>
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Clarissa's Blog: Fox <b>News</b> in Canada
"It will aim to challenge conventional wisdom and offer Canadians a new choice and a new voice on TV," Quebecor Media CEO Pierre Karl Peladeau said as the conservative news channel faces stiff competition from existing cable news ...
bench craft company click here for servicePortland terrorist bomb plot: <b>News</b>, opinion from The Oregonian and <b>...</b>
Return to OregonLive later today for more from The Oregonian on the terrorist arrest.
Minecraft dev explains sales transparency PC <b>News</b> - Page 1 <b>...</b>
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Clarissa's Blog: Fox <b>News</b> in Canada
"It will aim to challenge conventional wisdom and offer Canadians a new choice and a new voice on TV," Quebecor Media CEO Pierre Karl Peladeau said as the conservative news channel faces stiff competition from existing cable news ...
bench craft company finishes
Andy Sjarif has an almost weird, man-crush on Google. No matter what crazy things Eric Schmidt may promise shareholders, Sjarif is in no doubt that the great and mighty Google can achieve them. Self-driving cars? Trips to the moon? Wind farms? All in a day’s work at the Googleplex. Google with its execution, its Ph.Ds and its algorithms is Sjarif’s mahaguru.
But – all that said – he still wants to slaughter them in the Indonesian market.
To that end, his company Sitti has indexed more than 20 terabytes of data; comprising 12 million articles, 12 million Twitter accounts, 800 million pages of websites and blogs, 10 million Facebook conversations, 20 thousand words of slang and 2.7 billion Google search terms– all in Bahasa Indonesia and all to make mathematical sense of Bahasa language context, so that it can match ads to content better than Google.
Google has been supporting an Indonesian language version of Chrome for a few months, but it only launched Adwords and announced it was ready to serve the market October 8… about a week after Sitti just launched a trial of its contextual ad engine consisting of that consisted of 2,700 individual ads for 529 brands. It must be doing something right; not only did Google come into the market almost immediately but, the day after the campaign launched, Google bought the keyword in Bahasa for “Sitti.” See the screenshot, grabbed by Sjarif below.
A few weeks later, Google sent a team to Indonesia and held dozens of job interviews. Sjarif claims a few candidates were told that Google was going to crush the small upstart. They are said to be hiring a local team of about a dozen employees in 2011.
Of course, the timing could all be coincidence. Indonesia is a hot market that, as I’ve argued before, only a fool would completely ignore. But, if nothing else, it certainly makes Sitti look good to the locals. There’s that nationalistic pride issue of Google making more than anyone else when it comes to Indonesian Web advertising, but not employing many locals and not paying much in local taxes. Sitti is undoubtably a gnat in the Google universe. But every once in a while, a gnat gets your attention and you swat at it, right?
Whether he helped provoke it or not, Sjarif is thrilled Google is coming into the market, because he thinks it’ll drive more professionalism, attention and revenues for the ecosystem as a whole. Google Adsense tailored for Indonesia means local Web companies can better bootstrap companies with Google ads, the way the early Web 2.0 wave of companies in the United States did. The two could co-exist the same way mass players like Google and more tailored ad networks like Federated Media did for US startups.
Google brings heft to the market, but it will never get as deep into the nuances Bahasa indexing as Sitti is. Sitti cites the example of ZAO Begun in Russia, which Google tried to buy for $140 million before it was blocked by the Russian government, as evidence that language can be a powerful differentiator on the Web.
More than a year ago, Sjarif tried to raise funding from Valley VCs and one very well-heeled one he asked me not to name said, “It’s not that your technology isn’t hot, it’s the fact that you’re here. In the Valley, people would be fighting over you.” So Sitti raised money from a handful of local angels instead. They were offline moguls who didn’t know a thing about the Web, but backed him anyway. This is a running theme among Jakarta Web companies I met this past trip. Knowing the big families is important as entrepreneurs shape a new industry in a country with infrastructure issues and little local venture capital. One of these angels called him the day after he committed the money and said, “Andy, do two things for me. The first is don’t die, because this is going to be big. Now, explain to me what you do.”
Indonesians complain about a lack of sophisticated Web expertise and mentorship, but it’s one of the only emerging markets where I don’t hear complaints about a dearth of angel money. Sitti’s angels have given the company a long leash, deep pockets and helped open doors to the country’s old media elite. Sjarif now turns down traditional venture firm money, bootstrapping the company’s growth by giving big brands local media consulting advice for digital campaigns. “I want to talk to VCs when I don’t need their money,” he says. Smart plan. Venture money can come and go quickly in markets that don’t have a track record of returns.
But back to the product. Sjarif is so deep into how, when, where and what Indonesians say on the Web that he can tell you a lot about this phenomenon. He says three things drive the Indonesians love affair with Tweeting and Foursquare for instance: They’re narcassists; they love to gossip about one another (more than celebrities, unlike the US) and they get bored during urban traffic jams. He says he can map the traffic flows in Jakarta based on the volume of Tweets he indexes at any given time.
Here’s a visualization Sitti did of part of my Bahasan Twitter connections, created in part to embarrass me at an event. In true polite Indonesian style there was little embarrassing on it, except for the fact that ARRINGTON is the biggest hub on this map. And, what the hell is Mashable even doing on there? I might get fired for that if the big yellow dot ARRINGTON sees it. Interesting that @katharnavas in India is the same size dot as @arrington. Thanks for the links, whoever you are. The yellow dots are my connections; the red dots are connections to them or connections with smaller networks that have mentioned me; and the size of the dot indicates how frequently.
And this is a relation of most common words associated with “Sarah Lacy” into Google.co.id’s engine:
It’s certainly different than the words most related to me in an English-language search. It seems in Indonesia, haters don’t gotta hate quite as much. Good to know. The company also did a visualization of topics on my personal blog and conversations over Twitter they’ve indexed that relate to me.
Sitti wasn’t the only company I met trying to build a business out of social media sentiment in markets that were ignored by companies like Google up until recently. There are several companies in Asia generally seeking to make sense out of the wave of pages being created on the Web in Asian languages in order to turn all that traffic into actual cash. Since, most of those pages are being created over social media, it takes a company that can understand slang, context, and meaning in just 140 characters. And a lot of these companies put the Valley’s self-proclaimed “social media consultants” to shame with highly scientific and proprietary approaches.
Two very different examples are Brandtology in Singapore and Scraplr in Indonesia. Brandtology promises to make better sense of what social media is saying about a brand by hiring an army of smart college grads to sit and parse queries so the machines don’t mis-read things like sarcasm and local slang. While, I’m sympathetic to the idea that there are certain things an algorithm doesn’t get, the economics of this company didn’t quite sense, and didn’t quite hold up the more questions I asked. How do you hire enough college-educated locals to filter all those keywords and still have a cost-effective solution? The answer is it’s not a free product. It costs between $1,000 and $10,000 a month depending on what percentage of keywords you want examined. Without paying extra, you don’t really get better relevance. I’m not sure that scales as the cost of talent rises.
Scraplr takes a totally algorithmic approach, that is specifically tailored to Bahasa, not emerging market languages broadly. Because it takes a machine-only approach it has a freemium model. That means more people can see how good the site is, but making money will be a bigger challenge. There is probably room for all three, as long as they perform as advertised. Indonesia and social media are both black boxes the West is struggling to understand.
When reading the otherwise rosy stories in the mainstream media, the most glaringly simplistic and attention grabbing subsegments of which continue to proclaim the recession over, while conveniently ignoring that despite $4 trillion in monetary and fiscal stimuli underemployment is at 17%, foodstamp recipients are at all time highs (but who cares about that social stratum), discretionary purchases are continuing to be funded primarily from millions of delinquent homeowners who refuse to pay their mortgage (now on average between 18 and 24 months behind), companies are refusing to hire, capex spending is at all time lows, banks are hoarding cash for the imminent perfect MBS putback storm, commodity price inflation is threatening to collapse profit and net income margins, half of Europe is locked out from capital markets, rampant Chinese inflation is threatening to recreate Tianenman square, investors are pulling cash from markets for 29 weeks in a row, hardship withdrawals from 401(k)s surging, and the muni mess is one political decision from an avalanche of city and state defaults, one may be excused to have a comparable simplistic perspective of the economy. After all stocks are up. Which of course is precisely the response that Bernanke is hoping to elicit from these same simplistic interpreters of economic and market data, who are next supposed to take money procured from selling newsletters and other top and bottom-line declining products, and buy (Chinese) trinkets they don't need. It is these same people who will also conveniently ignore the sad reality that America's small business find themselves increasingly in: and for the most vivid example of this is the latest Reuters report which informs that small business are now calling of Christmas en mass. "The 2010 holiday season represents the worst
slump since the firm began polling 22 years ago, she said. Of 103
leading businesses queried, those holding a celebration of any kind fell
to 79 percent, down from 81 percent both last year and the year before,
during the height of the economic recession." Obviously Wall Street is not among those polled: the country's bankers are preparing to spend over $140 billion in compensation this year. Good luck booking a restaurant, club or lounge in New York in the next month.Alas, it is small businesses that create economic prosperity in America. Bankers only take it away. Which is why how the small business segment feels might have been relevant if anyone still cared for America as a going concern. That's no longer the case: it is now obvious that the country will persist in its current form only for so long as it can continue to roll its $13.8 trillion in debt (we forgot to add record debt in the list above): an mount which will never be repaid.
From Reuters:
bench craft company filler stPortland terrorist bomb plot: <b>News</b>, opinion from The Oregonian and <b>...</b>
Return to OregonLive later today for more from The Oregonian on the terrorist arrest.
Minecraft dev explains sales transparency PC <b>News</b> - Page 1 <b>...</b>
Read our PC news of Minecraft dev explains sales transparency.
Clarissa's Blog: Fox <b>News</b> in Canada
"It will aim to challenge conventional wisdom and offer Canadians a new choice and a new voice on TV," Quebecor Media CEO Pierre Karl Peladeau said as the conservative news channel faces stiff competition from existing cable news ...
bench craft company spread coversPortland terrorist bomb plot: <b>News</b>, opinion from The Oregonian and <b>...</b>
Return to OregonLive later today for more from The Oregonian on the terrorist arrest.
Minecraft dev explains sales transparency PC <b>News</b> - Page 1 <b>...</b>
Read our PC news of Minecraft dev explains sales transparency.
Clarissa's Blog: Fox <b>News</b> in Canada
"It will aim to challenge conventional wisdom and offer Canadians a new choice and a new voice on TV," Quebecor Media CEO Pierre Karl Peladeau said as the conservative news channel faces stiff competition from existing cable news ...
bench craft company teamPortland terrorist bomb plot: <b>News</b>, opinion from The Oregonian and <b>...</b>
Return to OregonLive later today for more from The Oregonian on the terrorist arrest.
Minecraft dev explains sales transparency PC <b>News</b> - Page 1 <b>...</b>
Read our PC news of Minecraft dev explains sales transparency.
Clarissa's Blog: Fox <b>News</b> in Canada
"It will aim to challenge conventional wisdom and offer Canadians a new choice and a new voice on TV," Quebecor Media CEO Pierre Karl Peladeau said as the conservative news channel faces stiff competition from existing cable news ...
bench craft company filler st
Michael M Thomas Says:
November 12th, 2010 at 11:33 am
In the first big art boom, back in the late ’80s-90s, some one observed, “It isn’t that the art isn’t worth the m oney, it’s that the money isn’t worth the money.” – MM Thoomas
Friday screencast: artflation Abnormal Returns Says:
November 12th, 2010 at 1:36 pm
Easy money and the red hot art market. (Big Picture)
Mike in Nola Says:
November 12th, 2010 at 2:27 pm
When I saw the Lichtenstein story on the BBC yesterday, was going to send BR a note that he might use as the start of a blog post.
The point of my note was that such big prices tend to mark tops in stocks because it’s a sign of overconfidence combined with spending paper profits. The example that first came to mind yesterday was the Japanese investor who bought one of Van Gogh’s Sunflowers for $80M – in 1990 just after the Japanese market peak.
http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1P2-1126944.html
Of course there are other indicators. Remember reading about one of the well known players in the very early 1900′s who, when he saw $10k bet on the turn of a card, went out and correctly sold everything.
An illustration of what some art investments are worth in hard times is that some segments of the art market were down 75% during the depths of the crash. The only reason art is booming again is because Ben B has repumped the liquidity bubble, allowing the banksters to make plenty instead of having their sorry asses thrown out on the street as they deserved.
grlampton Says:
November 12th, 2010 at 2:37 pm
A lot of what this post says about the art market can also be said about the rare coin market. Granted, rare coins are not unique in the same way a single piece of artwork is (though some are close to unique).
Although I do not know what the long-term appreciation figures are for artwork, classic American rare coins have outperformed the S&P over the lon g haul, and, in my view, thwey are a lot more fun.
gms777 Says:
November 12th, 2010 at 3:39 pm
And for the 99.99 percent of us who don’t have millions to throw at art, when you buy art, buy it because you like it and think you will continue to enjoy looking at it in your house for years.
Something like 95+% of all art never appreciates in value or if it does, it does so below the rate of inflation.
obsvr-1 Says:
November 12th, 2010 at 4:30 pm
seems this is just the .1%-ers keeping up with the Rockerfellers
Perhaps the FED should be buying up rare art during distressed markets — then sell to the Fraudsters and elitist when they have nothing better to do with their money but buy high priced art; then recycle the profits back to the taxpayer (reduce nat debt) — or substitute SSA for the FED to bolster the Trust Fund for self sufficiency.
ToNYC Says:
November 12th, 2010 at 5:07 pm
If you’re very rich, you can ship your art to Switzerland, London or Singapore to be stored in a state-of-the-art facility and not have to worry about the Feds tracking it as funds.
Believe it or not, that’s where the majority of art ends up these days, sitting in storage waiting for the right time and place to be shown or sold.
great point you make:
rich or just smart…keeping all invested in Intellectual Property keeps you free. Hard assets are more like anchors and chains and locks and guns.
Long term Says:
November 12th, 2010 at 5:12 pm
The problem I see with art, as an investment or even as a store of value, is that BOTH the insurance AND storage costs of pieces in the $10M+ range are significant. And reoccuring. And a drag on ROI unless a large mark-up is achieved.
Mannwich Says:
November 12th, 2010 at 5:27 pm
Then there’s this. Sure doesn’t sound worth it to me.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/14/realestate/14cov.html
philipat Says:
November 12th, 2010 at 6:44 pm
I’d also recommend fine wine for similar reasons. Also more liquid (Double entendre intended!)
pintelho Says:
November 12th, 2010 at 7:33 pm
Now this is an excellent educational piece…thank you Marion
Long term Says:
November 12th, 2010 at 9:06 pm
i consider this very interesting from the perspective of how chinese billionaires will benefit high-end american exports.
VennData Says:
November 12th, 2010 at 11:13 pm
What’s good for Damien Hirst is good for the global economy — Charles Wilson
YourPortlandFinancialAdvisor Says:
November 12th, 2010 at 11:30 pm
“Blue-chip art is no different from gold.”
It’s actually a lot different. People collect art to feel good about themselves, to feel intellectual, worldly, ect. Watch “Gone With the Wind”, Tara, the plantation is filled with paintings from Europe because that was the equivilant of the time. Plus anyone who fancies themselves a contemporary art collector must have and be judged by works of certain artists. Warhol would be one. No Warhol, no collection.
Julia Chestnut Says:
November 13th, 2010 at 5:52 am
The distinction here is between art as a store of value and art as an investment that is expected to create appreciation. The big jump in the value of a piece of art occurs when the artist dies, and thus the supply ends. People who build a fortune in art do so by having good taste and developing a relationship with the people who create (and/or sell) the kind of art that they love. It is about enjoyment and communication – about beauty and provocation. I have found in my limited experience that people who see art as an investment don’t pick the right artists: someone has to do their choosing for them.
But the pieces that we’re talking about in this article are investment grade – blue chips, as you said. Those are a store of value, alright. But as someone noted, the price of keeping something like that is extremely high. There are some pieces of such extreme value to certain unscrupulous people that you don’t insure them if you own them – because you are afraid that the appraiser or the insurance company might tip someone off about where the piece is. I wish I were being alarmist. Often these pieces are kept in professional storage in vaults because you don’t want to keep it where your family lives for these reasons. As old Priam found out long ago, possessing a thing of legendary beauty invites certain problems, especially if you are using it as a store of wealth.
contrabandista13 Says:
November 13th, 2010 at 8:25 am
And just to think, I bought a “Melvin Cruddy” last week for $2.77 at Resales for the Retarded.
It kinda looks like a Modigliani of Bugs Bunny and Daffy having breakfast at a Milwaukee coffee shop.
BuffaloBill Says:
November 13th, 2010 at 8:35 am
A.) If bought at auction, there are also buyer’s and seller’s commissions. You’ll need to add these into your investment computations. These commissions are not insignificant.
B.) If bought at auction, the hammer price (plus commission) is the single highest worldwide valuation for that piece.
C.) To quote the late Lawrence Fleischman who headed Kennedy Galleries in NYC for many years. “Art makes a lousy investment for almost all buyers except for dealers as we work hard to maintain a rolodex of likely customers. ”
D.) To quote the late Horace Solomon of Holly Solomon Galleries, “The painting hanging behind me is worth $125,000 – mostly because I say so.”
contrabandista13 Says:
November 13th, 2010 at 8:41 am
The BIG MONEY plays in the art market are all about vanity… Oh….! Such refined and subtle sophistication…
Having said that, It’s worth remembering that a trophy such as a Pollock or a real Modigliani, never grows old, never makes you carry it’s purse and will always comfort you in sickness and in heath….
Greg0658 Says:
November 13th, 2010 at 9:13 am
interesting thread .. I’ll add my pov (thats point of view) not (privately owned vehicle :-) … while waiting for the pumpkin pie to bake
I collect art – not blue chip art (I can’t) .. music 1st books 2nd clocks 3rd (why I started that with the dang time change twice a year) .. add general stuff to cover the walls, shelves and corners .. why I started that or continue that operation (as we slip back into a hunter gatherer society) (produced in mass production) I don’t know … I guess I’m a well trained consumerist .. worked all my life to turn green TP into stuff – because what good is scratchy green TP .. so coming up on the Thanksgiving season I’ll just ask for your thanks .. so thank you in advance … ie thanks for working to build stuff and then turn excess wages into stuff so people who can’t turn stuff into stuff can flip it for a living
ps – the other pov – wish I could earn enough to have one of those fancies I loved to take pictures of – but then again – I might hit a deer with it or get it k@/@d
ToNYC Says:
November 13th, 2010 at 9:30 am
Art as investment works for the smart players who realize that over time their judgment of the intellectual perspective which is IP, and what it is that the artist presents will be a Call on an increasing statement of value over time (and transferred stored savings). The ones that see the artist’s vision and help bring that awareness public do the very best and are the lifeblood of our culture as well.
Saturday links: cleaner coal Abnormal Returns Says:
November 13th, 2010 at 10:08 am
What is driving the art market? Easy money.* (Big Picture)
philipat Says:
November 13th, 2010 at 11:31 am
VennData Says:
“What’s good for Damien Hirst is good for the global economy — Charles Wilson”
IMHO, the new Warhol? And I mean that not kindly. Both take advantage of art as culture as fashion as Ladt Gaga to make money. No problem with that, and good luck to them. But is it art?
Howard Lindzon » Blog Archive » Printing Money…I Mean Quantitative Easing Says:
November 14th, 2010 at 2:07 am
Today I am thinking about my Sotheby’s $BID indicator. I wrote about it a lot up until 2008 and have just forgotten about it until this fantastic post about the art market.
Record Art Prices… Are the Rich Worried? Says:
November 14th, 2010 at 3:34 pm
Today I am thinking about my Sotheby’s $BID indicator. I wrote about it a lot up until 2008 and have just forgotten about it until this fantastic post about the art market.
Abnormal Returns on Art Says:
November 15th, 2010 at 1:02 am
To read the post mentioned in the video, click here: What’s Driving the Art Market? Easy Money.