Art Feels Difficult
Unlike buying a CD or DVD, art is not something you can casually own.
Along with the image of art and fine art as belonging to some loftier stage, it seems to remain a distant presence for ordinary people. In Japan especially, the total value of art traded is astonishingly low even by global standards.
On the other hand, museum attendance has been strong, led by blockbuster exhibitions such as the historic hit “Jakuchu: The 300th Anniversary of His Birth” (Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum) in 2016 — where the wait to get in reached “five and a half hours!” — as well as the “Yayoi Kusama” and “Scary Paintings (Kowai-e)” exhibitions in 2017 and the “Chiharu Shiota” exhibition in 2019.
The interest in art is there, yet the hurdle of actually buying a work stands in the way. How should we understand this mismatch? Reading “Let’s Buy Contemporary Art!”, the book introduced here, I felt I had finally grasped how it all works.
“Let’s Buy Contemporary Art!” by Daisuke Miyazu
The author, Daisuke Miyazu, is an art collector who bought 300 works of contemporary art over 15 years while working an ordinary salaried job at a company.
His love of art grew until he even commissioned a French artist to design his own home. Miyazu calls the real joy of buying contemporary art “the exchange with the artists.”
As I read on, I felt that being able to speak with the very artists who live in the same era as us is an essential part of enjoying their work. Buying a piece also supports the artists’ own activities, and I sense that the breadth — the whole world — of enjoying art expands dramatically.
The book also vividly recounts the episode of collecting a historic work by Yayoi Kusama, Miyazu’s signature artist, and its sense of immediacy is thrilling. The appeal of this true account comes from the relatability of an ordinary salaried worker — not a tycoon like Yusaku Maezawa, who won a Basquiat at auction for 12.3 billion yen.
Try Buying Contemporary Art
In today’s age of social media, we can interact not only at exhibitions and galleries but also online. In the world of art, too, online shopping seems to be starting to function as a means of purchase.
Rather than closed, hard-to-enter galleries, having more opportunities to casually engage with artists and works — and more places to buy them — is a very good thing, I think.
The significance of this book is that it becomes a trigger to think, “Let’s try buying contemporary art!” It is a fine book I can recommend to anyone who wants even a glimpse into the world of art.
Why not give it a read?
