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Main » Articles » What's the Art Market Up To?

What's the Art Market Up To?

Vorthos Mike
Posted on February 10, 2016
 Reddit

I have written about the original paintings of Magic for a number of years now regarding pricing. Back in 2011, the great recession was still very felt in art markets, and if you were able to buy art, you should’ve bought in deep. I was busy framing.

Nothing happened at all from 2011 to 2014 other than OriginalMagicArt.com going live, TheManaDrain’s Art, Rarities, and Collectibles Page thread of Magic Original Art hitting hundreds of pages and more Vorthoses began to talk about art-collecting. Nothing public is more on the nose to major works getting scooped up by collectors.

Then, things exploded. In 2014, I talked about the explosion of original art, and the ceiling of what can and what will sell is correcting itself in the market. Later that year, I tried to make a model of how much something costed by correlating it to dollars per square inch due to size and take artist notoriety and average per inch cost into consideration. You can see it below and see the average size of artworks scale upwards quickly. This currently only works for paintings, not sketches.

There is no perfect model of connoisseurship and no real certified appraisers yet for Magic art—that is, a micro-niche of the Imaginative Realism (formerly Fantasy and Sci-Fi Art) genre. To examine how things are so expensive, we should look like a person buying a house would. You look at comparables and try to roughly determine is something is over or underpriced.

Once a baseline has been established of who the artist is and if he or she is considered valuable by the market, you can dive into card playability, which affects price. A Chris Rahn is probably not going to be a $5/square inch artwork, but you can see when artworks separate from their normal area of pricing with a Planeswalker or a major landscape. What pricing charts help you to do is to find the deal or tell you that there is wiggle room because it is probably overpriced.

At that point, thin-versus-thick aesthetics become apparent to understand why a painting is $1,000 or $3,000 when it appears to be rather similar. Generally, Magic art is valued high due to its thick aesthetics of importance to a card, not to society at large. When it hits both to a stellar degree, it becomes in the great art category, with multiple audiences desiring it in the $30–$50/square inch of valuation. To explain thin versus thick, I’ve listed them below closely following the John Hospers definitions:

Thin aesthetics is the technical creation of the work. It’s the brushstrokes and proper usage of light. If looking at it in its natural state, it’s to examine it thinly. Everything is without context—this is examining it as only a painting. By a commissioned work, it’s naturally thin because the creativity to create from scratch does not exist.

Thick aesthetics is the context of what the Magic card is and who the artist is who made it. It also brings into consideration that, if you remove the card frame and mechanics and it still has some relevance, importance, and value, it’s considered thick.

I’m going to go through many of the available pieces on the market currently and give you some insight into how you should look at pricing.

eBay — Current Listings

Active Volcano

$80 per square inch is about as high as we’ll ever see for the pricing model.

You can see Viashivan Dragon, which, at 7.5” × 9,” is about $60 per square inch. It’s technically cheaper for more art compared to the Hampton “vintage” art, and we can start making conclusions as to whether Active Volcano is worth that much or it’s overpriced, and the Ian Miller pieces are more to the price it should be. As Ian Miller is a pretty known illustrator in the Fantasy/Sci-Fi world, especially in Britain, I would assume that’s a bit more correct at first glance.

Plague Spores

When you see any seller with a glut of works from one artist, it means he or she bought a giant lot of them to obtain the high-value pieces. It was probably a bulk deal for the minor works, and no, I’d bet they weren’t even $500 at the time. That said, you see some odd discrepancies when any seller lists a bunch of pieces rapidly. The sizes vary considerably from quite small to a more normal size here in 2016. I’d argue the Dingus Egg would be the solid mean of pricing, but at 67.6 square inches, it’s nearly $15/square inch, compared to Fight or Flight at $8.33/square inch, almost half as expensive per size.

I’ve pulled up a handy page that my wife and I have used to compare differences in TV size as relative to each other. I use it for art, to viscerally see the difference in terms of percentage. As for that Dingus Egg compared to the Fight or Flight, these are rough values, but it’s nearly 70% larger. That is an astonishing difference when you frame it on your wall and how much easier it is to appreciate it daily in your home. The question is, Will you pay twice as much for an artwork that is 70% smaller?

Rarely does framing impact a purchasing decision, as most people reframe their pieces immediately to fit their personal taste. But in this case, this framing job is lovely. Is it a $30/square inch value of work? That’s hard to say, but that frame is nice.

Sea's Claim

Greg Hildebrandt and his assistant have been reaching out to community members to let them know of available pieces on their website SpiderwebArtGallery.com. These two eBay pieces are not being sold by the artist, but you can see how the Hildebrandts had really major works in Magic that are reminiscent of their Star Wars art in terms of quality, but they also had a ton of common card arts in Kamigawa block that ain’t nobody wants to purchase.

Kamigawa, like Unglued and Unhinged, consists of paintings that have sat for years without any inquiries. If Wizards were to return to either grouping, there are artists whom I have talked to who would turn down those commissions or find a way to be busy. It’s a sunk cost for traditionally painting artists that they can’t recoup.

Harsh Judgment

And finally to round out the eBay auctions, we see some higher-end pieces that “break” the pricing-per-square-inch model. Let’s dive into why.

While Mark Tedin and Kev Walker are both well-known Magic artists and the artworks are rather great cards, their pricing is absurdly high for their size. (It’s over $90 and $140 per square inch!) Forming a checklist it goes as follows:

  • Art size for dollars per square inch

  • Who is the artist? Is it someone you know?

  • How good is the card?

  • Is the card still being played?

  • Is the card priced to move?

  • Is the seller advertising?

In this case, I know the collector. He’s a pretty avid collector, and he isn’t pricing these cheap to move. It’s priced aggressively high to say that he has them, yes, but also he won’t undersell them. It’ll be interesting in a few months if these prices hold.

Slaughter Pact

Recent auction eBay ends:

Odd in this group are the Tazri being very underpriced for Chris Rahn, with under $10/square inch, an RK Post original painting selling in less than a day for its Buy It Now price, and Howard Lyon’s gigantic piece. Rahn’s piece is a minor work, it’s not as highly detailed with layering of paint compared to his normal work, and Tazri’s face isn’t at his normal quality level. RK Post’s piece was just underpriced and snap-bought-up. It’s probably worth twice as much. As for Lyon, well, Howard works both digitally and traditionally, but only recently has he painted Magic pieces traditionally due to time and cost. Adding in his perfect timing of listing the auction—right as the card was revealed and also the card is quite strong and it’s massively large—it raises the profile and final realized auction price.

MTG Art Exchange

The largest semi-public art sales areas online is the MTG Art Exchange. There are over sixteen hundred people there, and from announcements to auctions, it’s the largest place to buy Magic art. You’ll notice the pricing difference from eBay. Since there are no fees, prices tend to skew downward, and you start to pick up on asking price or retail price and actual price.

Soul Spike

All from one seller (image size and framed size):

Belbe's Armor

All from one seller, an art collector with hundreds of pieces:

I’d take note of a few things below: the difference of the eBay pricing to Facebook pricing. There are a ton of really stellar pieces from this seller, no question there. They’re all just a tad high, as evidenced by the Facebook to eBay pricing for the few we have sizes for below. That’s okay, as you can always shoot people offers via Facebook.

Claustrophobia

All from one seller, a known community member who specializes in signed cards.

Notice the size of the pieces. They’re roughly the same cost as everything else, but they’re larger than most pieces. Adding in a painterly quality that is a bit more uncommon from 1996 to 2006, and you have some soft pricing if you want to bundle two or three pieces.

VintageMagic.com

Artifact Ward
Yes, his pricing is ambitious, but it’s the highest of the deviation of older art costs. If you want to know the high end of the ceiling, you look there. Compare the Justin Hampton’s on eBay to Artifact Ward for nearly double the price at the same size despite identical playability (near zero). I mentioned advertising before with a few pieces on eBay, and this is similar. These pieces aren’t priced to actually sell, and that’s okay, too. It leaves inventory to always be there for a special sale or reasoning in the future.

Mark Aronowitz’s Groups on Facebook

Grouping these three together really showcase an artist working with an agent to sell works. Some are more priced to move than others, as he also handled the Zoltan Boros and Gabor Szikszai pieces that were posted and largely snapped up on Facebook and eBay. They were incredibly priced to move.

People also don’t really know about these yet. The Doug Shuler group on Facebook has fewer than one hundred members.

Doug Shuler:

Joven

These two pieces, again, show how important size is to pricing. One is nearly twice as big and yet only a couple hundred dollars more. But it’s a legendary creature compared to a Commander card that still sees play and could be reprinted easily. Using the model above, it’s $15.71/square inch for Greater Good vs. $45.45/square inch for Jovan. I’d argue Greater Good is a better “deal” for the artist, looking at the rest of the list, despite it being one of his most expensive pieces.

Richard Kane Ferguson:

Most of RKF’s major Magic artworks have been bought up and traded hands. To note, most are the standard pre-1996-larger-scanner-at-Wizards size of 5.5” × 7,” so you’re not getting a raw deal for his pieces that are that size. You would just get a better painting if you buy one of his larger works. That said, even his tiniest at $62/square inch is pretty expensive for what the card is, but I assure you there is some wiggle room. These pieces have been posted a little while.

Volkan Baga:

Anticipate
The artist who studied under Donato Giancola, the living master, has almost sold all of his Magic originals. He dropped the pricing on a few of them to make them move. At the start of every set, his pieces have been promoted properly—he’s a known great artist, and he paints large! Per square inch, as my model looked at, his pieces are some of the cheapest. This is where the scale can skew—you don’t see his works that were 4,000 to 8,000 Euro at the same size that did rapidly sell. We only see the remainder below, and a promotional Zombie Apocalypse from the original Innistrad block seems to be a rather sweet pickup if you’re into zombies and have room for a gigantic painting.

Framing It All Together

What ultimately helps prices fully realize—that is, to hit their maximum potential without a bidding war—is to promote the offering prior to a sale price being discussed or an auction’s terms. A seller can never plan on a bidding war; they occur randomly, and one-upmanship is impossible to predict. What we as buyers can predict is to look at comparables in the market that are not selling and see if our comparable is priced accordingly. If so, that means it’s probably too high, according to the market.

I’ll be examining more in the future, but assuming larger is more valuable is legitimately step one in valuing a piece. This is also why when you see someone asking for pricing and hearing immediately-thrown-out values, those are not to be trusted, as much thicker aesthetics than merely looking at one eBay auction—or worse, a private sale that cannot be verified—come into play.

Let us talk about this again soon, especially as we look into who the patrons are for each artist and their respective collecting circles that surround them. Interviews will be in order.

Until then, buy some art for your walls. I assure you, it’ll improve your everyday experience.

-Mike

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TAGS articles, editorial, review, analysis, art, vorthos, mike linnemann, creative, art review

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