It seems like we see this type of article a few times per year --

http://www.theage.com.au/money/investing/classic-cars-and-watches-give-best-returns-20140107-30f4a.html

The articles we see on a regular basis:

• watches are a good investment
• watches are a bad investment
• there is no future for mechanical watches
• there is a great future for mechanical watches.

: My friend, Jack Forster, editor of Revolution magazine,
: recommended this article in the New York Times -- Art Is Hard
: to See Through the Clutter of Dollar Signs

: Much of this seems to hold true in the world of vintage and
: collectible watches, only there are fewer digits after the
: dollar sign, in our little world.

: Jeff

: +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

:

: Art Is Hard to See Through the Clutter of Dollar Signs, By ROBERTA
: SMITH, November 13, 2013

: As our troubled age becomes ever more gilded, art auction prices
: soar with bone-numbing regularity. A new high-water mark was
: reached on Tuesday, when a 1969 triptych by the British painter
: Francis Bacon sold for $142 million while the Christie’s
: auction in which it was featured took in $692 million. Both
: figures exceeded recent highs: One arrived in spring 2012, when
: Edvard Munch’s “The Scream” sold for $119 million at
: Sotheby’s; the other came last spring, when a Christie’s
: auction total reached $492 million. It seems that people really,
: really like art these days.

: Auctions have become the leading indicator of ultra-conspicuous
: consumption, pieces of public, male-dominated theater in which
: collectors, art dealers and auction houses flex their monetary
: clout, mostly for one another. The spectacle of watching these
: privileged few (mostly hedge fund managers and investment-hungry
: consortiums, it seems) tossing around huge amounts of money has
: become a rarefied spectator sport. These events are painful to
: watch yet impossible to ignore and deeply alienating if you
: actually love art for its own sake.

: More than ever, the glittery auction-house/blue-chip gallery sphere
: is spinning out of control far above the regular workaday sphere
: where artists, dealers and everyone else struggle to get by. It
: is a kind of fiction that has almost nothing to do with anything
: real — not new art, museums or historical importance. It is
: becoming almost as irrelevant as the work, reputation and market
: of the kitsch painter Thomas Kinkade.

: Some have tried to put things into perspective, lamenting that the
: Bacon price almost equaled the $154 million that President Obama
: requested for the National Endowment for the Arts for fiscal
: year 2013 — and more than the $138 million that the endowment
: actually received, with cuts.

: Others have pointed out that the price would have paid, twice, for
: the renovated Queens Museum, which cost a modest $69 million. It
: has been noted once more that such figures make it impossible to
: see the art for the money, that works costing this much are, at
: least temporarily, damaged goods.

: But here’s another perspective. Prices for postwar art began to
: rise in 1980, when the Whitney Museum of American Art paid $1
: million for Jasper Johns’s “Three Flags.” The art world
: was shocked. Adjusted for inflation, the $1 million spent on the
: Johns painting would be roughly $2.8 million in today’s
: dollars. Now, this would seem a drop in the bucket.

: And the system seems greased to go even higher. In a postsale news
: conference on Wednesday, Brett Gorvy, worldwide head of postwar
: and contemporary art at Christie’s, seemed to be in gung-ho
: mode. “This isn’t a bubble,” he said. “It’s the
: beginning of something new.”

: Yet it seems obvious that the Bacon — three portraits of the
: artist’s friend, the British painter Lucian Freud — is a
: special case and a guaranteed money magnet. It is a portrait of
: one of Britain’s two most famous modern artists painted by the
: other one, both of whom led flamboyant and well-documented
: lives. More skeptically, the triptych, “Three Studies of
: Lucian Freud,” might also be termed a portrait of a middlebrow
: artist by another middlebrow artist. Yes, the work is
: beautifully painted with a fetching yellow background, yet if
: its subject were someone else, or if it simply had an unfamiliar
: name in its title, it probably would have gone for quite a bit
: less.

: In the meantime, it helps to remember that today most people look
: at Mr. Johns’s “Three Flags” at the Whitney without seeing
: a million dollar signs. It may be hard to look at this Bacon
: without thinking of its extraordinary price. But since the buyer
: is currently a mystery, it’s anyone’s guess whether we will
: see it again anytime soon.

: This article has been revised to reflect the following
: correction:

: Correction: November 18, 2013

: A critic’s notebook article on Thursday about the $142.4 million
: sale of Francis Bacon’s “Three Studies of Lucian Freud” at
: Christie’s auction house misstated the year of an earlier
: notable art transaction, the Whitney Museum of American Art’s
: purchase of Jasper Johns’s painting “Three Flags.” The
: Johns painting was bought for $1 million in 1980, not in 1977.
: And because of that error, the article gave an incorrect cost
: for the Johns painting in today’s dollars. Adjusted for
: inflation, the $1 million sales price would be roughly $2.8
: million now, not $3.85 million.