The $5,000 Question, Part IV

NEW YORK—Charles, our Manhattan friend looking to make his first-ever art purchase on a $5,000 budget, is beginning to feel at home in galleries now. He’s spent time uptown in Part I of our series at Knoedler & Co. in Part I of our series; visited Gemini G.E.L. at Joni Moisant Weyl off 57th Street in Part II; and most recently, in Part III, he has been to Danese in Chelsea.

He’s quite near now to making his decision on how he’s going to spend his $5,000, but first he wants to visit SoHo, and he decides to try one of the original SoHo galleries, Nancy Hoffman Gallery, which has been in business since 1972.

He walks in, takes a long look at the current show of Howard Buchwald’s colorful abstract paintings, and then goes over to the desk where he explains what he’s looking for.

He’s delighted to meet Nancy Hoffman herself, and to his surprise—because this hasn’t happened before—she starts by suggesting that he might want to go somewhere else.

“It might be a good thing to start by going round to galleries, and looking at things, and educating yourself by looking.”

Charles is a little taken aback. “And is that because you don’t have any work here that I can afford?” he asks.

“No, we’re not the kind of gallery which turns its nose up at somebody who has $5,000 rather than $500,000,” Ms. Hoffman replies, “We have a huge, absolutely huge choice, of work in your price range.

“But once we see where your sensibilities lie, if we feel there’s another gallery in the area, we’ll send you there, or send you to a few other galleries, or give you a list of 10 places that you could try. I want to stress that you can learn by looking and you have to start trusting your instincts.”

Charles is impressed, but explains that he has already visited some other galleries and is eager to see what’s available within his price range here.

“There’s a wide range of work you could acquire here with $5,000. We’ll show you everything we have in your price range, and we’ll try to begin an education. We’ll explain why somebody is making work; what motivates them; what’s behind their work conceptually; what materials they use. All of that.”

Hoffman begins to place before him work by Ilan Averbuch; by the artist who’s showing currently, Howard Buchwald; and then the intriguing meetings of abstraction and ghostly figuration in works by Linda Mieko Allen.

While they’re looking, Hoffman continues with what she called Charles’ education: “You have to work with dealers you can trust. You can’t just go around and buy works from $100 to $5,000 and assume that everything is going to either appreciate or hold up for you. You have to work with people who are not simply going to be ‘selling’ you something, but who will help helping you to find out what you want to live with.”

And then she shows him work by Rupert Deece and some beguiling Mark Depman cibachromes in editions of five.

“It’s an adventure, beginning to collect. Once you kindle that spark in someone, of wanting to live with something of quality, it’s like being bitten by a bug. I remember when the gallery first opened, we sold something to an architect and all he could pay $25 a month. He had fallen in love with a piece that we had here. It wasn’t very much money, but $25 a month was all he could afford. And that was how we sold it to him.”

Hoffman keeps bringing out pieces under available for less than the $5,000 cap: work by Greg Halili and Rohan Harris and some exquisite paintings of tulips by Michael Gregory.

And she continues to share her experience with Charles. “We had an art fair encounter where somebody came up to me. He didn’t know his way around the art world, he was just starting to buy. We don’t fix our prices to massage people’s egos, and then discount them enormously. If we build value into our prices, then we don’t discount them beyond a certain percent.

“And this person was making me an offer that, as I told him, ‘I could refuse.’ But he kept coming back. He came back 10 times. Finally he came back to me and I said, ‘Look, give me your cell phone number, and I’ll think about it.’”