Pick up bargains in Chinatown and make 10,000 times the profit at the beginning

Chapter 107: Insufficient Cultural Accumulation
Since it is an exchange meeting, there must be experts. One of the organizers of this exchange meeting, the vice president of the Antiques Association, is said to be an appraiser of an auction company. His name is Andrew.

The item he brought this time was a famous Western painting.

To be honest, the variety of antique artworks in the West is far less rich than that in China.

Although there are four ancient civilizations in the world, and China is one of the later ones in history, there is no interruption in ancient Chinese civilization. With cultural relics accumulated over thousands of years, the other three ancient civilizations combined cannot surpass China.

Andrew is explaining his painting to everyone and telling them how to authenticate it.

Since it is an exchange meeting, how can there be no exchange?
That is a work by Paul Siffer, a nude portrait painter and illustrator who is good at body sketching and is known as the "King of Beautiful Buttocks". He is good at using European classical realistic painting methods, and the overall composition also adopts European classical composition methods to depict a young naked woman in the bedroom.

Seeing this group of people appreciating a nude picture, Lin Yuan was speechless.

If it was a picture of a nude woman, it would be understandable for a group of men to appreciate it, but the person in the picture is a man!

Paintings like this by famous artists are works of art, but if ordinary people draw such paintings, they are probably guilty of spreading obscenity.

"Paul Siffer's work is only $18?" Henry was a little unbelievable.

You know, Paul Siffer is a world-class master of painting!

His work only costs a little over a hundred thousand dollars?
Lin Yuan smiled and said, "Some Western artworks have a big bubble. We all know that Western artworks dominate the auction market. On the auction list, the top ones are almost all dominated by Western artworks. Just because we see that situation, we can't think that the value of Western artworks is generally stronger than that of Chinese artworks."

The reason why antique artworks of the middle and lower classes in the West are not good is perhaps because they lack cultural heritage.

In fact, except for a few masterpieces by well-known painters, most of the artworks - including common works by well-known artists, and many antique furniture and silverware with a history of one or two hundred years, look good, but are not expensive.

As long as you visit antique markets and art fairs in the West, you will find that artworks and even antiques worth thousands or tens of thousands of dollars are very common.

The main purpose of Westerners buying these artworks is to decorate their homes, and they do not have the funds to speculate on this sector, so their appreciation potential is very limited.

A few hundred thousand or even hundreds of thousands of yuan may not be enough to buy you a decent work of art in the Chinese contemporary art market, but it is enough for you to own an oil painting by a master of Western classical art, or bring home antique furniture or shiny silver wine vessels that are 100 to 200 years old and still well preserved.

Some people may say, doesn’t this just prove that Western art is not that watered down?
Please note that what we are talking about here are the top Western artworks, which have been hyped up a bit.

Especially Impressionist and post-war art.

After World War II, the world's art center shifted from Europe to the United States. The United States needed to weaken European classical art and strengthen emerging art from Cézanne to Picasso and even contemporary art in order to establish its own dominance in the art empire.

From another perspective, the sky-high prices of post-war art are, to some extent, also a financial behavior.

In Lin Yuan’s view, art is sometimes a financial tool that requires finding new explosion points to promote in order to bring in high profits.

Post-war and contemporary art mainly belong to the investment adventure sector. If chosen correctly, the return on investment can be dozens or hundreds of times, but this is destined to be an activity that only a few people can engage in.

"Besides, Paul Siffer was a painter in the 19th century. In a sense, history is still too short." Lin Yuan added. Of course, it cannot be said that modern and contemporary artworks are worthless.

Zhang Daqian, Xu Beihong and others are also modern and contemporary artists, but the prices of their works are generally very high.

"In addition, Paul Siffer is more famous for his paintings of nude women, not nude men, and the value of their works is quite different," Lin Yuan continued.

Most of the naked women in Sifer's paintings are young women, who appear in the bedroom and show their intimate and moving beauty. In front of the charm of the female body, he is always as ecstatic as an innocent child. Even when he is old and sick and can't walk, they still give him the strength to cheer up.

In his paintings, the female body has an absolutely full and overflowing charm, but it seems to be an unconscious existence. Therefore, their youthful, plump and attractive images all reveal a kind of innocent, pure and natural charm.

As for the naked man!
To be honest, normal men probably don't like to look at this kind of paintings, right?

Lin Yuan did not go over to join in the fun. What was so good about a painting of a naked man? If you didn't know, you would think he was a psychopath!

In the West, this kind of behavior may be very common, after all, people there are open-minded and free!

But Lin Yuan felt that he couldn't accept it.

He drove the treasure hunter and continued to look for valuable things.

"Tony, that vinyl record is pretty good. If it's sold for less than 20,000 US dollars, there's still some profit to be made." Lin Yuan said to Tony beside him.

Tony's eyes lit up and he immediately walked towards the owner of the vinyl record.

In today's world where digital media are prevalent, vinyl records, an outdated sound carrier, are not only favored by more and more music enthusiasts, but also lead a nostalgic trend, attracting more and more people to join the vinyl collection team.

We all know that vinyl records are the earliest carrier for storing sound signals in human history.

Initially, Edison placed the world's first phonograph, which he invented, in a shopping mall, but it was ignored by customers because of its bulkiness and poor sound quality.

Ten years later, the German Paulin stood on the shoulders of the giant Edison, improved the phonograph, and launched a black disc-shaped dense-grained Bakelite record that had clear sound quality, was easy to carry, low cost, and could be reproduced in large quantities. The era of the record industry thus arrived.

However, in the mid-80s, vinyl records began to be replaced by CDs.

In fact, when it comes to collecting vinyl records, some people pursue the "front page", some pursue the band, and some pursue the cover. As the market price of vinyl records with collectible value soars, many collectors are eyeing this huge market. However, many collectors do not do so for the sake of waiting for a good price.

Perhaps for them, collecting a vinyl record is not only about collecting the sounds of that era, but also about themselves of that era, the story that belongs to the record, and the history and culture related to the record.

After a while, Tony came back with the record, and he finally succeeded.

(End of this chapter)