Collecting and Investing

I feel so lucky and delighted to have found you and your web site today. Thank you for an hour’s patient (sic) telephone tutorial and for your forum material – all of great interest. Your love of these prints and your consequent care of apprentice lovers like myself give a delightful foretaste of how life will be when human values (beauty, love, truth, justice, all that jazz……) rule the world. I’d expected a huge flash plate-glass office outfit, with scary secretaries and bosses who scorned my ignorance. I almost couldn’t make the call. Boy am I glad I did.

You have prompted a (for me) revolutionary thought: if Picasso prints do indeed continue to appreciate apace, why should I not buy some for myself (my love of these prints is of course the real driving force behind all this), hold a few of these marvels in my house for a few years and then sell rather than put my savings in some damned exploiting bank and live off the interest – as I do now, with perhaps 20 years left to live and small savings to support them? —Alison T.

Response: My pleasure. I agree about the investment plan as rationalization for Picasso purchases–it’s certainly the rationalization I’ve always used. My only disagreement is with your projected longevity. I know better than to inquire about your age, but what do say we be more optimistic? After all, Picasso himself lived to 92, and that’s with chain-smoking and without the benefit of all sorts of interval medical advances, not to mention the UK’s wondrous socialized medical system!