I D E A S...
A new world.
The acquisition of contemporary art has
taken an unsuspected turn until just a few years ago. If Claude Monet had been
told 120 years ago that his water lilies and brilliant landscapes could be seen
on high-quality screens from anywhere in the world and, furthermore, bought and
collected from the sofa in a house with just a few clicks, he would have thought
it was a bad joke. No one in their right mind is ahead of such paradigm shifts,
no one except the madmen or the visionaries who generate such changes when
technology allows. But in addition to technology, it must be allowed by the
public, who must naturally assume the more than real possibility of said
advance, the comfortable and safe act of buying, at whatever price, objects of
all kinds, from a car, a house or the most valuable art. This internalized trust
as something normal, as a habitual market process, has also cost decades of
assimilation by citizens since the appearance of the Internet. Before that,
everything was analog and required a meticulous and face-to-face examination of
the object, artistic in this case, its confirmation of a real thing and not a
virtual one, and of course an ancient payment method that has nothing to do with
bank gateways or the transfers that we currently use on the internet. It could
be said that the charm of direct sales has been lost, the exchange between
seller and buyer, the direct appreciation of the painting, of the car, of the
vacation home that we will go to in the summer, but nothing has been lost, these
options continue being there, there is only profit, there are only new and
fabulous tools to be able to comfortably buy anything. Scams and swindles have
always existed and the argument that everything is worse online does not hold
up; the security protocols of the worldwide web, banking with its current online
payment systems, the progressive education and knowledge of the digital
environment of citizens mean that being able to buy a beautiful new car or a
painting by the artist that we like is currently real world of facilities and a
pleasure accessible from the most comfortable and remote place imaginable.
© José Manuel Merello
