Excerpt:Journal of Advanced Appraisal Studies - 2011

As many AW Blog readers and fellow appraisers are aware, the Foundation for Appraisal Education just published the fourth annual edition of the Journal of Advanced Appraisal Studies. As the editor, I like to post excerpts from the articles on the AW Blog.

The first article in the new edition is by Katherine Jentleson, who is the Director of Analytics at Art Research Technologies and writes the ART report. Many of you are aware of ART as I post information from their monthly ART Focus newsletter to the AW Blog.

Katherine's article is titled The Blue Chip Market of Grandma Moses: An Outsider Artist inside the Mainstream Auction Market, and offers some great insight into the outsider art market in general and Moses in particular.


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The term “Outsider art” is an apparent contradiction: it describes art that—by virtue of its labeling—has actually been included in the mainstream art world. Yet the label is useful insofar as it signals that Outsider art is largely segregated, sold by its own dealers at its own art fairs, and viewed mostly in museums that specialize in folk art. Outsider art and its “separate-but-equal” status in the art world present ample opportunities for a variety of discourse, but neither the debate over the aesthetic merit of this art nor the problematic semantics of its modifier are the primary focus of this article. Nonetheless, both issues underscore the subsequent discussion of Grandma Moses, which employs quantitative analysis to highlight recent trends in Moses’s auction sales and situate them within the greater context of the American art market.

As sociologist Gary Alan Fine has argued, Outsider art is perhaps more at home on the market than in museums or the academy; few scholars or museum curators focus on Outsider art, but scores of dealers keep it in stock. The consequent role of market participants as the primary authentica-tors, which would be problematic in any market subcategory given the reliance of the valuation process on scholarship from non-commercial bodies, is especially problematic in the realm of Outsider art. What can an appraiser or an auction house specialist say of the value of a work whose very attraction may be its difference from a conventional art object? The valuation process, a privately rendered algorithm that combines connoisseurship and market knowledge, breaks down in the case of Outsider art; different standards must be applied. For example, attention is often paid to the abnormal social or psychological position of the artist. If some aspect of the value of these artworks is intertwined with the unique identities of their authors, then they become difficult to incorporate into the prevailing art market categories (i.e. Postwar and Contemporary Art, American Art, etc.). In 2008, five years after Christie’s attempted its first and only sale devoted exclusively to Outsider art, Robert Manley, the head of the house’s Contem-porary Art department explained the quandary of auctioning Outsider art: “[Outsider Art] is definitely a Catch-22. It’s hard to get quality consignments without a stand-alone sale, and you can’t have a stand-alone sale without quality consignments.”

As a result, despite a thriving private market, Outsider art is scarce at auction. Sales of works by major figures such as Bill Traylor, Martin Ramirez and Henry Darger have established Outsider artists’ potential for high price points at auction, yet their work rarely crosses the block.

In fact, the only Outsider artist with a significant auction history is Anna Robertson “Grandma” Moses, a 20th-century painter whose rural tableaus of the Northern United States have attracted the admiration of the mainstream art world since the early 1940s. Moses has become a staple of the quarterly American Paintings, Drawings and Sculpture sales held at Christie’s and Sotheby’s, and since 2005 her average price has been at least twice as high as widely accepted stalwarts of the American market like Arthur Dove and George Ault. The robust auction market of Grandma Moses, which is documented in Section II, not only evidences the potential for Outsider artists to be sold in broader market sectors; when considered relative to her comparable peers in the American paintings market (Section III) Moses’s case demonstrates how the value of an Outsider artist can be successfully anchored by mainstream art auctions. The behavioral economic principal of anchoring implied in Section III will be elaborated in the paper’s Conclusion.

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