An American novelist has a female character say, "It's better to cry in a Rolls Royce than to laugh on a bicycle." I still remember this line, so it must have been impactful. I think it conveys the atmosphere of the 20th century American dream and American material civilization.
For me, a bicycle is enough and I think it would be much better to have peace of mind. But people's values are diverse, so I don't intend to argue. There are people who spend hundreds of millions of yen or even 100 times that amount to buy paintings, jewelry, cars, etc. Since the 18th century, equal distribution of wealth and denial of private property have been widely advocated, and large-scale experiments such as communism have been carried out.
Still, there is no system for distributing wealth equally, and it's not clear whether it's really necessary. Where there is no money, there is none, but where there is, there is plenty. Since we live in a monetary economy, money flows through society and supports the functioning of society. People with a lot of money invest it to increase their wealth, or buy luxury items. As art dealers, we receive a share of the money left over from people with money to spare after buying the necessities of daily life, and use it to cover the living expenses of artists and for our own living expenses. However, neither artists nor art dealers make much money, and even the most successful people probably only manage to build a mansion and buy one vacation home.
Painters are similar, and they all make a living on a shoestring. Wealthy people and people who have been successful in profitable businesses want to spend even a little of their spare money on paintings to help painters make a living. And they want merchants to help them too. Customers' demands for paintings can sometimes be surprisingly greedy. They want good works, cheap, and they expect the price to go up, and they even think about reselling them if the price goes up. In other words, paintings are considered a product that has both interior and financial value. For example, if you buy a piece of furniture for 2 million yen and want to sell it for 5 million yen in 20 years (after using it for 20 years), you would be thought crazy. But when it comes to paintings, people don't mind thinking like that. That's probably because it happens sometimes. I want to tell my customers, "Enjoy it to your heart's content as an interior or luxury item. And think of it as a lottery ticket that comes with it." Sometimes you win. I'm in love with the artists I contract with, so I work hard to make each of them more famous and someday earn ten times the amount they earn now. I want to tell my customers, "Please buy my dream along with this painting. Let's bet on this dream together."
Even if the sales method is a little pushy or the explanation of the artist's evaluation is exaggerated, it is of course better if it is not so, but I think that such things can be customer service in a sense. Of course, lying is not allowed. For example, fakes and fake signatures are absolutely not allowed. I remember a customer who used to buy paintings from me often asked a lot of questions that did not have a straight answer, such as "Is this painting really good? Will it become famous...etc.," and listened to my explanations that were not really answers. I remember him paying the money with a satisfied smile and saying, "Well, I'll take it. You've fooled me again."
I think culture is a place to throw away excess money. At a party, I talked to a man who made a lot of money in finance. He bought a watercolor painting by a French artist, and he asked me if it could be sold for a little more now. I said, "Now, I can sell it for more than I bought it for, but people like you who have made a lot of money in finance buy paintings when they are very expensive, and if the artist's paintings are worthless, that's fine. If the price goes up from when you bought it, you can go to a gallery that is about to go out of business, pretend to have been scammed, and sell it cheaply." Culture and hobbies are places to waste excess money. I wish rich people would pay the living expenses of the people who support such culture and hobbies, who are not so well off.
Jewelry, travel, Rolexes, and other designer items may be nice, but paintings are even better. Because they are art, they enrich the soul. They sharpen the senses and show us a different world. They improve the quality of the joys, pains, and sorrows of life. We will learn a lot from interacting with the paintings hanging on our walls, and we will find much comfort and joy. There are talented painters who are quietly creating wonderful works of art that will be passed down to the next century.
Please help us to create works of art that are full of imagination. Each painting, or 100 paintings, that you buy will create a future Picasso, a Chagall, or a Gauguin. The work you buy may be the work of a future master. I would like our artists (though not all of them) to leave their mark in art history. Some of them have their works in museums.
Nowadays, when I look at paintings by artists who are worth hundreds of millions of yen, for example, a 10-size painting, I often think that the paintings by our artists are better. However, the price is only one tenth or one hundredth of that. It is true that the works of artists who are worth hundreds of millions of yen are often wonderful, transcending the barriers of time, space, culture, race, and ethnicity, but I often think that our artists are better than artists who are worth up to tens of millions of yen, especially those who are protected by Japan's closed market and do not stand up to the eyes of many people.