rob_react

Spoilers- it's a bronze trash bag!

Well, that's the other part. Until Rothko had the idea to paint like this, the idea to paint like this didn't exist. That's what people are paying money for. It's the conceptual breakthrough and Rothko's place in one of the most important parts of art history. The value isn't in the complexity of the technique. I was just pointing out that the techniques involved are complex because Rothko was the subject earlier in the thread and I know a bit about his practice. There are plenty of artists who sell for millions of dollars (tens of millions) who don't have a process nearly as complicated as Rothko's. This is even more true as we get closer to the present day where the concept is much more important than craft or aesthetics in the minds of many in the art world. I go to international art fairs (most often Art Basel Miami Beach and the satellite shows) so I see the full breadth of this stuff. You can walk around a show like that and play "trash or treasure" trying to guess if a work is a pile of trash, or a sculpture

In other news, I updated the The Most Valuable Comic Books In the World article and list and added the Church Detective #27 back into the top ten.

more in-depth

The subject of Mark Rothko's art is actually very, very deep. There's discussion of every aspect of his work (both from fans and detractors) including very serious discussion about how they should even be viewed. He wanted viewers to be very close to the paintings, so they overwhelmed their field of vision. They were meant to be seen over a long period of time. Sitting and looking for minutes at a time changes what you see. The boundaries between the color fields come alive the more you take them in. For some it's a very meditative, spiritual experience- which was his aim. People who like his work like it intensely. On the subject of spirituality in Rothko's work, there is a Rothko Chapel, in Houston (wikipedia description follows) http://www.rothkochapel.org/

Also, the technique he uses is actually very painstaking and precise. The joke about "my kid could do better" ignores (as it usually does) the decades of development that come before an artist has a conceptual breakthrough like Rothko did in the 1950s and the actual craft of the work. Of course, it ignores the breakthrough itself, but that goes without saying. He was actually very secretive about his techniques. His work is actually very difficult for restorers. It's WAY easier to work with an old master painting than it is something like this. They have a hard time figuring out what combination of pigment and binder he was using (he used both organic and man-made pigments- including novel ones) and his brush work is very subtle so it's very difficult to replicate. The problem of restoring a Rothko is such that, in the most extreme example, Harvard (who could spare no expense) threw in the towel on actually restoring the murals he did for them and used an ingenious lighting system to "restore" the works to their original appearance. https://harvardartmuseums.org/exhibitions/4768/mark-rothkos-harvard-murals https://theconversation.com/how-we-restored-harvards-rothko-murals-without-touching-them-35245 To each their own, is cool by me. I don't care if you like his work or would toss it in the trash if you came upon one of his paintings (you'd need a big bin!) I just know enough about this stuff that I can't help myself.

For what it's worth, paintings by Rothko are 10000% meant to be experienced in person. A jpg isn't a fair representation of his work at all. They're large and are designed to envelop the viewer. I'm not the biggest fan, to be honest, but they're paintings that are designed to be experienced in person.

What copy is that?

That's true. That's a topic when you look at land conservation deals. The parents might be really into donating the land or selling it at a discount to have it be protected. The kids might be thinking they'll sell to the highest bidder as soon as they are able.

I recently went through the smallest, tiniest, part of this exercise when I was comparing different chunks of the Church collections versus the Promise books as a whole and... without going beyond the just the Actions it's a pretty big number (to me at least.) It all depends on how you define life-changing of course. $5,000 would be life-changing for some people. $50,000 for others. What's life-changing here? $50,000,000? $100,000,000? We're not seeing these books for sale.

If there are more books, and they are keys, I think this would actually have quite a big marketing pop right now. I would love that to be true.

No worries. And, as I mentioned later, this is how it works so thanks for alerting me to the error there. I didn't know those were off, so it's good to know that there's an issue there. I'll have to double check everything on that missing page, since I don't actually know where the fill-in data came in.

Yeah, there's a clear gap. I don't know where the fill-in data came from though. I'd love to get those fixed.

It's not something I have captured as an existing issue. But obviously the data is out there now so I can add it.

To follow up on the Silver Streak #7 that was brought up, there are no Silver Streak books in the catalog pdf I got from greggy. That listing must have been added to the original spreadsheet put together here on the boards that I got from user Arty. I'll add that as an issue to research. See, this is how it works! If people report issues, I capture them and the data improves. The problem is that so many of the issues are actually research topics. That's why I've hired people. For example I hired a young person to take the Standard Catalog of Comic Books and the list when it had incomplete publisher data to make sure there was a publisher for every title.

I need to update that page. The visualization is out of date and I'm sorry I lost your attribution, so I'll add that back in. You were super helpful on that chronology

Vancouver was such a funny pedigree. Amazing books, but it was like the original owner was actively trying to avoid buying anything that would end up being valuable.

As always, thank you to the many people on the boards who have helped out on the many projects I've taken on over the years. I really do appreciate it, but getting snark because something I worked on over two years isn't good enough when I haven't historically gotten the sort of help I'd need to improve the data is annoying as hell. Roll up you own sleeves and do the work yourself and see how that goes.

It didn't "float in" from anywhere. It's a project I worked on, off and on, over two years. It's imperfect, for sure, but it's a much more usable version that the tiny text pdf that everyone has. It's open source, so my hope was that people would submit corrections and I could update the data that way. That has rarely happened, unfortunately, so it's difficult for me to keep the data up to date myself (in the middle of all the other projects I do and having a life.) But, please, feel free to throw shade at the work I did for free, for the hobby, including spending hundreds of dollars of my own money to hire two separate people to try to double check and format the data since it was too big a task for me to do on my own. It's much easier for people to snark about the project than it is to actually help. I get it. Here's what I wrote up initially where I explicitly say it's incomplete and needs corrections and I explicitly ask for help. I also posted about it on the boards. https://itsalljustcomics.com/2016/04/07/edgar-church-collection-data-released/

Yes, it hasn't been updated in 3 years. I would like to return to it, but it's one of many things I've got going on and it's a bit down the list.

Comics are weird in that auction houses do not generally discuss values or give estimates, but in other categories I follow (fine art, watches, spirits, wine) it is commonplace. There's usually an estimate, right there in the description. For example, Sotheby's is explicit, in their press release, about the overall value of their recent consignment win.

I don't know of anyone either, I'm just reacting to the comparison because it's something I already had thought about. In the livestream talking about the collection they tried to put a dollar value on the collection and I immediately started to think about how thinly you could slice the Church books to match the value of the whole Promise collection. Allentown, as well. In both cases, it's probably two books , That said, I'm enjoying the release of this collection. As I mentioned, I tuned into one of their livestreams talking about it. It's amazing that a collection of this quality can still be discovered at this point in time. That said, ranking this collection (new and shiny as it is) versus some of the other collections is fun, too. And while I am trolling a little bit, I'm not kidding when I start naming collections that I think are better (including the three Silver Ae collections.) We all have gone through exercises ranking pedigrees. This is just a continuation of that. While the story is amazing and the opportunity for collectors is a rarity, some of the landmark pedigrees in both the Silver Age and Golden Age are on another level. Seeing people question whether the hobby can "handle" the Promise books is silly when you think about what the impact of something like White Mountain, Pacific Coast or the Allentown books showing up today.

I'll give Promise that, the story is amazing. The books are really nice, too. Just not in the same neighborhood as the Church collection.

Even more provocative- I'd take Curator, White Mountain and Pacific Coast over the Promise books ()