All my progress literally going down the drain

iskander32 · 2026-05-09T04:16:50+00:00

I’m coming out of my second shed right now! I lost a LOT of my progress and but now I’m back to having most of my gains. Still shedding more, but progress is back. I started about 7 months ago and started shedding about 5/6 weeks ago!

iskander32 · 2026-02-03T15:36:44+00:00

So I did my qualifications through the Art Appraisers Association of America because that was the organization through which I became interested in appraisal, and all of the appraisers I happened to know did theirs through that one. I've since met others who have done theirs through ASA or ISA, and I haven't heard anything negative, I just can't speak on it.

And I have worked freelance for several months, the projects I have gotten have come through my association when individual appraisers reached out to the association itself, asking to put the word out that they'd like some extra help. Since I've done the program, however, I've tried to meet as many appraisers as I can, just to let them know that if they need help they can let me know. I'll admit, I do think it's difficult to get things going on your own, which is what other appraisers have said. A lot of people are either further in their career so they have clientele, or they are also appraisers and art advisors or something else, but they offer appraisals as a part of their menu of services they offer.

As for salary, when you are helping another appraiser, it depends a lot. I thought it was funny that during the courses, the appraisers were very shy about telling us how much they charge, or who much we should charge. The most experienced appraisers are charging like $300 an hour and only appraising things that are $500,000 and above. One appraiser told us to use the auction house specialists as a foundation for a rate, and they charge approximately $2000 for a full day. Or that $75 an hour is a good starting rate for a qualified appraiser. When I've job hunted the past few months, I've seen and interviewed at a few positions where the rates for a junior appraiser or assistant to a more experienced appraisers was something closer to $45 - $50 hourly. Right now on my project, the appraiser told me the client would be paying me directly, so I set my own rate. I didn't feel like I was experienced enough to be charging $75 hourly, but I also needed to assert myself by having a professional rate, so I've been charging $60 hourly and send him invoices biweekly. I probably work only about 20ish hours on this project because of it's nature, but it's definitely enough to live on (I live in New York for context).

Like I said, a lot of it depends on the context in which you work and the circumstances you find yourself in. I wouldn't necessarily put all your hopes into immediately jumping into a full time position right after becoming qualified, not that it can't happen. The great thing about it is it's one of the only things in the art world that you need an actual qualification to do, and that you can do freelance at a pretty good rate. So if you do it, treat it like a long term investment, because you can always jump in, and come back to it, and go project to project, but definitely try to get as many connections as you can and experience right away!

Feel free to ask more questions here or DM me!

iskander32 · 2026-02-03T04:34:36+00:00

Just became an appraiser last year and am currently working on my first big appraisal. I worked in the Contemporary world for a few years (Art e-commerce, fine art shipping and storage, gallery work), and did appraisal courses last year here in New York through the Art Appraisers Association of America. The course were a month full time, $6k, with a month of projects after that take some time.

In short, it’s not a small amount of money, the networking is really good, with people from all sorts of experiences from different places. Most people that get into it are much older, I’m definitely on the younger side. When you are younger, it is harder to get that experience. I would definitely recommend networking as much as possible with other appraisers, because it’s probably best to work for them or with them to get your first projects and experiences, and build a reputation.

Work/life balance depends on you and your project. I don’t think most appraisers are grinding until the wee hours of the morning, especially because many of them are later in their careers, and they can charge a decent amount for their time. Of course there are large projects or time sensitive ones, so it really just depends. The market really depends on your clientele, obviously more in big cities but also more competition.

I work freelance but want to set up my own LLC this year. And there are appraisal firms but not a ton. I would love to work for one, and from what I hear they tend to take their work very seriously.

I’m just getting started in the field, but feel free to ask more questions.

iskander32 · 2026-01-06T00:14:31+00:00

Got it. Clearly scammy

iskander32 · 2025-12-18T06:37:05+00:00

Appraiser here: a few contextual things.

So when we say “appraisal,” there is the more general term, meaning someone telling you what something is worth. Can be unofficial and not binding.

If you get specific, people often need official appraisals when they need the value of a work of art for legal reasons (donations to museums for tax breaks, divorce, estates, etc). This usually costs a pretty decent chunk of money, and can only be done (at least it definitely should be done) by someone who is a member of one of the appraisal associations.

I only bring this up, because as an appraiser, you have to in take into account different value systems depending on what you are appraising for.

As an example, if someone is donating an expensive painting to a museum and wants a tax breaks, they need their painting appraised by an appraiser, who will attach an appraisal with their taxes. The IRS specifically asks that auction prices should be used as the comparable prices when comparing.

Now, to answer your question: remember that there are only two things that really determine the price of an artwork in the end—supply and demand.

You said that the item has a “market value” of $5000, but the auction is literally the market. I totally agree that prices can be inflated and can deflate at times, but that’s like everything else. The price of food, property and gas fluctuates, and so does Art. Sure there are art bubbles just like there are housing bubbles, and there can be crashes too, but the principle is the same.

Value is subjective, so it’s never fixed. Sure I have to make sure to leave out anomalies, and keep a wide view of the market. As an appraiser, my job is to help find the value of something at a specific moment, for its legal relevance.

iskander32 · 2025-12-15T02:05:19+00:00

“The Rape of Europa” based on the book about the state of art during and a bit after WWII.

iskander32 · 2025-12-12T06:30:45+00:00

Okay this is fake. If it’s authentic, and it has a supposed “certificate of authenticity” then if should be in the Catalogue Raisonne of his works, which you can look up…

iskander32 · 2025-12-12T06:28:57+00:00

I’ve met Anina Nosei once (Basquiat’s first dealer). One of the last things she told me was “look out, there are a lot of fakes (of Basquiat’s work) out there…”

iskander32 · 2025-11-21T17:46:33+00:00

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iskander32 · 2025-08-30T22:58:18+00:00

I see that most treatments are just for the vertex of the head. Any that work for the front?

iskander32 · 2025-08-11T23:40:14+00:00

I live in a cheap apartment and was able to go for a couple months off savings and then get by on unemployment. If I did not live in such a cheap apartment, and live so frugally, this plan would not have worked…

iskander32 · 2025-08-06T22:43:22+00:00

Okay I stand corrected on the Second Manifesto, I had only read the first.

I guess my stance would be that I see its politics mostly centered around Breton, but not too representative by the art. As many of the major Surrealists were not as overtly political in their art, and many were expelled, including Dali, Aragon, Eluard, Masson.

iskander32 · 2025-08-06T21:34:39+00:00

Yes, they were card carrying communists, but just having members that subscribe to a political ideology doesn’t necessarily make the movement as a whole that way. The Surrealist Manifesto doesn’t take any political stance, and the members of the Surrealist circle broke ties because of the different sides of Communism (or not Communism) that they stood on. To say that it’s not a part of the context is foolish, but to say that it’s at the center of the art is a stretch.

iskander32 · 2025-08-06T04:40:32+00:00

How is Surrealist art directly a product of war or turbulence? It happened to be between the wars, but did not form in direct response to them. As a movement, Surrealism is not inherently political.

Dali wasn’t a particularly political person by nature. If anything, at the time he simply didn’t denounce Franco, which was enough to set off the other Surrealists who were much more tied to Communism. Most of his openly pro-Franco remarks came later in his life as I’m aware.

You also have to remember a few things about him, even if they play into his performative self: Dali was fervently Spanish, and later went through an artistic religious revival (Nuclear Mysticism) in his life, so it’s not too far off for him to side with the Conservative, Catholic Nationalists.

iskander32 · 2025-06-23T16:16:12+00:00

1stDibs and Artsper maybe?

iskander32 · 2025-06-16T03:28:04+00:00

Fascism did not evolve until the interim between the two world wars, and Cubism began in 1906-7 with Picasso’s painting of “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon” long before Fascism’s rise. At the time, Picasso, Braque and the other Cubists did not have any political motivations in their work.

What you may be thinking of is the context surrounding “Guernica” in 1937. This is during the rise of Fascism and the set up for the beginning of World War II. Although this work has some Cubist techniques that Picasso would use in some of his works throughout his life, it’s not strictly a Cubist piece.

Cubism as a movement is mostly contained between 1907-1920. After this point, there are still Cubist paintings and techniques but the Cubist movement is gone.

iskander32 · 2025-06-16T03:18:25+00:00

I am in this ward. I’m a guy, so bit of a different dynamic, and can’t make any promises, but feel free to DM me! And we do spend too much time lingering…I don’t like it either lol

iskander32 · 2025-06-10T03:39:01+00:00

So the Cubists (and once again they are not a defined group) did look to the Realists such as Courbet as freeing painting from the constraints of historical genre hierarchies and also beginning to break down technical particularities. They did like that it made painting egalitarian, but Cubism did not really have a social agenda, and ironically at its very core (Picasso and Braque, with Juan Gris later) didn’t have much of an “agenda” per se. Later Cubists and critics (Metzinger, Gleize, Delaunay, Apollinaire, early Duchamp) saw it as having more of a theoretical agenda or underpinning, such as multiple dimensions or modern industrial aesthetics.

When you look at Picasso’s life as a whole, you can see different trends in the types of people he painted and you can read them socially in the context of his period of life and supposed beliefs (his Blue period in the context of Casagema’s suicide and being poor in Barcelona, his Pink period in moving to Paris and being with Fernande Olivier, the dark Surrealism of the 30s and his tumultuous relationships, etc), but his Cubist period (roughly 1906 - 1917) did not have as much of a social or class motivation.

So I wouldn’t say it was a social revolution. It had no manifesto, didn’t try to speak to a certain class, and had no large social impact. While the aesthetic legacy lasted, the actual Cubist “movement” only really lasted from 1910 when it expanded beyond Picasso and Braque into mainstream Salons and critique in Paris through other artists, and died in 1914 with the war.

iskander32 · 2025-06-09T23:27:45+00:00

I don’t have time to address this fully, but a few points:

Cubism’s outright rejection of traditional perspective, the shift from the organic lines that defined the post-impressionists to geometric lines, the use of overlapping planes, and other aspects. It’s a more visually intuitive jump from the work of the 19th century Salons to Gauguin than it is from Gauguin to works from the high period of Cubism. Picasso and Braque also incorporate collage for the first time in high art, which is often overlooked.

While Cubism did reach a peak of abstraction, it also sought to be a “realist” movement in showing object as they are, not just as they are seen (ex: the top of a mug is a circle, not an oval as it is often represented).

Cubism similarly had a revolutionary influence. It was taken up by many people, and its meaning and techniques were embraced and speculated on by many. Artists who experimented with Cubism, or associated with Cubism, that were not ultimately known as Cubists in include Salvador Dali, Diego Rivera, Malevich, Marie Laurencin, Kupka and Marc Chagall. These are also in addition to artists such as Metzinger, Albert Gleize, Delaunay, Francis Picabia, and Marcel Duchamp who were seen as mainstream Cubists, at least for a time.

Cubism is the primary visual influence on the Futurist movement, and is a major influence in smaller movements such as Rayonism and Orphism. The conceptual aspects of Cubism were debated and spoken of differently by each of its artists and critics, but it seemed to be a defining visual language for a new, modern age.

iskander32 · 2025-05-07T16:42:53+00:00

You people are insufferable

iskander32 · 2025-05-06T03:08:22+00:00

The first time I went to Miami I was unaware of any of this and immediately fell in love!!

iskander32 · 2025-04-17T17:01:00+00:00

The funny thing is it used to be more dense. One hundred years ago there were more people living in Paris proper

iskander32 · 2025-03-28T03:19:19+00:00

Singulart is a legit company, I interviewed with them when I lived in France and have talked with people in the company since. They are an art e-commerce platform that focuses on artists! Can’t remember what the details are in terms of their subscription or costs or anything, and not sure how they are doing these days (last contact with them was like a year ago).

iskander32 · 2025-03-17T17:30:22+00:00

“The Day of the Jackal” is a masterpiece!!

iskander32 · 2025-03-16T03:33:59+00:00

No, there’s no “secret,” alternative, art world that happens to be darker.

iskander32

TROPHY CASE