My last article on local artist Lorrie Bennett, whose new works go on exhibit beginning April 1 at Green-n-Groovy Gallery in the downtown Fort Myers River District, mentioned her fondness for ACEOs. It’s an acronym for “Art Cards, Editions and Originals,” a format which involves small works of art rendered on 3.5 x 2.5 inch cards in virtually any medium including oil, acrylic, pen and ink, collage and multimedia.
One problem faced by collectors across demographic lines is the cost of fine art today. Smaller works by emerging artists customarily fall in the $2,000-$3,500 range, and mid-career artists often command substantially more for their small canvases and panel paintings. In the current constricted economy, where consumers often feel pinched by declining wages and hours juxtaposed with increasing prices in the grocery store and at the pump, many art lovers find themselves unable to collect original works of fine art. Even the well-heeled cannot acquire the number, size or quality of art they’d like. ACEOs provide access into the art market for everyone.
But will ACEOs make their way into museums and prominent public and private collections? Time will tell, but it’s not hard to envision a 3.5 x 2.5 inch Klimt or Toulouse-Lautrec selling for hundreds of thousands of dollars or more at Christie’s or Sotheby’s. As with conventionally-sized works on traditional supports, the answer is that it depends on the quality of the art that makes its way into the ACEO format.
A parallel might help shed light on the possible role that ACEOs will play in the current art market and the position they might assume in art history. My last article mentioned the Art Nouveau movement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
In its infancy, Art Nouveau was viewed as a vogue, especially by the established art community, the same art community that mocked Manet, Monet and their colleagues. (One art critic wrote of the first-ever exhibition of impressionist paintings, “I enter and my horrified eyes behold something terrible.”) But Art Nouveau filtered through every aspect of artistic endeavor, from paintings to architecture and interior design, although today it is remembered most for its advertising posters.
Advertising posters? Art? Yes, art. Art rendered by the likes of Gustav Klimt, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Edvard Munch, Egon Schiele, Aubrey Beardsley, Henri Dumont and Alfred Roller, with one collection containing 4,300 posters being valued recently at $6.3 million.
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