METALLICA Drummer Finds Art A Financial Safe Haven
October 10, 2008, 16 years ago
The following story is courtesy of Carol Vogel from the Nytimes.com:
As the financial markets skid wildly, some collectors are waging bets that art will be viewed as a safe haven.
Among them is Lars Ulrich, a songwriter and the drummer for the heavy-metal band METALLICA, who has consigned Untitled (Boxer), a 1982 painting by Jean-Michel Basquiat, for sale by Christie’s in New York next month. “Of course it’s an awkward time to sell, but I’ve always been about taking chances,” Mr. Ulrich said.
“I have a lot of faith in the art market,” he added. “It’s perhaps the last frontier where the best of the best will not go the way of the rest of the economy.” Recently his collecting has gone in a different direction, he said. Rather than relying on auctions, he has begun scouring galleries, buying the work of emerging artists.The Basquiat, which goes on the block Nov. 12, depicts a victorious black boxer, his hands waving in the air, against a richly painted background filled with the artist’s signature graffiti scrawl. The figure is part hero, part warrior, part victim. It is also said to be autobiographical.
The artist, who died of a drug overdose in 1988 when he was just 27, grew up in Brooklyn, where he liked to while away time at the Brooklyn Museum. “I realized that I didn’t see many paintings with black people in them,” he once said, adding, “The black person is the protagonist in most of my paintings.”
Untitled (Boxer) was one of the centerpieces of the 2005 Basquiat retrospective at the Brooklyn Museum, which also went to the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. Mr. Ulrich bought it in 1999 after seeing it in a show in Vienna.
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