A Lesson on an Artist's Growth
For years and years now I have been advising art collectors to buy Tim Tate. How does one know when to acquire work by an emerging artist, anyway? The obvious first clear part of that puzzle is: Do you like the work? If the answer is yes, then read on.
This advice to buy work from this then-emerging artist came from a place that's a mixture of savvy art dealer (I was one of Tate's art dealers until mid 2006), prognosticator, and experience in digging out the details of what makes an artist "tick," coupled in most cases with that artist's work ethic, talent, and luck. Hopefully those hard to quantify details are what balance my resulting objectivity vacuum with regard to Tate.
When Washington, DC's Fraser Gallery gave Tate his first ever solo show in 2003, collectors could have picked up an original Tate piece for as little as $300. Many did, as that show sold out, and those prices are already a distant fact of the past.
I myself acquired the work titled "Positive Progression," a piece discussed in the Washington Post review of that first solo show. At that seminal show I also broke another piece while packing it, and thus bought that one as well, and over the years have accumulated the world's largest collection of broken Tim Tates.
Over the years Tate worked very hard in his own peculiar marriage of biography, social commentary, and need to drag glass away from the crafts world and towards the fine arts arena. “The Hirshhorn," a Hirshhorn curator once emailed me, years ago, "does not collect glass."
He worked at a pace that was amazing to behold and brought new things into the fragile glass world that were amazing to witness: cement, found objects, AIDS and HIV imagery, ceramics, terracotta, and most recently, videos and a dizzying array of technology (motion detectors, and voice recordings).
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