Art Investment (3)
Everything in the world could be reduced to money. Art was no exception.
All that talk about how you couldn’t put a price on art was nonsense. In fact, few things were priced as aggressively as paintings and sculptures. They changed hands constantly through auctions and private sales, and the returns from art investing could be just as high as those from stocks or real estate.
A painting or a piece of pottery bought for a song could be certified as genuine and suddenly return thousands, even hundreds of thousands, of times the original price.
This painting wouldn’t come up for auction until four years later. A Russian magnate had consigned it to Christie’s, where it went on to fetch the highest price in auction history. He was said to have paid one hundred million dollars to two art dealers, and before those two bought it, the painting had been sleeping in a gallery warehouse.
In other words, as far as the present was concerned, it was still somewhere out there.
But where, exactly?
I wasn’t some art-world insider; I’d only seen the article in passing. I remembered the painting, and I remembered the artist, but not which gallery had sold it. Fortunately, I did remember something Seonwu had once told me—that it had been sold by a gallery in Chicago.
But how many galleries were there in Chicago? Dozens of them were famous, and if you counted the smaller and midsized places, the number climbed into the hundreds. Add up everything they sold, and you were looking at tens of thousands of works at the very least.
Still, I had a few clues: early-sixteenth-century Europe, a religious painting, anonymous artist, severe damage, and a sale price of $11,000 at a Chicago gallery.
If I got this wrong, I’d have to scour every gallery in Chicago like a man hunting for a needle in a haystack.
Luckily, it was the internet age.
Galleries posted their catalogs online to sell their works. Not all of them were open to the public, of course; most required paid membership to browse. Still, I paid for access to dozens of sites and dug through their catalogs.
After a long stretch of web surfing, I finally found a painting that fit the description at a place called Eppenfrit Gallery.
It wasn’t clear exactly when the pair who had originally bought it made their purchase. Either way, I had to move before they did.
Just in case, I raced to the gallery as soon as I landed at the airport, and I managed to get the painting safely into my hands.
After taking a taxi to the hotel, I showered first and then flopped onto the bed.
Once I’d caught my breath, I tore open the packaging and unfolded the painting.
It looked half-melted, as if time itself had smeared it out of shape. Without restoration, it would have been hard to tell what it had originally looked like.
The restoration cost might end up exceeding the value of the painting itself.
That was probably why the gallery hadn’t bothered to restore it.
“A painting like this for $12,200.”
As I remembered it, the painting had sold for $11,000. Had they lowered the price because it wouldn’t move? Or had they sold it cheaply only to those two men?
I didn’t know whether the piece was truly worth that much. To be honest, I doubted I’d buy it even if someone offered it to me for a dollar.
But everything changed once you knew who had painted it.
What mattered most when it came to the price of a painting?
The size of the canvas? The amount of paint used? The number of people and the hours it took?
None of that mattered. What mattered most was who had painted it. Even a sketch scrawled on a notepad was worth at least ten thousand dollars if Picasso had drawn it.
The artist behind this painting was a name everyone knew.
And yet he had left behind only seventeen paintings, one of which was also the most famous painting in the world.
That made this his eighteenth painting.
More important than anything else was the fact that...
“This thing sells for $460.3 million at auction four years from now?”
Robert, who had been about to buy the painting right in front of him only to have it snatched away by a young Korean man, was dumbfounded. When Patrick heard what had happened, he exploded in anger.
“Why on earth would you do something that stupid?”
If Robert hadn’t tried to be helpful, they would have secured the painting without any trouble.
“I didn’t know he was here to buy the painting.”
“What’s the Korean guy’s name? Do you have his contact information?”
“How would I know that?”
“Do you realize what this has turned into because of you?”
“What? Because of me?”
“Who else would it be?”
“I was the one who found the painting in the first place, and you were just along for the ride!”
Even while they were tearing into each other, the two of them did everything they could to track down the Korean who had bought it.
Galleries didn’t normally hand over customer information, but after enough coaxing and browbeating, the two men finally managed to get the director to reveal a name.
That alone, however, was nowhere near enough to recover the painting.
If only I’d asked which hotel he was staying at.
Robert returned to New York, pleading that if the Korean man ever came back or reached out, they should contact him immediately.
That painting can’t be real. The real one has to be somewhere else.
He had to believe that, or he wouldn’t have been able to stand it.
When he got home, he erupted.
“Damn it!”
He thought back to the young man he’d met in the lobby.
The painting you bought! That painting should have been mine!
He’d lost the Ranksy painting, and he’d lost this one too. Of all things, both had been snatched away by Koreans.
Han Miru, was it? And come to think of it...
Ranksy had said that the Korean who bought all of his paintings called himself “Mr. Han.”
Suddenly, the face of the East Asian young man he’d seen when he turned his head in Central Park overlapped with the face of the East Asian young man he’d met at the gallery.
Realizing the truth, Robert was struck with horror.
“W-wait a second! Don’t tell me that bastard was the same bastard?”
As I headed for the airport, I called David Lockhart.
“What brought you to Chicago all of a sudden?”
“I had something to buy.”
“What exactly did you buy? I saw a $12,200 charge at the gallery.”
I didn’t have ten thousand dollars lying around, so I charged it to the corporate card. That made the painting an asset of Continue Capital.
“I’ll tell you about it next time. The Korea branch is set up, right?”
“Yes. The paperwork is all done.”
Thinking about everything I had to do next, I needed a branch in Korea.
“Then I’ll call you again once I’m back in Korea.”
“Understood.”
I finally headed back to Korea with the painting in hand.
After more than ten hours on a plane and landing at Incheon Airport, it finally sank in that the long journey was over.
The moment I took a taxi home, I collapsed onto the sofa.
A two-room apartment was cramped, but home was still home.
First, I took out the painting I’d bought from the Central Park street vendor.
“Looks like I was right.”
These were Ranksy’s works.
Ranksy himself had posted about them on Twitter, and the news had picked it up too.
The art dealers were reportedly tracking down the buyers as we spoke.
I had bought twelve paintings.
If I valued each one at $500,000, that came to $6 million.
It was enough money to live lazily for the rest of my life, but compared with the debt I owed, it was nowhere near enough. What mattered wasn’t the twelve Ranksy paintings; it was the one painting I’d bought at the gallery.
If I could sell that properly, the money problem would be solved to some extent.
While I was lying there resting, Seonwu came home from work.
“You’re back?”
Seonwu was startled.
“Huh? What the hell? When did you get back?”
“Just now.”
“If you’re coming home, at least say so.”
“Ah, didn’t I?”
“Nope. You didn’t.”
I looked at Seonwu and asked, “What’s with you? Did you sleep on the street?”
He sat down on the sofa and let out a long sigh.
“Some asshole caused a mess, and I’m killing myself cleaning it up. One click and our user count got cut in half.”
“The operator duplicated items and sold them?”
At my words, Seonwu’s eyes widened.
“Yeah! How did you know?”
Because the exact same thing had happened in my first life.
I brushed it off.
“I saw it in the news.”
“The game is a total disaster because of it. Everything’s going crazy. We can’t let it die like this.”
Unfortunately, it would die exactly like this.
That face of his from the old days, when he’d gotten drunk and poured out his frustration, was still vivid in my memory.
“How was America?”
“Good.”
“So what were you doing there for months?”
“I told you. I set up a company and invested here and there.”
“Are you actually making money?”
“Of course. It’s growing nicely.”
The fact that he was asking suggested he hadn’t been following the news. Then again, who would remember the name of some foreign private equity firm?
“What did you invest in?”
“That’s a long story. I’m tired right now, so I’ll tell you later.”
Seonwu glanced at the paintings strewn across the floor.
“What are all these paintings, anyway?”
“Oh. I bought them in America. I’ll give you one. Pick whichever you like.”
“Why’d you buy so many paintings?”
“They were selling them at a park stall, so I bought them.”
Seonwu skimmed over several of them.
“For paintings bought at a street stall, they actually look pretty good.”
“Right?”
“Yeah. The lines look like they were drawn properly.”
From the way he said that, he seemed to know a thing or two about art.
Whoever it had been had apparently gone around complaining that the lines hadn’t even been drawn properly. He was probably kicking himself by now.
I looked around the apartment.
“I was gone for a bit, and this place turned into a dump.”
Clothes I’d thrown off and bits of trash were scattered everywhere, and clumps of dust drifted through the air. He definitely hadn’t cleaned once while I was away.
“Anyone hearing that would think you’re the one who cleans around here.”
“Still, it wasn’t this bad when I was here.”
I’d never really thought of it as inconvenient before, but after staying in hotels, the apartment suddenly felt tiny.
I was making money now, so there was no reason to keep living in this shabby two-room place.
“What was the monthly rent here again?”
“Three thousand deposit, one hundred monthly. Why?”
I’d been pitching in four hundred thousand won every month, though in exchange I’d been using a room barely bigger than a closet.
“How about we move out of here?”
Seonwu looked shocked.
“What are you talking about?”
“Somewhere a little better...”
“What, you already wiped out my savings and my line of credit, and now you want to take my three-thousand deposit too? No way, you bastard! Not unless dirt gets in my eyes first!”
“...”
After a few more words with Seonwu, I fell asleep almost immediately.
I must have been carrying more fatigue than I realized, because I slept like a rock for twelve straight hours without waking once. Even when I opened my eyes, I didn’t feel like moving a single finger.
It was eight in the morning.
Seonwu had already left, so the apartment was empty. When I checked my phone, I found a missed call from Sung Yoon-ah.
I called her back.
“Where are you now? Are you back in Korea?”
“Yes. I got in last night.”
“Why were you back so late? You said you’d come straight back from New York.”
“I had somewhere to stop on the way.”
“Tch! What are you doing today?”
“I’m going to look for a new place to live.”
“Really? Then why don’t we look together while we catch up? I can see your face too.”
“What about work?”
“I was planning to use a day off today anyway.”
A day off was something you could just use whenever you wanted?
“Then let’s meet at Gangnam Station at noon. We can have lunch together.”
“Okay.”
There was still time before the appointment.
I thought about what to do until then, set an alarm, and closed my eyes again.