Kid Collectors

On Friday, September 14, the Wall Street Journal had an article on young art collectors: kids. I suppose since the bottom dropped out of baseball cards earlier in the decade this makes a bit of sense. Why drop several thousand dollars cumulatively over the course of adolescence when it can be done in one big purchase that likely won't devalue like Donruss.

Here are the best quotes.

"So far, Dakota (9) says she has focused her 40-piece collection on works featuring animals and "happy colors" such as pink and yellow. An early buy, hanging above her tea-party table, is an Andy Warhol panda from his 1983 series on endangered species. Her dealer spotted it at a gallery in Los Angeles. "Panda is darling and chubby and cute, and at night he protects me," Dakota says."

and...

"Children tend to focus on art that mirrors their interests, which is why animals are a popular theme, as are flowers, cars, graffiti, and the cartoon-like characters found in works by Takashi Murakami and Yoshimoto Nara. For the most part, young children sidestep art containing nudity, extreme violence or irony, dealers say."

Oddly, both quotes kind of mirror the preferences of adults. The creme della creme is this one:

"And Taylor Houghton says his friends are often tempted to break into his Jan Albers wall art, which consists of real candy bars lined up behind plexiglass. "I have to remind them the candy was made, like, eight years ago," he says. "Nobody likes old candy.""

Tell that to the kids in the late 1980s chipping teeth on old sticks of gum found in Topps wax packs from the 1970s.