NEW YORK — If you’ve been watching experts and commentators appearing on television from their homes, their increased attention to decor might look familiar: In the early days of lockdown, they, like many of us, sat in front of blank white walls, while now their homes frequently display prominent artwork.
“Cinderella has nothing on these people,” said Claude Taylor, who created the Room Rater Twitter account with his fiancee, Jessie Bahrey. “I don’t think art is even something people thought of in April.”
Room Rater scores speakers’ setups on a 10-point scale for details like lighting and camera level. Good artwork can boost a score. For example, Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson scored a 10/10 for appearing on Morning Joe in front of artwork by his wife, Avis Robison.
It seems many Americans who are stuck staring at their walls have decided the pandemic gives them a good reason to pretty them up.
My first hint at an uptick in art spending came last summer. When businesses shuttered and laid off employees in March, we braced for my artist husband’s sales to plummet. For a while they did. But then, his numbers didn’t just return to normal. They spiked.
I thought it might be an anomaly. My husband, John Tebeau, illustrates beloved bars; maybe people were buying his bar art because they missed their favourite watering holes?
But then friends who work at a framing shop said they were as busy last fall as at Christmas. Artists we know said they, too, were selling more than usual.
Online arts marketplace Etsy confirmed the trend. Comparing March-December 2020 to the same nine months in 2019, Etsy reported:
• a 95% increase in searches for wall art.
• an 80% increase in searches for stained glass window or wall hangings.
• a 46% increase in searches for sculptures.
Etsy doesn’t release data on actual sales. It’s fair to assume at least some of those searches were daydreams that never led to purchases, if my own time scrolling through listings for upstate houses I have no intention of buying is any indication.
Adobe Analytics does track purchases online, and those numbers are even more dramatic: Average daily sales of “art goods,” which includes sculptures, artworks and frames, increased 134% between the pre-COVID-19 months of 2020 and last fall. Comparing September and October 2019 to the same two months in 2020, average online daily sales increased 109%. Adobe’s analysis of e-commerce sales includes 80 of the 100 largest online retailers in the U.S.
Atiba T. Edwards has just the combination of experience to explain what’s happening. He worked in banking for several years and is also the cofounder of the arts non-profit FOKUS, which offers arts education, hosts art events and publishes an online magazine.
Edwards noted that many people who kept working during the lockdown suddenly weren’t spending money on travel, going out to restaurants or movies, or getting babysitters. They were probably home more than ever before, so they might have redirected some of that discretionary income to art.
Edwards is an example himself. He loves and appreciates art, but in the before times, he left his Brooklyn apartment early in the morning, went to work as chief operating officer of the Brooklyn Children’s Museum, then got home late after coaching basketball or going to an art event. Now he works more at home, and misses seeing art at work and elsewhere.
“I have hung six pieces in the last three months,” he said. “People are seeing the benefit of surrounding themselves with beauty.”
Edwards has worked with hundreds of artists as executive director of FOKUS, trying to create accessible art experiences in nontraditional spaces. He believes the traditional art show or gallery experience feels intimidating to someone who doesn’t feel knowledgeable about art, while social media algorithms can serve up artists to peruse with no pressure to buy.
“The newcomer can look at art at home and not have the feeling of it being unwelcoming,” he said.
Higher unemployment rates caused by the pandemic mean many people, of course, don’t have the money to buy art now.
But for some of those still working, buying art can also be an attempt to help support others.
“I had people reaching out to buy a piece of art to save my gallery,” said Eden Stein, owner of Secession Art and Design in San Francisco, which sells the works of about 70 creators. “That money not only supported my family, it supported the artists and their communities.”
Stein said making art sales during the pandemic has felt a little like a wedding reception: She has reconnected with friends and clients from throughout the gallery’s 13-year history.
Typically, Stein would host two or three events a month, while foot traffic to nearby restaurants and a music venue next door would also bring in new visitors. Instead, for the last year, she’s talked to many buyers by phone or arranged visits by appointment.
“This year has been really personal.” Stein said. “If you can’t hug people, selling a piece of artwork feels a little like that.”
LONDON (AP) — With a few daubs of a paintbrush, the Brontë sisters have got their dots back.
More than eight decades after it was installed, a memorial to the three 19th-century sibling novelists in London’s Westminster Abbey was amended Thursday to restore the diaereses – the two dots over the e in their surname.
The dots — which indicate that the name is pronounced “brontay” rather than “bront” — were omitted when the stone tablet commemorating Charlotte, Emily and Anne was erected in the abbey’s Poets’ Corner in October 1939, just after the outbreak of World War II.
They were restored after Brontë historian Sharon Wright, editor of the Brontë Society Gazette, raised the issue with Dean of Westminster David Hoyle. The abbey asked its stonemason to tap in the dots and its conservator to paint them.
“There’s no paper record for anyone complaining about this or mentioning this, so I just wanted to put it right, really,” Wright said. “These three Yorkshire women deserve their place here, but they also deserve to have their name spelled correctly.”
It’s believed the writers’ Irish father Patrick changed the spelling of his surname from Brunty or Prunty when he went to university in England.
Raised on the wild Yorkshire moors, all three sisters died before they were 40, leaving enduring novels including Charlotte’s “Jane Eyre,” Emily’s “Wuthering Heights” and Anne’s “The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.”
Rebecca Yorke, director of the Brontë Society, welcomed the restoration.
“As the Brontës and their work are loved and respected all over the world, it’s entirely appropriate that their name is spelled correctly on their memorial,” she said.
