Lebanon - Art - Agial Gallery
Nishee
Helen Khal meets Saleh Barakat, owner of Agial Gallery
Is there an art market in Lebanon? More specifically, when we buy a
piece of art either in a gallery or from the artist directly, does that
work have an established market price that we can depend on if art as
investment happens to be one of our considerations? To find out, I
tapped the brain of Saleh Barakat, art dealer and owner of Agial Gallery
on Rue Abdul Aziz in Ras Beirut.
In a his starched collar and tie, Barakat looks more like a cool-headed
banker ready to negotiate a loan than he does a person so obsessed with
art that when he sees something he likes, he says, “it hits me, like
love, in a heartbeat.”
He is probably both. Ten years ago, when he opened Agial, he was
pursuing a master’s degree in business administration at AUB. Initially,
he viewed the gallery venture as the sideline indulgence of an interest
that began in childhood. He recalls the first time he visited a museum,
the Louvre, when he was 9 years old, how he went there all alone and
searched out the “Mona Lisa” he had only seen in picture books before.
What began as a sideline is now Barakat’s full-time career. During the
first few years, while juggling his MBA studies with the gallery work,
he seized on the management skills he was acquiring to turn himself into
a professional art dealer. “I knew absolutely nothing about the
business,” he says. “So I laid out a two-phase ten-year plan I’d spend
the first five years learning all I could about art and running a
gallery; then in the next five years I’d apply that knowledge, plus
business know-how, to becoming an expert art dealer.”
His studied effort has paid off. Agial is one of Lebanon’s most
professional art galleries, and Saleh Barakat is perhaps the only person
around knowledgeably specialized in the buying and selling of
contemporary Arab art. He is constantly on the look-out for good buys
for rare pieces by well-known artists dead and gone, for early works of
artists now in their prime years of production, for that unrecognized
genius still buried in obscurity. These he stacks up in a back wing of
Agial and shows to the increasing number of art collectors who drop in
to see what he has in stock.
He uses the gallery space two floors of it mainly to showcase new or
unknown artists from Lebanon and other Arab countries and refers to this
activity as “dealing in the primary market.”
In this instance, the artist determines the price of the artwork and the
gallery retains a commission on sales, which in Lebanon ranges from 30
to 40 percent.
“These exhibitions,” says Barakat, “are not only exciting but very
essential to my interest in discovering new talents. But they don’t pay
the rent. It’s only when I believe I have a real winner and make my own
investment by purchasing some of the works that I can look forward to
the prospect of a profit in the future. The rule of thumb is ‘buy low,
sell high’.”
But is the market actually establishing prices that the serious investor
in art can count on?
“Not yet, but it’s getting there,” says Barakat. “First of all, there
are too many galleries operating on a laissez-faire basis that shouldn’t
be in the business at all. They’ll exhibit artists not worth a damn at
arbitrarily high prices and get the media to publicize them into the
limelight which hoodwinks the public into buying art of no real or
lasting value. Then there are those artists who upset the market by
showing in a gallery at one price and selling later from their studios
at a 40 percent or more discount. And finally, we have a public still
uneducated in the field of modern art. All these factors combine to make
art as investment a risky business.”
Barakat advises that unless you have an educated eye for good art, don’t
think of art as investment or you may be left holding something that
will eventually end up in an attic or some flea market. Buy only what
you like, what hits you “in a heartbeat,” and enjoy living with it.
Whatever the price you pay, the pleasure will be worth it and consider
yourself lucky if what you’ve bought turns out one day to be a
dark-horse winner.
But if you’re bored with stocks and bonds and investment is your
interest, you are advised to train your eye, know the artists, bone up
on market values and take a gamble in what is known as the “secondary
market” where works initially bought in exhibitions or from the artist
become available for resale, either directly from the owner, through an
art dealer or at an auction.
Squeezed by the economic crunch these days, many people have been
selling blue chip acquisitions at cut-rate prices. According to Barakat,
the secondary market is where the real buys are, where prices are in
flux and not determined by social whim or the artist but by market
demand.
Because the market still lacks solid structure and is currently in a
slump, bargains abound for the wise investor who shops around. Consider
the Paul Guiragossian painting offered at auction recently a superb
one-meter-square oil on canvas by this prominent Lebanese artist who
died five years ago. Because of low market demand, it went for $5,000,
although its equivalent in size and quality is priced at $7,000 or more
in galleries around town. Which should logically mean there is nowhere
for this $5,000 investment in the work of a dead artist to go but up.