By Kent Bruyneel /
Attila Richard Lukacs has long been considered one of Canada’s most influential and avant-garde artists. Now, with fellow artists and collaborator Michael Morris, he has launched a travelling show exhibiting the Polaroids he has been creating for over 25 years. Unlimited fired quick questions to the pair about their relationship, how to collect art, how to get good collaboration and why they both should have hung onto their Andy Warhols.
Michael Morris and artist Attila Richard Lukacs
Photography by Malcolm Brown
Unlimited: How do you get started investing in and collecting art?
Attila Richard Lucas: We’re coming out of an inflated market. And so everything was high, high, high. Prices were high. Now there’s an adjustment. So, it’s not so scary. Won’t be so scary for younger collectors to get into it because galleries, even a lot of galleries in New York, they’re just not doing that well anymore. So I mean you don’t see the high prices. I started collecting when I was in 13.
UL: Is there a younger market of collectors emerging?
ARL: I find I come across a lot of young people who collect. A lot of young people starting up galleries. You should only buy something you really like. If you’re buying something for speculating you don’t plan to hold onto it for very long and you never really get attached. It becomes more of an object. A good painting or a good piece of art always takes time to unfold. You see new things in it all the time.
MM: I had an opportunity to meet Andy Warhol when he was first making his Marilyns. The Famous Marilyns. I bought a set of those. Right at the beginning in '68 you could buy them at $200 apiece. In the '70s, I sold eight of the nine for $1000 each and saved one that I particularly liked.
UL: Five times your investment.
MM: A good friend of mine is president of Sotheby’s Canada. I saw him a few months ago ,and he asked if I still had the Warhol. He said, “You know I can sell that for you for $100,000 for the one piece.” I said, just out of interest, if I had had that [complete] set, what would it be worth? Three million, he said.
ARL: The first piece of art I bought was I borrowed $800 from my dad to buy an Andy Warhol soup can. I started in grade seven.
MM: One of those, especially the early ones, a couple hundred thousand for that now.
Artist Attila Richard Lukacs on the business of buying art
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