Rent-a-Masterpiece

Rent-a-Masterpiece

How about a limited edition, worth $3000, for $220 for three months?

A Picasso in your living room. A Degas in the music room. A Henry Moore sculpture in the garden. Not quite, but a slew of national art museums – including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Indianapolis Museum of Art – and local galleries are making it possible for shallow-pocketed connoisseurs to hang museum quality art on their walls. For the cost of a museum membership and charges depending on the value of the piece, a culture vulture can walk away with works of up-and-coming local artists as well as artists with well-established reputations.

The individual renter can’t, as cool as it might be and as much as you promise to treat it well, rent from the permanent exhibitions.

But how about a limited-edition Charles Cuniff photograph from the Seattle Art Museum worth $3000, for $220 for three months? Or a David Hockney lithograph from Art Dimension in Santa Monica, California, selling price $8,000, for $200 a month.

Museums differ in the number of months they’ll rent a piece for and whether they’ll renew. But all allow the satisfied customer to buy the pieces he or she rents, minus a percentage of the rental fee or of the money already spent renting. It’s a win-win situation, as galleries make money, the artist gets exposure and income, the public gets access to affordable artwork.

So far, the only hitches have been nasty little natural disasters like earthquakes. Please, the museums plead, along with your real fine taste, have real fine-art insurance.

Piece of art. Photo by Elena