IMO, I think that getting kincaid paintings would have been enough justice on BIL's head.
+1 I haaaaate them. My IL's have a house full and keep buying them as "investments."
That's basically the situation here. MIL bought them as "investments" but she could only afford the mass produced ones. They're worth about 10% of what she paid, if that. She was trying to do right by her kids and grandkids but basically just destroyed her pension lump sum payout between the paintings and the silver "investment" coins. BIL seems to have inherited that mentality.
I really don't like them either. We took one as a remembrance of MIL. It's actually a nice looking lighthouse instead of a cottage and my dad liked lighthouses but it's not hanging yet because the frame is a tacky "gold" thing and we haven't decided if we're going to spring to get it reframed or not.
I've heard of people buying prints as wall art convinced that these will also function as small investments. After 20 or so years though some of these prints have sun damage. Its just ink on heavy paper after all.
Buying art as an investment requires a different approach. You need to buy only art that stands a chance of going up in value, you have to make sure that you'll be able to sell it again which requires that you keep proof of the art's provenance, and you need to ensure the art stays in the same condition it was in when you bought it. Miss even one of these steps, and you've bought the use of a decoration that has aesthetic value but nothing more.
The kind of art that stands a good probability of appreciating will be either an original work or a numbered, signed limited-edition print. The materials used in an original aren't important: it could be a pencil sketch on a napkin and it may still have value depending on who made it. But prints should be on high quality stretched canvas as opposed to paper. The print should be numbered, signed, and from a limited edition. Un-numbered prints do not have resale value except as decoration, and frequently the frame will have a higher value than the print. So if you buy an un-numbered Kincade print, what you have is wall decoration. I'm not saying to never buy wall decoration, just know that wall decoration is what you're buying.
The artists whose work tends to go up in value are the ones who take their work seriously. They submit bids for public art installations, they enter juried art exhibitions, and they make the first page of Reddit. They also have some mechanism to see to it that their art is seen by large numbers of people. So they have a system to mass-produce and distribute at least some of their art. Whether this is a Web site or a gallery distributor that sells on consignment doesn't matter as much as the fact they generate sales and publicity. They mostly don't make money off their originals; they make it off the copies they sell as wall decoration, playing cards, and everything else. In the process, they put their work in front of thousands of different and unrelated eyes.
To maintain resale value, the provenance should be perfect: you need to be able to prove the work is what you say it is and not a reproduction. So you need some record of the transaction, the price you paid, and where you bought the art. I prefer to deal directly with the artist or with the artist's authorized dealer or distributor. You have to hold onto the receipt or some kind of record of the transaction, and you have to keep track of who the artist is or was.
Buying art for investment is a lot like buying penny stocks. Most will go nowhere or even down, but you may luck out and get something by an artist who later goes on to become famous and sought-after. It's also possible to bid on work by established artists at auction, however that's pretty much pure speculation and of course you have to worry about provenance. The prices will already be high, and that's a barrier to entry for most.
For art that is cooperative (a lot of textile based art such as petit point is), you don't need the record of sale because the designers and distributors already publish a picture of the kids they sell, and the artist either sells kit or pattern based copies or licenses his or her work to a company that generates a limited edition pattern. To sell cooperative art, you can do very well if the finished work has no mistakes, has been properly cared for, and of course you need to find the right buyer. Forget eBay and Etsy; a reputable antique dealer would be a better choice. It helps if the needlework was done by someone prominent, but it's equally important that it's done well. Either way it's a multi-generational commitment. Lace and needlework seldom have significant value until they're at least a hundred years old and the design is discontinued. To get them to that age, you need to keep them out of the sunlight, care for them properly, and not treat them like disposable garbage.
If you miss even one step of the above process, you might be supporting an artist and providing him or her with income, and getting something nice to decorate your home or office with, but it's not an investment.
