I D E A S...

​​The art of buying ART.
A new world.

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​The acquisition of contemporary art has taken an unsuspected turn until just a few years ago. If Claude Monet had been told 120 years ago that his water lilies and brilliant landscapes could be seen on high-quality screens from anywhere in the world and, furthermore, bought and collected from the sofa in a house with just a few clicks, he would have thought it was a bad joke. No one in their right mind is ahead of such paradigm shifts, no one except the crazy ones or the visionaries who generate such changes when technology allows. But in addition to technology, it must be allowed by the public, who must naturally assume the more than real possibility of said advance, the comfortable and safe act of buying, at whatever price, objects of all kinds, from a car, to a house or the most valuable art. This internalized trust as something normal, as a habitual market process, has also cost decades of assimilation by citizens since the appearance of the Internet. Before that, everything was analog and required a meticulous and face-to-face examination of the object, artistic in this case, its confirmation of a real thing and not a virtual one, and of course an ancient payment method that has nothing to do with bank gateways or the transfers that we currently use on the Internet. It could be said that the charm of direct sales has been lost, the exchange between seller and buyer, the direct appreciation of the painting, of the car, of the vacation home that we will go to in the summer, but nothing has been lost , these options continue being there, there is only profit, there are only new and fabulous tools to be able to comfortably buy anything. Scams and frauds have always existed and the argument that everything is worse online does not hold up; the security protocols of the worldwideweb, banking with its current online payment systems, the progressive education and knowledge of the digital environment of citizens mean that being able to buy a beautiful new car or a painting by the artist that we like is currently also real, simple and reliable, and a pleasure accessible from the most comfortable and remote place imaginable. © José Manuel Merello