Calculating the real value of the art you own

AT THIS year’s Frieze Masters, the annual arts fair in Regent’s Park, nine prints of spiders made me catch my breath. The arachnids were a complete set of Ode a Ma Mere by Louise Bourgeois, who used the creepy-crawlies to illustrate her relationship with her mother. Her most famous expressions of the theme are the gargantuan sculptures in museums like the Guggenheim in Bilbao and the Tate Modern in London.

What made me gasp was the image at the lower right corner: a tall spider, either languid or exhausted, in some sort of conversation with a tiny member of her species hanging by threads. It’s almost identical to a Bourgeois print I’d purchased at a charity dinner almost three decades ago. I didn’t know of its link to her larger work, of which only 90 complete sets were made. The Frieze series was priced at £62,000 (S$106,161); I paid a few hundred dollars for mine.

Momentarily, I felt like an Antiques Roadshow participant at the moment an expert passes judgment on a dusty keepsake. But, very quickly, my expectations deflated. My spider is a test print. Though bearing an autograph, it’s an out-of-context artefact separated from its eight other eight-legged kin. It might pay for a month’s rent, if that. As they often say so consolingly on the show, it’s a priceless tale to pass on to your children. Alas, my spider has a very thin storyline.