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Reach out to the artists (IV)

A four point guide for buying Cuban visual art

July 23, 2020

This series of four entries closes with “Reach out to the artists”, a post in which we advise to international collectors to keep an eye, and certainly a foot on the ground. Reach out to the artists, make friends with them, make it as personal as it truly can be. It is a good chance to know firsthand the inner potential of the author of your investment move. Meeting with the artist is for the art collector the opportunity to balance that vital emotion that provoked your interest in the first place.

Thanks to the slow but continuing opening to a more natural flow of information derived to the ease of internet technologies usage by the Island's Government, there is a full range of capacities for the visual arts to revert traditional parsimonies out and inside Cuba´s frontiers. For the first time, Cuban artists have the full potential of finding a way out the traditional inner censorship and also an escape outside the suppression of the worldwide distribution elite mechanisms. Thanks to the recent, but now endangered, interchange with the US people, Cuban visual arts had been able to debunk some stereotypes and path their way out of old labeling.

In this entry we would like also to refer collectors interested in Cuban visual arts to “Cutting Edge Art in Havana. 100 Cuban Artists”, is an amazing booklet specially tailored for art lovers and travelers who would like to reach directly to 100 artists’ studios in Havana. The book has launched a second revised edition, and it is an incredible starting point for new collectors.

Even for our American fellows and under the strictest US ruling in regards to Cuba, fine arts have been a privileged and lawful commodity to deal with since in 1989 US courts determined that the Embargo would not affect the Island's arts tradeoff with the United States of North America. Big win for the Cuban fine arts! And sorting your physical presence in Cuba to guarantee the efficacy of your investment will never be an unworkable obstacle because it´s never been either.

Most Cuban artists live and produce the majority of their work in Cuba and many refer and distinct the magic that involves the creating process inside the Island versus the dynamics that they encounter in the creative process while creating outside of their birthplace. Go and enjoy the vibrant experience of breathing the inner space of the artist, where perhaps lays the most orotund clue of detectable significance. Find the way to tour inside the artist's micro-world and get the chance to face your bid validation images.

On the verge of a very talked-about afresh ¨boom¨ in Cuban visual arts, international collectors can´t afford to bid on second-hand judgments. Beyond any political questioning, there has always been the chance to lawfully be an active participant in dealing with Cuban art acquisitions right here in Cuba´s soil.

With an extremely diversified menu of choices, international collectors have the chance to be the players on the newfangled mechanisms that in this day and age are also accessible to the Cubans thanks to the machinery of the postmodern era of art validation. After over half a century of more or less total ostracism inside Cuba and the subsequently external biases, Cuban visual arts tradeoff are not determined anymore by content circumstances like a US Leader ending presidency gracious gesture.

Observing what seems to be the top number of academically instructed visual artist per capita in the world, a Cuba´s fine art collector could be assisting now to an ongoing spectacle comparable to a Pandora box opening, with the difference that a promising outcome here comes in opposition to what the ancient Greek myth relates.