Top 5 over-hyped or international artists

“Contemporary artists are more ‘collectible’ than old masters: there’s more of their art out there, you can party with them, you can even hope to discover geniuses before they get ‘hot’. One downside is that, because the competition’s so stiff, prices can lose all touch with reality.

Here are five highly touted artists as listed by that won’t turn out to be great investments,” observes art market analyst Blake Gopnik who also lists the top 5 over-hyped or international artists. Here’s a quick look at them courtesy The Newsweek and The Daily Beast:

• 1. Neo Rauch: This German painter, a founder of the so-called Leipzig school, makes perfectly sweet, semi-surreal canvases with a dab of fifties nostalgia. They’d make great greeting cards. Rauch’s ‘Suche’ sold at Christie’s for $1,082,500 in May 2010.
  
  2. Wangechi Mutu: A minor collage artist, he who glues up fragments of magazines, sometimes with sequins thrown in. The results look splashy and have the hint of an edge, but the work will never be important, despite her prices. ‘A Little Thought for All Ya’ll …’ sold at Christies for $400,002 in 2008.
  
  3. Damien Hirst: He is truly one of the greats of our time, but his greatness lies in his entire career, and the way he’s turned selling out into art. A few of the sculptures
  have significant presence, but any single painting—one ‘spot’ picture, for
  instance, among the scores that he’s made—counts as closer to a memento than a
  masterpiece. A Hirst spot painting called Dantrolene sold at Sotheby’s for
  $1,105,250 in June 2011.
  
  4. John Currin: He makes cartoony figures that sometimes have a hint of pornography. He’s praised for his skills with the brush, but it won’t be long before it becomes clear that he’s just one more realist illustrator. Currin’s ‘Nice ’N Easy’ sold at Sotheby’s for $5,458,500 in November 2008.
  
  5. Richard Prince: Long ago, in the 1970s, he was a great artist. The ads that he copied and presented as art helped change the course of art history. Since then, he’s made absurd numbers of splashy paintings—the Nurses, the Jokes, the Checks—that only a collector could love and that will soon be forgotten. Prince’s ‘Country Nurse’ sold for $2.9 million in June 2009.