This week an Osamu Sugiyama auction is being run at Artelino (www.artelino.com) and is decribed as “Osamu Sugiyama – for old prices – 1035″. The auction is scheduled to end Thursday, September 27, 2012, 8:00:00 PM.
Looking at the prices for several prints at the Artelino auction and comparing them with pricing available at Osamu Sugiyama’s own website today it does appear that for some prints the reserve plus buyers premium set at Artelino may exceed the retail cost of the same prints from the artist. (Please note that this may depend on your specific currency exchange rates and the particular print your after).
As an example, the print listed on Artelino as ” Osamu Sugiyama born 1946 – 10 Views of Mt. Fuji – Moonlight over Shinobino Moor” has a reserve of $200USD plus 20% commission giving $240USD. Osamu’s own price for this print is 17,850JPY which converting at xe.com today is $228USD. That price difference ($240 vs $228) isn’t bad for the first/only bidder but any additional bidders will in my view be paying to much. For those of you in the EU don’t forget to factor in the additional 7% VAT buying from Artelino vs any import taxes if buying from Japan.
So, if you are planning on bidding at the Artelino auction be sure to compare your woodblock prints pricing over at Osamu’s website to ensure that your not paying more than you need to.
Where is Osamu’s official website? My google skills are failing me.
The Osamu Sugiyama website is at http://osamuhanga.com/ (for english cick the “English” link in the upper right). It seems that the site vews much better in I.E. than Firefox. Sorry for omitting this in the post. I did see somewhere on Artelino that all Osamu’s print prices were going up. I’d be interested to hear if the print your considering s cheaper from Osamu than Artelino.
Thanks again for this information! The osamuhanga.com site appears to not be crawled by google or bing in English. If you search for “site:osamuhanga.com” you only get Japanese text hits. For a non-japanese speaker, this makes it effectively non-existent without your hint!
I have not purchased many prints so I am a novice buyer. This is my first experiment with artelino.
Both prints I have bid on are listed at 17850 yen ~= 229 dollars + conversion costs (usually at least a few percent from my experience in the past) on the osamuhanga.com site. I can’t tell what the osamuhanga shipping would be to the USA. Osamuhanga.com doesn’t take credit card (which can pay cash back on some/my card) also. This appears to be more than my current bids + artelino commission of 15% (due to early/often bidding on my part) + artelino shipping. Of course, there may be hidden costs somewhere I have missed but it appears I have not been burned yet. Not sure if I have different import taxes between Japan and Germany. My research so far indicates there isn’t a tariff due (but I’d love to hear otherwise if you know) – http://www.usitc.gov/publications/docs/tata/hts/bychapter/1100C97.pdf
Hi Ben,
Yes, the math when allowing for taxes and shipping does tend to complicate things. I’m in Australia and we have a $1000 tax free limit on personal imports so that really helps me. I thought I saw somewhere at osamuhanga.com that they were looking towards accepting cards?
Artelino are excellent to deal with so you won’t have any problems there. Their shipping is expensive (by Aus standards) but the parcels are probably the best packed I’ve ever received.
When searching for woodblock prints (any art really) it’s very useful to use Google default (text search) and Image search. Sometimes artworks are easier to find using image searching. The other thing is to find a woodblock print artists Japanese (kanji) name then use that to search. Obviously you’ll get Japanese language hits but you can open those in Google translate and some have english pages.
http://www.garydonald.com/thumbprints/japprints/jap1.html#r in the US have a couple of Osamu Sugiyama prints left at good prices. I’ve bought from them in the past and can recommend them.
Some of the best websites for looking at or buying woodblock prints are :-
http://www.ohmigallery.com/
http://www.jaodb.com/db/search.asp (research only, no sales)
http://www.ukiyoe-gallery.com/sitemap.htm
http://www.artelino.com/
Regards, Mike.