Etihad offering STATUS tier miles if you transfer credit card or hotel points into Etihad Guest

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• Tim says:

  28 Jul28 July 05:39

  If you’re stupid enough to put a £1 million piece of art in a £1 lounge then you’re smart enough to sell your £1k art bits from the 10p lounge.

• David says:

  28 Jul28 July 07:07

  How and when are other works of art being sold?

  I have my eye out for a couple from the CCR!

  • Rob says:

    28 Jul28 July 09:06

    Only a handful are being sold. The rest remain in situ.

• Andrew says:

  28 Jul28 July 07:33

  Frost’s ‘Colour Down the Side’ was translated into one of the BA ‘World Tail’s’ schemes. I seem to remember a number of Brymon aircraft sported it.

• ChrisW says:

  28 Jul28 July 07:43

  Why would you keep a million pound painting in an airport lounge??

  • Fartsmasher69 says:

    28 Jul28 July 07:47

    Are you aware that most of the world’s art is stored I. warehouses, unseen for years at a time? Being in a lounge seen by hundreds of thousands of people a year is fantastic.

  • TGLoyalty says:

    28 Jul28 July 08:39

    Because BA are a billion £ company and it was probably seen as an investment. You’re not getting very far with it if you decided to steal it either.

    • AJA says:

      28 Jul28 July 10:50

      I love the idea of somebody taking the picture off the wall, along with a couple of cans of Brewdog and some cheese and onion crisps, and walking out the lounge to board an aircraft 🙂

      • Dubious says:

        28 Jul28 July 11:52

        As long as they bring a big enough duty free shoppin gbag to put it in…

        • Lady London says:

          28 Jul28 July 20:43

          I think we could do it. Anyone game?

  • Bagoly says:

    28 Jul28 July 08:40

    The argument is usually diversification of investments.
    And perhaps that to some extent, while other owners would need to pay for security, the lounge is already very secure due to being in a major airport.
    And that they their target important market are people who have such things on the walls at home.
    Of course they say that they pick them up for say £5k and a few of them become worth £5M (that is the justification for employing someone who chooses what to buy)
    More realistically, “we know some banks made huge amounts of money with minimal effort buying unknown artists in the past, so we would like a slice of that.”
    It would be interesting to know what they did pay for the Bridget Riley mentioned here.

  • Andrew says:

    28 Jul28 July 08:48

    Some local authorities just dump £Ms of art by the motorway roadside.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Kelpies#/media/File:The_Kelpies,_at_The_Helix,_Scotland.JPG

    When I was office junior, at a rather grand old bank branch in Edinburgh, down in the vaults amongst the thousands of “sealed box, contents unknown” were row after row of expensive framed paintings. Some were awful, some were quite beautiful, many had been down there for decades. Far better that a painting is displayed where it can be enjoyed rather than be hidden away.

    • TGLoyalty says:

      28 Jul28 July 09:01

      Exactly why hide away art when it’s can be displayed for the public in a secure place.

      Perhaps the cheap stuff is being sold off as they have their eye on new paintings (or have even bought them already) for the future refurbs

• RWJ says:

  28 Jul28 July 09:49

  This probably marks me out as a pleb, but I honestly can’t see how those Bridget Riley “elongated triangles” pieces are worth £5k. Pretty sure I could replicate that effect on a computer in a day and have all the variants I wanted!

  • Rob says:

    28 Jul28 July 11:03

    Er, that’s the point. You can do it by copying what she did. She did it without copying anyone. That’s what you pay for.

  • Sandra says:

    28 Jul28 July 11:04

    +1 And the Mark Quin prints. I know they are limited edition numbered prints but even so they are prints, which are in effect copies of the original produced to increase the profit from the it. I’d rather save my money and go to Ikea for £50 unnumbered print!

• Colin MacKinnon says:

  28 Jul28 July 11:07

  I used to follow the art market – back in the old days when an auction house would charge the seller 10%. You could sometimes make a little profit!

  Then the big boys started charging a second fee – to the buyer, also at 10%.

  Now, you’d have thought that as the value of art rose, the quantity of cash coming in would have risen in proportion. After all, they were charging a percentage.

  But no, the percentage has risen. So the seller might be paying 25% plus VAT, and the buyer 30% plus VAT. Plus “insurance” in case the auction house damages it, cataloguing fees and photography fees. And maybe a bit extra because of the internet!

  And then there is the Droit de Suite – basically a new fee to the artist since they, apparently, deserve a cut of the ale price of a work of art they quite happily sold for a certain sum many decades ago!

  So, if you take a work of art that is “sold” for £10,000, you’ll be lucky to get £7,000. and the person who buys it may have to shell out £13,500.

  That’s almost an immediate 50% drop in the “value” of your asset!

  So for me – it was a no brainer to sell a £30,000 painting I had. The days of that sort of thing being an “investment” have long gone. You can even watch the sale on Grand Designs! Now, we have some fabulously decorative items that cost just a few hundred pounds.

  No worries on insurance. No worries on “investment” potential. Just nice things to have around the house.

  Appreciate it is different for companies and billionaires. But for good artists in the middle ground, it is really difficult to get the middle classes to “invest”.

  • Lady London says:

    28 Jul28 July 18:10

    Hum. And I was thinking that spreads of 3%-15% on buying and selling FX are iniquitous.

    For high value or particularly interesting works though I am sure seller’s fees can be negotiated down to very little.

    • Rob says:

      28 Jul28 July 21:09

      For a £20m painting, yes. Not for what BA is selling. What do you think pays for the massive Sotheby’s site slap in the middle of Bond Steet?!

• ADS says:

  28 Jul28 July 11:09

  Rob – glad you agree with my comment yesterday that it’s a PR gimmick !

• Dubious says:

  28 Jul28 July 12:13

  “Etihad isn’t in a major airline alliance so, even if you did earn status with them, it isn’t worth much unless you are flying Etihad itself.”
  Agreed – although a few benefits in places if you can get them honored…

  Silver gets you an extra 10Kg baggage allowance on SAS and Virgin Australia and something silmilar on Alitalia along with Lounge access (but only in AUH)…

  • Sandra says:

    28 Jul28 July 12:55

    My OH used them as much as possible when based in AUH as they were convenient and was mostly business travel building up the points. When you do get status they are v good and several times on points redemptions they upgraded from business to first, the best upgrade being 17 hours on their (at the time) new direct route from AUH to SFO in first which was the private room with personal attention. Brilliant start to a holiday!

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