It’s nearly impossible to buy an original Bob Ross painting (2021)
(thehustle.co)140 points by rmason 2 days ago
140 points by rmason 2 days ago
> Bob Ross as we know him only blew up in the 2010s in the internet/YouTube/streaming age.
No, he was just as well-known when his show was on the air. He was a household name, his paintings and style was known, and people talked about him enough to have opinions on whether he was an "artist" or just a TV show host.
I was going to call this anecdotal evidence based on it never appearing in the top 100 (or so) Nielson rated TV shows for a year, based on the lists for 1984-1995 here[0].
However, it looks like PBS never signed up for Nielson until 2009, so we have limited/no public data on viewership of The Joy of Painting (or Sesame Street, etc for that matter).
http://www.thetvratingsguide.com/2020/02/tvrg-ratings-histor...
There's a lot of TV shows out there, even in the 80s and 90s, and plenty of ways for celebrities to have their image and reputation bolstered. Ratings aren't reliable in trying to measure someone's notoriety.
Growing up in the late 80s/90s, and mostly outside of the US, I can't remember a time when I didn't know who Bob Ross was.
There was a lot less tv in the 80s. If you didn’t have cable, then you just had a handful of channels. I didn’t watch Joy of Painting, but it was pretty hard not to notice the painting Afro guy when flipping through the extremely limited number of channels most people had access to.
I present the evidence of Family Guy episode _Fifteen Minutes of Shame_ airdate April 25, 2000 which had a Bob Ross bit. Bob Ross was part of the cultural zeitgeist long before the 2010s Internet memes. That has brought a new generation to him, but that's just bringing GenZ in line with the others.
Agree. Few people watch PBS. The readership here is not representative.
Bob Ross was known in my country (in Europe) due to his show at the time. Not quite universally, but probably closer to a household name than any other living painter was at the time. Dunno how it was in other countries in Europe, but still. The man was relatively well known for paintings, paintings that were regarded well by the general audience (experts: dunno).
So while maybe he couldn't be selling his paintings for 1000s to the decently-off, there clearly was ample demand. If he truly wanted to make a boatload, he easily could have.
Related: the treasure trove could easily be sold 1 painting at a time. Just don't make it regular - not once a year, but sometimes 2 in 2 months, and then 5 years nothing. That really wouldn't spurs the value that much, if at all.
I think a lot of the responses to this are ignoring the things that were popular in the 90s that don't see a big spike of demand more recently.
Bob Ross was popular. Thomas Kinkade was popular. IMO it's doubtful Ross would've been as popular at retail in the 90s as Kinkade. One was a nice cute little educational show. One was "the painter of light" with a marketing engine around him. Both also had plenty of detractors from the "serious" art scene.
Why did Ross get positive associations through 2000s internet culture that Kinkade never did?
Which would you rather go buy now?
Was it just nostalgia, since he was relevant much more to the lives of the kids that grew up to create a lot of the internet culture of the time? Probably a big chunk of it.
But there's also just a certain right-place-right-time. Like, nobody seems to be going nuts about re-buying their childhood Pogs or even Beanie Babies. Ok, those were readily available at retail; Bob Ross wasn't. But Pokemon cards were too...
> cannot all be sold because they would flood the market and decrease their own value. So Bob Ross, Inc. is cleverly keeping them under lock and key and letting the scarcity drive prices up.
Personal pet-peeve.
And yes, I know it doesn't really matter to most people.
Still urks me.
"CANT OR WONT!?"
"I don't know, can you?"
People that say that sometimes irk me with their pedantry. You don't hear it so much anymore, though, as all the people who once cared are elderly or gone.
Language is mutable. I think the best thing you could do is let it go. Perhaps even ascribe a stronger meaning to this "incorrect" usage: it theoretically could be, but it won't be, because it can't be given the circumstances.
Literally.
Sometimes people hide behind this detail in order to absolve themselves of responsibility, though. That’s not as benign as a mere shift in language. OP may have been pointing out responsibility rather than nitpicking language.
“We cannot pay you more, or we won’t be able to hit the margins the market expects from us this year.”
“We can’t license this sports event for wider audiences”
“We can’t sell all of Bob Ross’s paintings or their value would go down”
A way into this: it's not personal choices.
Milking every dollar out of anything valuable is burned into people's souls, and willfully decreasing the value is not a possibility.
Try leaving America some time.
I promise you, there are countries out there where that type of person is widely looked down on (usually the countries that had to fight off colonizers).
> He was reasonably popular at that time, sure, but Bob Ross as we know him only blew up in the 2010s in the internet/YouTube/streaming age.
No, he was well-known already in early 90s (at least on my college campus), and his sayings were pre-internet memes. He was perfect match for slacker stoner culture
Going back further, from what I saw he had notoriety even back in 2003/2004 on 4chan.
If you were growing up without cable in the US when he was on the air, PBS was one of like five channels you could watch.
All us kids in the US knew him growing up in the 80’s, as he was on just before the cartoons on Saturday mornings.
The reason people think that Bob Ross didn't want the paintings he did for the show to be sold is because he said so. He considered them demos, not finished paintings, and you don't sell demos.
He was also famous and popular before the internet discovered him. The internet certainly boosted his visibility, though.
Another explanation is that there is significantly more value in doing licensing deals:
https://negosh.com/brand/54d96e91-3646-49bd-9226-53265743157...
Yeah, this was what happened when Warhol died, the market was flood with thousands of works.
> Bob Ross as we know him only blew up in the 2010s in the internet/YouTube/streaming age.
Uh, what?
Bob Ross was very popular in the early 90s while he was still alive.
So much so that he even did a promo for MTV.
While the article is interesting, the lede is buried literally at the very end of the article:
> Ultimately, the real reason there aren’t more Bob Ross paintings up for sale is that the artist never wanted them to be a commodity.
Any artist who wants to be able to pay their bills without doing anything besides "making art".
If you can convince giant bags of money pretending to be people that one of your paintings is worth several years worth of the median wage, it's no more a less a commodity than if you're selling hundreds of thousands of prints of the same image for $5 apiece.
On that point, I saw a pretty great documentary about Thomas Kinkade called "Art for Everybody" a year or so ago at a film festival. Was pretty fascinating. I won't give away too much but was really interesting to go into the man (and his other artwork) behind the facade.
Banksy?
Until it becomes apparent the people he loathes the most are the ones willing to pay him ungodly amounts of money for his "art"; so he relents and sells it to them anyways.
I don't knock Banksy for making a buck here and there. I can't see he even licenses any of his art for merch. He says all his art is free for non-commercial use. I don't think there's any commercial aspect to his work. When I briefly knew some of his graffiti friends in the early 2000s they were struggling like crazy to try and make a quid or two from their art. They were all doing art-for-art's-sake. They were selling their best pieces on eBay for peanuts to pay their bills, or to buy other art they wanted to own. I just regret not buying one of his first pieces when he was selling them for about 100 quid a piece o_O
Which is fascinating to think he wanted to mass produce art and then after he died, the same thing happened; all of his stuff that was still around ended up creating a scarcity and driving up the price of his stuff anyways.
He doesn't get to decide that. They belong to the people now. Let them have it.
If they were smart, what they would do is sell them directly to consumers who will cherish them and give the paintings good homes. Then make the buyers sign a contract of some sort that they can't be resold for X number of years. That way the paintings bring joy and value to others, while respecting Bob's wishes of not being a commodity.
People who hold them, sued Bob Ross’s son for using “Ross” i.e. his last name.
Slimy people.
I think that "I don't want people to just buy my art" is consistent with the persona of Bob Ross, at least presented on TV. Maybe he was a different person in private, I don't know.
But Bob Ross the personality trying to teach people The Joy of Painting? I think he would rather people paint their own than buy the ones he painted
If you want to get sappy, Bob would probably want you to paint your own version of the piece he made that feel like buying.
> Today, 1,165 Bob Ross originals — a trove worth millions of dollars — sit in cardboard boxes inside the company’s nondescript office building in Herndon, Virginia.
This seems like a bit of a waste given that there's demand for them.
The scarcity makes the demand. I doubt there are that much people wanting low/average quality paintings, even if it has the signature of a person as famous as him. But the 3 of them are willing to spend a lot of money on it. If anyone could buy an original batmobile, people would grow tired of seeing them in the street and they would lose their appeal really quickly.
Most fans of Bob Ross would probably have painted something similar. What he teached was that the enjoyment came from the process and that anyone could paint similar low/average uninspired stuff.
I don’t care about art very much and I would be pay a thousand or two for one. I know that’s much but given that I’ve never bought a painting before and I don’t think I’m particularly unique, I believe this signals there is pretty large demand.
Because he was a celebrity?
I paint myself occasionally some similarly uninspired stuff, and bar 2 painting I hung in the living room and corridor, I throw them away (or rather reuse the canvas) because I don't even consider them art but rather artisanal decorative items.
2 thousand can get you much more interesting paintings. There are many talented but barely known artists anywhere in the world waiting for you. You just have to visit galleries whenever you are visiting a town.
They would certainly go for more than that. Ross didn't paint anything I find even remotely interesting but for $1k, I would buy 20 or 30 Bob Ross paintings right now and sit on them too.
I can't imagine them selling for much less than $20k a painting with a name that everyone knows.
It’s honestly not that much money. Paintings from artists who are not as famous as Bob Ross can go for thousands.
> that anyone could paint similar low/average uninspired stuff.
I hated this sentence. What is wrong with art that is actually, you know, pretty to look at. Obviously Bob Ross paintings aren't very complicated, as they're designed for amateurs to be able to follow along in the instructions. But I find many of his paintings quite beautiful, and if anything the joy in seeing how simple brush strokes can create such beautiful paintings.
Tracey Emin's "My Bed" "sculpture" sold for two and a half million pounds. So people pretending there is some high objective or moral difference between "high art" and "low/average uninspired stuff" are, frankly, full of themselves IMO.
There's wanting to own one as property, and then there's wanting to own a souvenir of an experience. Like a patch, or a t-shirt, or a trophy.
Maybe they should do some Bob Ross events and give the paintings away either as a prize or do a charity raffle. Shit make a foundation to get art supplies to underprivileged kids and use the sales to establish a trust for the foundation.
Curious how they give that information away like this. Therefore I suspect it is bogus, or at least phrased in that manner just to make it sound more quaint.
"Oh heres several millons worth of paintings sitting in cardboard boxes in our Bob Ross Inc. nondescript office building in Herndon, Virignia -- please dont break in and steal anything!"
If he didn't want them sold, he should have destroyed them. Because even if his current heirs decide to keep them locked up, eventually someone is going to come to the realization that they don't need to work anymore if they sell a few of them, and why would you spend your life working for someone else when you could just get rid of something that only takes up space to begin with?
> given that there's demand for them.
Yes, just think of the commercial opportunity!
They put him in a Mountain Dew ad: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q51bomzSQ_s
The Kowalskis sued to exclude Bob Ross from the company bearing his name in the final days of his life, when he was struggling with cancer.
So let me carefully suggest that Bob Ross Inc. is not as benevolently looking out to preserve the heritage and legacy of Bob Ross as you might think.
And had threatened legal action towards his son for using his family name as a painter.
or you can have chatGPT make one to your specifications in his style...
(2021)
Previous discussion when submitted by rmason:
It’s nearly impossible to buy an original Bob Ross painting - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27014367 - May 2021 (85 comments)
> “He was about as uninterested in the actual paintings as you could possibly be,” says Kowalski. “For him, it was the journey — he wanted to teach people. The paintings were just a means to do that.”
That could be true. Though, someone is sitting atop a treasure trove, the value of which is pinned to the legend being promoted by this article.
For Bob Ross, I wonder whether he might've been too humble to consider that his shows touched many people, such that -- besides whatever personal creative journey he encouraged them on -- some might appreciate having a tangible, more direct link to him, of one of his own paintings.
>some might appreciate having a tangible, more direct link to him
Painting your own painting while watching his show and letting him guide you through, would be a pretty tangible, personal, and direct link to him.
There were plans for a Bob Ross Wii game that sadly never came to fruition. Maybe it can be revisited in AR/VR.
I'm very surprised there's not a Bob Ross painting app. One which would have presets for every color, brush, and blade from the show. People could fire up the app and use their Apple Pencil or stylus to follow along.
I did that once on a boring Saturday. Used Procreate and a Pencil to follow along with a couple of shows. Had to pause it more than once to find & download a matching brush in Procreate. Was quite fun. I think a dedicated app would sell extremely well.
Maybe this is the wrong site for this viewpoint, but I don't see what in the world the best damn AR/VR painting game in the world has over actually painting.
Like an expensive canvas is what, $20? And paint can be had for like $5-10 a tube, and unless you just slather the shit on your paintings, you can go quite a long ways on a tube.
Like I play Call of Duty because I don't actually want to experience a warzone. Who wouldn't want to actually paint?
> Like an expensive canvas is what, $20? And paint can be had for like $5-10 a tube
I think you're oversimplifying how much of a hassle painting can be. Sure, one canvas and one tube of paint cost you $25, but you also need to include brushes (duh), an empty jar for water, a palette or an old plate, an easel or a table where paint spills are not a problem, plus the time to set it all up, clean your brushes afterwards, and tear it down (unless you have an empty garage, which people in apartments typically don't). And then there are the lessons which, if you're a beginner, mean several one-hour chunks (and several canvases) until you feel even mildly comfortable on your own.
I think VR painting is to painting what Guitar Hero is to playing a guitar - you may not be a "real" painter afterwards, but as long as it's fun...
No drips.
No cleanup.
No need for figuring out what to do with the canvases.
Any color of paint you want, possibly including ones like "polka dots" or "tiled faces of Nic Cage" or "color-cycling rainbow".
And your brush strokes can be 3d contours of virtual paint hanging in the air instead of marks on a flat canvas.
An Bob Ross-like painting with "tiled faces of Nic Cage" would be awesome!
For those curious about AR/VR painting, check out Vermillion: https://vermillion-vr.com/
The paintings are nice, but I think his ASMR content is worth way more.
Fond memories of zoning out on the couch watching Bob beat the devil out of a 3" brush.
His only nearest competitor was Mother Angelica's Religious Catalog on EWTN.
These paintings sound almost perfect for an NFT art project (burn it and turn it into digital tokens), given that the quality of the art pieces is not super high, but there's huge cultural resonance. To be fair the idea is much older (Yves Klein, the Klein blue guy, Zone de Sensibilité Picturale Immatérielle [0]).
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zone_de_Sensibilit%C3%A9_Pictu...
I think NFTs have no credibility in the eyes of the public. Something akin to NFTs tracking real world ownership of physical things could work, but we already have that in the form of registries and deeds. Provenance is a solved problem, from a technical and social perspective.
The idea of “owning” a purely digital asset that anyone else can just make copies of (but not “own” according to some blockchain) just seems silly.
Fun video about the same topic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rDs3o1uLEdU
I'm fine with that. Bob Ross Must Be Protected At All Costs.
I'm not sure I buy the premise that they're sitting around because selling them all would make them a commodity. They could auction one off every couple months. They could pick a handful to sell every year. Why hoard them?
I don't know why the article and everyone here is coming away with the conclusion that Bob Ross didn't want his art to be sold.
A simpler reasoning is that there wasn't any demand for his paintings while he was alive. His show ran from 1983-1994 and he died in 1995. He was reasonably popular at that time, sure, but Bob Ross as we know him only blew up in the 2010s in the internet/YouTube/streaming age.
Now there is a trove of 1,165 paintings which are no doubt valuable, but cannot all be sold because they would flood the market and decrease their own value. So Bob Ross, Inc. is cleverly keeping them under lock and key and letting the scarcity drive prices up.