Comfortable in the middle
DURING past financial recessions, the market for traditional art has gene-rally been healthier than for contemporary and it will be instructive to discover whether the same will prove true of the present, with the pandemic likely to be followed by economic turmoil. In troubled times, the portable has a premium and, during the Second World War, alternative currencies among refugees included industrial diamonds, links from gold watch- chains and rare stamps, all of which had international rates of exchange, either by carat, weight or the prices in Stanley Gibbons.
