Everyone's Ignoring One of the Best Deals in the Art Market

As prices for mid-century American artists rise to amounts that make even billionaires blanch, dealers have turned to South Korea, northern Italy, and rural Cuba to “discover” people whose markets still have room for growth. But savvy collectors who rifle through the annals of Western art history might be shocked to discover that some of the most important artists of the 20th century remain bargains hiding in plain sight.

Those collectors might start with Nam June Paik (1932-2006), a Korea-born American who is widely considered the father of video art. Paik’s work, which started out as performance and composition, then moved to video art, is in the permanent collection of museums around the world. Paik’s archive, moreover, is in the Smithsonian Institution, and in 2015 his estate announced that it would be represented by the powerful, multinational Gagosian Gallery.