Financial Instruments
by Daniel Menaker
November 24, 2008
The New Yorker


Mark Ptashne, a molecular biologist in his late and skeptical sixties, is a precisionist in everything he does. For example, he won the Lasker Award for discovering exactly how genes are turned off and on. He owns a Gyro Swing golf club, which whirs as it responds to his swing and vibrates when he doesn’t keep his left arm in the right position. And—his great passion in life—he owns and plays and lends out violins, two of which are artifacts of the most exacting craftsmanship. He began playing during his adolescence. “They say you can’t really learn at that age,” he said. “Like so much else ‘they’ say, that’s bullshit.” He has made a creditable CD to prove it. And he started a company, Genetics Institute, mainly in order to make enough money to buy one of his treasures—a Guarneri del Gesù. He now owns quite a few other fiddles yet is at pains to make it clear that he is not a collector but a musician and a devotee.

Both treasures—the Guarneri and a Stradivarius—were just lying out there the other day on top of a piano as Ptashne took a living-room practice golf swing. Lying there like hats or remotes or what-have-you. The Strad had seen action the night before at, of all places, the Blue Note, the jazz club in the Village. Luke Bulla, the fiddler in the band led by Jerry Douglas, Dobro virtuoso, was playing it. It had been lent to him, he said, by Ptashne, through a network that involved someone’s brother-in-law. After the session, backstage, Mr. Bulla offered up the violin to hold. But the offeree, who has a very bad history with expensive wineglasses and vases, declined. This same offeree had recently read an article about violins being an excellent financial bet. Given our tempora and mores, he got curious about whether he had just seen the, um, soundest investment of all.

Arguably, he had. During the market upheavals of recent weeks, spot gold prices bobbed at around eight hundred dollars per ounce. The best Stradivarius violin, on the other hand, could have gone for something like seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars per ounce. That’s twelve million dollars for an avoirdupois pound of wood, if you want to be crude about it, and why shouldn’t you, these days? In this and in other ways, the great violins are, ounce for ounce, among the most valuable commodities in the world. There is even a Web site called stradivariinvest.com. Almost alone among investments, important violins have proved immune to economic downturns. Auction prices for Stradivariuses have increased from about two hundred thousand dollars in 1980 to about three million dollars today.

The person who provided those numbers is Stewart Pollens, who runs a business called the Violin Advisor and used to be a conservator of fine instruments at the Metropolitan Museum. “As opposed to paintings and other works of art, there are no fads here,” he said last week. “Artists can be in or out. Few people want to acquire a gigantic Mother and Child oil these days.”

But, like most violinophiles, Pollens, who is married to the violinist Stephanie Chase, cannot really see the instruments in quite the same light as, say, wheat futures. And that’s the problem with violins as a market. Those who, like Ptashne, buy them because they love them often can’t bear to sell them. “What am I going to do?” he had said in his living room. “The money is basically locked up.” He put the Gyro Swing aside and played a little Bach on the Stradivarius on which Mr. Bulla had played a Bill Monroe tune just the night before. And then a little more Bach on the Guarneri—darker and more rustic in tone. It was melancholy music, as if to mourn a world in which not enough is not for sale.



Copyright: The New Yorker @http://www.newyorker.com/talk/2008/11/24/081124ta_talk_menaker

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