John Brownlee

Woman Finds $9Mn Pollock In Dumpster Dive

As a boy, my mother used to wake me up at dawn on Thursday mornings to scavenge amongst the neighborhood trash heaps. We were an upper-middleclass family, but my mother was driven by an inner compulsion, an instinct that said that people threw away perfectly good things all the time. If not for the vagaries […]
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As a boy, my mother used to wake me up at dawn on Thursday mornings to scavenge amongst the neighborhood trash heaps. We were an upper-middleclass family, but my mother was driven by an inner compulsion, an instinct that said that people threw away perfectly good things all the time.

If not for the vagaries of chance, my mother could be Teri Horton, who found an original Jackson Pollock in the garbage.

Even the most stubborn deal scrounger probably would have been satisfied with the rate of return recently offered to her for a curiosity she snagged for $5 in a San Bernardino thrift shop in the early 1990s. A buyer, said to be from Saudi Arabia, was willing to pay $9 million for it, just under an 180 million percent increase on her original investment. Ms. Horton, a sandpaper-voiced woman with a hard-shell perm who lives in a mobile home in Costa Mesa and depends on her Social Security checks, turned him down without a second thought.

You may think she's an idiot turning down an 180 million percent return on a painting. You're right: she is an idiot. But at least Ms. Horton is an idealistic one: she won't sell the painting until art experts verify that it is, indeed, an authentic Pollock. A chancy gambit, but me and my garbage-picking mom will be keeping our fingers crossed for her.

Could Be A Pollock; Must Be A Yarn