Here at the Chronicle, we are always keen to offer tips and bits of useful advice.
So here's one ...
Go out to your shed or into the spare room - or even attic or cellar (in fact, anywhere you have old junk stashed away) - and have a rummage. See if you can come up with an old Van Gogh or Picasso or similar artwork by some deceased dauber.
I mention this because of last week's news that Picasso's Les Femmes d'Alge was sold at auction for US$179 million. I was astonished by this. A trifling 179 mill? What has gone wrong with the art world?
If I had been passing by Christie's auction house in Manhattan at the time, I would have been in there like a shot and made sure the price was soon tickling the 200 million mark.
It was a good week for Christie's - they also sold Mark Rothko's No. 10 (a subdued, fuzzy-edged, orange-ish rectangle on black canvas) for US$81.9 million. I wonder what his No. 11 will fetch should he ever get round to painting one?
Going, going ... gone in the same week were a Lucien Freud nude for US$56.2 million; Andy Warhol's Mona Lisa (US$33 million) and Sotheby's auctioneers parted company with a "bad" Van Gogh for more than US$50 million.
Reports suggested that it was not art connoisseurs who were purchasing these works, but people with no great love or understanding of art who wanted the "trophy" aspect of a very expensive canvas by a famous name to show off to their mates.
Nothing wrong with that, but I suspect it might not be the whole truth.
Recently, the chairman of New York-based asset management company BlackRock - which, with more than US$4.77 trillion in its hands, is the world's largest asset manager - opined that contemporary art was the best investment you could make. Even safer than gold.
So there you have the best advice of all. Snap up a piece of abstract impressionism or whatever, sit on it for a couple of years and then cash in big time. It even beats investing in the Auckland property market where houses, apparently, only go up in value by a measly $1000 a day.
Does Bill English know about this? It's a sure fire way for him to finally nail that surplus he's been chasing all these years.
