Good points, both of you. If you're putting that much cash out for a sculpture, you don't want to think of losing money, but as with all antiques I won't buy unless the love is there. As we've seen in the past 5 years, the market can always go south, along with your retirement dollars. At least you want to love the items before you sell for a loss
As a sidebar, we do know that, even at 12K, the present owners would lose money on the sale.
The problem is, we cannot find any sale prices on anything by this sculptor, so there's no information on how his sales have been tracking, at least that we can find.