But Gursky and Sherman are titans, with solo shows in pre-eminent museums.

Who is Peter Lik?

It irks him a little that you have to ask. Because by one measure – money – Lik may well be the most successful fine-art photographer who ever lived. He has sold $US440 million worth of prints, according to his chief financial officer, in 15 galleries in the United States that he owns and that sell his work. The images are mostly panoramic shots of trees, sky, lakes, deserts and blue water in supersaturated colours. Generally speaking, his buyers are not people who acquire the art of Andreas Gursky and Cindy Sherman.

Which is just one reason Lik considers himself an artist working outside a system established by elitist tastemakers. And while he says he doesn't mind being snubbed by the establishment, part of him is bothered that his renown has lagged woefully behind his level of financial success.

Peter Lik's Maui mansion. As of February, 2015, it was on the market with an asking price of $US19.8 million. Supplied

So six months ago, he had an idea. Nearly every Peter Lik photograph is printed in a "limited edition" of 995; the first print sells at about $US4000, with the price rising as the edition sells out. With his eye fixed on a record-setting sale, he printed a single copy of Phantom.

Then he alerted a handful of his most ardent collectors, one of whom, he said, agreed to the $US6.5 million price. Before the deal was signed, Lik hired a public relations firm to make sure the sale, and the record, were noticed.

"The PR firm dropped those off yesterday," said Lik, looking at four fat ring binders, which an associate had just plopped on a table. They contain hundreds of stories from around the world about the Phantom sale.


'Officially the most expensive photo ever'

Typical was the reaction of Time magazine, which published the headline, "This is officially the most expensive photo ever."

Peter Lik attends the opening of the Peter Lik Gallery on January 24, 2008 in La Jolla, California. Jeff Kravitz

It's hard to know what's "official" about it. Previous records in photography were set by competing bidders in public auctions for images that were familiar and celebrated. This was a private sale for a newly printed photograph, and scant details were offered. But while the buyer's hidden identity inevitably arched some eyebrows, anonymity in such deals is not unusual.

Joshua Roth, the Los Angeles lawyer who represented the buyer, declined to name his client, although he emphasised that the client exists.

Despite the reported size of the deal, the art world greeted the news mostly with silence. This could have been because, before the sale announcement, no one had laid eyes on the image. One of the few gallery owners willing to discuss it was Michael Hoppen, owner of a gallery in London.

"It's an abomination," Hoppen said of Phantom, in an article that ran in England's The Independent. "Art, whatever the medium, is something that moves and informs you or changes your opinion. This has nothing to do with art or creative photography, and the tragedy is that it brings the whole business down." He declined an invitation to elaborate.

The photograph "Phantom" by photographer Peter Lik which sold for over $US6 million recently. Peter Lik


Here's another way to look at Phantom: as the flagship of an entrepreneur catering mostly to an overlooked group, namely people with some disposable income but little or no experience buying fine art.

Lik opens galleries in areas with lots of tourist traffic, and he embraces the familiar elements of retail transactions, instead of cloaking them in mystery, which is standard in the contemporary art realm. There are even credit-card swipe machines in every Lik gallery, a device rarely seen in any other fine-art context, where cheques are preferred.

A lot of Lik buyers just want an appealing image to hang on their wall. But others have read about the emergence of painting, photography and sculpture as glamorous and profitable assets, and Peter Lik USA gives them a slice of that action. Or so they believe. As is the case with many people who regard contemporary art as an investment, the slice is often worth much less than they realise.

Lik, a compact 55-year-old bundle of sinew and kinetic energy, has turned himself into a one-man fine-art franchise through charisma and single-minded will. He has no interests outside of his photography and his business, which includes a sideline in buying and selling luxury houses. (He recently put a property on 2.6 oceanfront hectares in Maui up for sale for $US19.8 million.) Having failed once at marriage, he says he is done with relationships.

A view of the electronic display showing "From The Edge With Peter Lik" Times Square Premiere at Times Square on March 31, 2011 in New York City. Joe Corrigan

No formal training in art

Lik doesn't seem to have much interest in art, either, at least art made by other people. He never studied any photographer, let alone took an art class, and seems to take some pride in that fact.

He professes no interest in Ansel Adams, perhaps the most famous US landscape photographer and an obvious touchstone to anyone dragging a big camera into a national park.


"Just a nice shot of Yosemite," Lik said, summing up Adams' work. "Right place at the right time."

He spends three months out of every year shooting around the country. There are no people in any of the photographs, nor are there any hints of ambiguity or darkness.

He is happy to explain why. "A) That is not going to make us any money," he said. "And B) I don't want to see that side of life. I just want to see the beautiful side."

It takes a while to piece together Lik's life story because the tale emerges in random shards that must be reassembled.

He skipped college and began working as a salesman, first for a packaging company and later a greeting card company. Everywhere he went, he brought a camera and, eventually, he parlayed his portfolio into a job shooting for the Queensland Tourist and Travel Corp. To bowdlerise his account of the two years that followed, Lik worked very hard and had sex with many models.

In 1996, he used his Queensland photographs to start a successful postcard company, and he later opened four galleries to sell his prints in his native country. But he always wanted to move to the United States, and in 2001, he sank nearly all his savings into a gallery he opened in San Francisco. It flopped. On his way back to Australia, however, he stopped for a visit to Maui. There, he spotted a retail space that he thought was perfect, and by 2003, he had opened a thriving gallery.

Two years later, he was ready to expand, and he opened a gallery in the shops in Caesars Palace in Las Vegas. He flew in the best of his sales team and ordered them to sell $US1 million worth of photographs a month.

"If you're in Caesars Palace, you're no joke," he said. "That was a huge turning point. I'm in Caesars. I'm God. Nailed it."


In the years to come, he would open three more galleries in Las Vegas and 11 more in other cities, including in Manhattan. He has sold more than 100,000 photographs, all of them custom-printed, mounted and framed, then boxed up at his headquarters in Las Vegas. It's a fine-art factory a few miles from the Strip. Last year, the company sold $US1.6 million worth of photographs every week.

"From the time an order hits the production department to the time it reaches the shipping department, it's about eight days," said Joseph Boswell, director of branding and marketing. "That's streamlined down from months."

Make some noise

In the past decade, the art market has gone from quiet niche to noisy spectacle. A few numbers tell the story. In 2003, Sotheby's and Christie's sold a combined total of $US136.5 million worth of contemporary art in their fall evening sales. In 2014, Christie's alone sold more than six times that figure in its fall sale – $US853 million of Andy Warhol, Cy Twombly, Francis Bacon and others. And there were some murmurs of disappointment that the auction didn't become the first to break the $US1 billion mark.

This backdrop has been essential to the success of Peter Lik. He stands apart from the mainstream art market, but he has benefited from the hype that surrounds it. He has also replicated many of its sales tropes, then exploited them to the nth degree.

Plenty of coveted fine-art photographers, for instance, print six, seven or even 10 copies of an image and charge more as they sell out. Lik vastly expands that concept, selling 950 limited editions and 45 artist's proofs of every photograph. (All the images are identical, but artist's proofs are deemed more prestigious and start at $US10,000.)

Every time a limited edition sells another 10 per cent, the price ticks up, in increments that grow. When an edition reaches 40 per cent sold, for instance, the price rises by $US500. At 90 per cent sold, the price rises by $US1300.

When 95 per cent of an image has sold it becomes "Premium Peter Lik," and the price jumps to $US17,500. At 98 per cent, it's "Second Level Premium Peter Lik" and leaps to $US35,000. And when the image gets down to its last handful, the prices can go as high as $US200,000 or more.


When all copies of a photograph are sold, it can gross the company more than $US7 million.

The message is that the sooner you buy, the less you will pay. So buy now. "If we had them at $US3950 the whole time, where is the sense of urgency?" says Rafee Fatoohi, the company's director of sales. "People would say, 'I'll come back and buy it in a year'."

Traditional contemporary galleries have their own bag of sales tricks, but they are plied with a poker face. These places want to come across more like a museum than a business, a venue for reverence instead of commerce. So employees are present, but none will ask if you need help. Everything has a price, but you need to screw up your courage to request it.

Lik dispenses with these subtleties. "Art consultants", as they are called, roam the floors of his galleries and have a number of company-approved icebreakers to start a dialogue about the photographs. (Sample: "They're amazing, aren't they?") They will happily discuss the colour of your sofa to find a matching frame, an unimaginable topic in other galleries.

Instead of white walls and silence, Peter Lik galleries have dark charcoal gray walls and piped-in vintage rock, circa early Tom Petty. "Presentation is key, the vibe is key," Lik said. "I wanted people comfortable when they went in there. Just relaxed."

Eight steps to success

Behind this chilled-out facade, there is a rigorous catechism, which every Peter Lik art consultant learns during a four-day training course. There are eight steps to each sale, a handbook explains, starting with "Greet and Engage" and ending with the "Post-Sale Button Up".

One recent afternoon at the Peter Lik Gallery in the Venetian hotel and casino, Ali Baigi was in the middle of Step No. 4, "Presentation", which involves "romancing the art," as the company calls it. Baigi was talking to a pair of men from Texas, in town for a sporting goods convention.


"This one is called Celestial Dreams," said Baigi, as the three gaped at a vivid purple and orange shot of a tree. "Many celebrities have it; we respect their privacy, don't mention names. Four months old, already went to 80 per cent sold, but it's still in good category. Eight or nine thousand dollars."

"I'm more of a beach guy," said Jarrod VanBrocklin, manager of a sporting goods store in Abilene, "but this is pretty damn cool."

"You keep it, 20 years from now, you surprise your son with wedding gift," Baigi said. "Meantime, your money is always there, you're looking at it."

During a lull, VanBrocklin told his friend about a photograph he saw at a Lik gallery years ago.

"I think it was taken in Key West," he said. "It was just a pier and white sand. I should have bought that. Now, I've seen it selling for stupid money."

VanBrocklin ultimately left empty-handed but with a promise to return with his wife. He is a fairly typical Peter Lik buyer, someone who hasn't spent much on art in the past and didn't start the day planning to spend $US4000 on a photograph.

Most Lik sales are a kind of high-end impulse buy. The setting is designed to valourise the jaunty, tripod-toting bloke scouring the nation in search of beauty.

A plaque on the wall tallies up a list of honours, including the fellowship he received from the British Institute of Professional Photographers and his master photographer award from the Professional Photographers of America. Another plaque boasts about the "world record" set by Phantom. Still another describes him in the shorthand of an online dating profile:


"Best loved food: Thai & Indian or anything that is bloody hot!"

'We're not art collectors'

There are plenty of repeat clients who don't need this spiel because they've already heard it. Fatoohi said a handful of collectors had spent north of $US1 million, and more have spent in excess of $US100,000.

One regular buyer is Craig Bernfield, a real estate developer in Chicago. He politely demurred when asked to tally up his outlays over the years, but he says he has purchased 50 Liks, all of them on the walls of his homes, his office or the homes of his children. He and his wife, Donna, began their collection during a visit to Hawaii in 2003, when the couple happened across Lik's gallery in Maui.

"We were not art collectors," he said in a phone interview, "but we had this wonderful trip with our kids, and at the time the gallery featured some photography that Peter had done on the island, shots of places that we'd been. So we bought a handful of photographs that we were in love with – the serenity and beauty of places that he captured."

Early on, Bernfield and his wife didn't consider whether they were making a good investment – specifically whether the art would sell well on the secondary market, a realm dominated by auction houses. But as the Bernfields' inventory grew, it was time for what Bernfield called a "gut check" about new acquisitions.

"We had to ask, hey, is this worth it?" he said. The businessman in him wouldn't mind what they call in the real estate world "comparables", a sales history of similar properties. He just has never found any.

"If you find some comparables," he said, "I'd be interested in seeing them."


Arguably, the person best versed in Peter Lik comparables is David Hulme, a fine-art valuer based in Australia for a company called Auctionata. For years, he has been getting calls from Lik owners around the world, and he finds the calls depressing.

"People tell me all the time, 'I've been in touch with the gallery, and they say my photograph is now selling for $US150,000 a copy,'" he says. "So they want to know what they can sell theirs for."

A tiny fraction of that sum is the answer. A subscription service called Artnet – which bills itself as the most comprehensive database of its kind – captures the resale value of Lik photographs by cataloguing auction results, and the most anyone has ever paid for one his photographs is $US15,860, for a copy of an image called Ghost, in 2008. (It's a colour version of Phantom.)

Tough crowd in the after-market

After that, it's a long slide down, to $US3000 for a copy of Eternal Beauty (Antelope County, Arizona) in 2014. Fifteen images have sold for between $US1000 and $US2500, and four have sold for between $US400 and $US1000. Another handful failed to sell. And that's it.

Hulme usually directs Lik owners to ArtBrokerage.com, a site where they can post images of their art along with an asking price. Currently, there are more than 770 Liks for sale on ArtBrokerage.com, the most of any artist on the site. As of Friday, that included 27 copies of one image, Tree of Hope, with prices that ranged from $US5000 to $US29,000.

Or you can buy a copy at the gallery, where it has achieved Second Level Peter Lik Premium status, for $US35,000.

It's a truism that the price of a commodity doesn't always correlate to its value. This is especially so in the art market, where experts say a stunningly small per cent of what is sold will ever be worth more than it was on the day it was acquired. Behind every headline of a superselling object at a high-profile auction, there are a few thousand items that will never budge.


"Reading about art investment success is like reading about the 1-in-40 drill holes that find oil," writes Don Thompson in The Super Model and the Brillo Box: Back Stories and Peculiar Economics From the World of Contemporary Art. "You never read about the 4 out of 5 contemporary works that Christie's or Sotheby's, or even Phillips or Bonhams, reject for their evening auctions because the artist is no longer in fashion."

Generally, photographers who perform well at auctions have appeared in museums, won praise from critics and have printed a very small number of a given image. The sole museum Peter Lik mentions on plaques in his galleries is the Smithsonian, but he's been exhibited only in its National Museum of Natural History in group shows of nature photography. And over the years, he has effectively flooded his own market.

So anyone buying his work assuming that it will appreciate is all but certainly in for an unhappy surprise. But given the sheer volume of Liks on the market, his scarcity in museums and the scorn he attracts from gallery owners, the question is: Why do so many people call David Hulme expecting good news?

One answer is that the vast majority of Lik's buyers are not well versed in the secondary art market, and they believe that because prices go up inside the galleries, they go up outside them, too.

This confusion over price, which is dictated by the company, and value, which is determined by the broader market, is sometimes encouraged by the sales team, according to two former executives at Peter Lik USA, who declined to be identified for fear of being sued by the company.

The eight-step presentation, the elaborate price tiers, the long list of professional awards, the "romancing" of the art – all have the effect of suggesting to potential customers that they are making an investment, not spending money.

"The salesman would say, 'Peter Lik is the most awarded landscape artist in history'," said one former executive. "This photograph started at $US4000 and it sold out at $US200,000. Now, you tell me how good an investment it is."

VanBrocklin, the sporting goods manager, seemed to have bought this message when he said to his friend at the Venetian: "This is one of those deals where you don't lose money." That widespread impression has led Hulme to question whether Lik galleries are "misleading" customers.


Fatoohi, the Lik executive, said sales reps are instructed during those four-day training courses to emphasise the beauty of Lik's work, and anyone in the galleries who makes rosy investment claims risks being fired. "We tell clients who ask about future values, 'Buy because you love it'," Fatoohi said. "There are no guarantees."

The secondary art market was the one subject that Lik was reluctant to discuss. Presented with the Artnet results and pressed for a comment, he said of his work, "It's like a Mercedes-Benz. You drive it off the lot, it loses half its value."

Bernfield, the collector with 50 Liks, sounds as if he'd be content with his purchases no matter what. He loves the images. That said, he also believes that his photographs are a good investment, a conclusion that stems largely from the delighted reactions of friends. But he has other evidence, and not surprisingly, all of it is lifted directly from the gallery: the bustle of customers, the list of accolades, the pricing tiers.

And Peter Lik just sold an image for a record-breaking $US6.5 million, didn't he?

The New York Times

© 2015. Distributed by the New York Times Syndicate.

AFR Weekend approached Peter Lik for comment on this story but he didn't return calls.

The New York Times