Tricks of the Trade

Tricks of the Trade
I am a collector.’ Ah yes, the magic words around which the entire shaky constellation of the contemporary art world now revolves; a phrase to pump the heartbeat of everyone from dealer to artist to museum director. And yet, there remains something strange, something askew, awkward even, about the rise to prominence and dominance of the ‘c’ word, an underlying malaise as worthy of psychoanalysis as economics. But of the power and prestige of the collector there can be no doubt. Nor can one question their increasing importance throughout every zone of the contemporary art infrastructure, from the humblest alternative gallery to the major international institutions, it seems the ‘c’ has become our ultimate fetish.Last year saw the publication in English of A Passion for Art (Thames & Hudson), a chunky super-glossy tome devoted to delicious photographs by Philippe Chancel of some of the world’s most prominent current collectors, accompanied by a suitably reverential text by Irene Gludowacz and Susanne van Hagen. A library of books on collectors would surely include monographs on the great figures of the past, scholarly and often somewhat critical histories of the Medici family, the Frick and Mellon collections; multi-volume catalogue raisonné put out by collectors themselves, whether Saatchi or Robert Lehman; and racy autobiographies such as Peggy Guggenheim’s Confessions of an Art Addict (André Deutsch). By contrast A Passion for Art is a straightforward homage, if not hagiography, of the most successful, photogenic and obsessively bulimic collectors, presented as ideal role models to the rest of us mere mortals. One of the authors, Susanne van Hagen, is typical of this breed herself: a striking beauty married to a British financier, based in Paris rather than her native Germany, she has a ubiquitous presence at every art fair and biennial around the globe. She is a typical ‘collector’ in so much as the power of that term alone guarantees her automatic respect and entry with no further questions asked. It is true that once you are known as an art collector very few will pause to wonder what you actually own, let alone what you’re worth.What has changed in the last decade is that the really big collectors, such as those worshiped in this book, now operate as public museums with all the puissance of any long-established state cultural institution. For example, the selection process for New York’s ‘International Studio & Curatorial Program’ fully blurs all boundaries between private collections, corporate art holdings and museums, as the jury includes curators from the Rubell and Eileen & Peter Norton collections, the Hirshhorn and Whitney Museums, and the company Neuberger Berman LLC. These collectors now have such wide and important ‘stock’ they are increasingly listed like any other organisation. Thus the Fondazione Nicola Trussardi, a not-for-profit institution that commissions artworks in Milan, always list their collaborating artists as being part of ‘the most important public and private collections worldwide’, without any differentiation between the two entities. Here the Guggenheim is listed right next to the Deste Foundation, the Seattle Museum is alongside the Fondation Pinault, the Israel Museum is indistinguishable from the Jumex Collection, and the collections of Elaine Dannheisser or Gilles Fuchs all appear to be the same thing as that of the Castello di Rivoli.In addition, the collector is now presented as a cure for every woe: all a struggling artist needs is the right collectors on their CV, museums must merely find their local millionaire supporter, and each new gallery should immediately obtain their own ‘c’. And whether it is because they are apparently so much richer, or publicly funded institutions are relatively poorer, private collectors are increasingly the major museum donors, to the extent that they determine acquisition policy more than any in-house curator. Thus when Harvey Shipley-Miller of the Judith Rothschild Foundation spent several years and millions of dollars buying drawings by new young artists, and then donated them to MoMA in New York, the museum had to go through the pretence of pondering before gratefully accepting this pre-planned gift. Likewise the two substantial shows of the ‘Leipzig School’ touring American museums are both from private collections (those of the Rubells and Michael Ovitz). The institutional purchasing process is so long and cumbersome there are usually no works left to buy by the time any museum gets lumbering around to deciding something may be of interest. This essentially means that it is individual collectors who now determine the ‘history of art’ rather than official state institutions. If an important enough collector decides to buy a certain artist or movement, they will eventually dictate their taste to the institutions. If all the curators in all the museums of the world were unanimous that, say, the ‘New Leipzig School’ was drab and dreary derivative tosh, it could make no difference to its historical importance matched against those collective collectors’ might.But what is a collector anyway? Merely someone who owns more than one object from a similar series? Then it only takes ownership of two works to qualify. And indeed if you should happen to own just one picture, but it was Picasso’s single most important and famous painting, you would be qualified as a major collector even without any actual collection. Today’s collectors are judged by the number of works they own (a ridiculous criteria comparable to a schoolyard competition), but also the current fame of the artists and hence their financial value. Just about everyone connected to the art world is technically a collector as everybody owns at least two art works of some description. Whether these were received as gifts or bought at a flea market, we can all quite accurately announce ourselves as more or less collectors.But as a collector, your status is dependent on the fluctuating fortunes of those artists you own. A collector with 1,000 works by a totally unfashionable or forgotten artist is not taken as seriously as a collector with just two works by the hottest superstar of the moment. Thus collectors make the market but are also made or broken by it, their importance judged by their stable of bets. Likewise every dealer and every gallerist is also ipso facto a collector, and surprisingly often their long-term wealth and success depends upon one of their artists whom they always had in stock, but could never sell, and who only decades later becomes a valuable commodity. As the old adage goes, it is not what you sell but what you keep that matters, or to put it more bluntly, the longer a dealer keeps a work the less valuable it becomes, the longer a collector keeps it, the more valuable it seems.