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METAMORPHOSIS #1005_2/ 2005
(  Satoshi Kinoshita )
| Series: | Paintings: Landscape | | Medium: | acrylic and "iron rust" on non-stretched canvas | | Size (inches): | 36 x 26 | | Size (mm): | 914 x 660 | | Catalog #: | PA_087 | | Description: | Signed, titled, date, copyright in magic ink on the reverse.
Iron + oxygen + water = Iron rust.
"The collectors" from The Guardian, Friday October 21, 2005.
We know about Charles Saatchi and Nicholas Serota, but who are the relatively unknown buyers fuelling the booming contemporary art market? What drives them, and how do they get what they want? James Meek meets five very different collectors - and watches them swing into action in the first, frenzied hours of the Guardian-sponsored Frieze Art Fair -
When Peggy Guggenheim, perhaps the canniest collector of 20th-century contemporary art, began her life of acquisitions in Paris and London in the 1930s, she had certain advantages. First, money. Second, time. Third, advice. Her mentor was an old friend, the defining surrealist Marcel Duchamp.
"I could not distinguish one modern work of art from another, but he taught me the difference between surrealism, cubism and abstract art," she wrote in her memoir, Confessions of an Art Addict. "Then he introduced me to all the artists. They adored him ... " Still, she preferred the old masters. It seems to have been another famous friend and unrequited love, Samuel Beckett, who turned her towards contemporary art. "Beckett told me that one had to accept the art of one's day, as it was a living thing," she wrote.
At exactly 2pm yesterday, in Regent's Park in London, the doors opened on what has become, in the remarkably short space of three years, one of the world's biggest annual markets for contemporary art. A crowd of Guggenheim's would-be heirs poured into the sumptuous bazaar of the Frieze Art Fair, fanning out hungrily, chequebooks in pocket, like bargainhunters on the first day of the January sales. They were very ready to accept the art of our day. But what they were really looking for was the art of tomorrow, the golden convergence of talent, obscurity and price that would look right on their walls, impress posterity, fit their budget and perhaps keep an unknown artist in paint, bacon sandwiches, formaldehyde, whatever, for a few months.
There is something very intimate and direct about Frieze. It is not an auction; each of the items on sale has a fixed price. The artists are alive, and may even be attending the fair themselves. The work is fresh; on some, the paint has barely dried. Even though galleries, with their typical commission of 50%, are the intermediaries at Frieze, for a collector, buying at an art fair like this is as close to getting work direct from the studio as it comes, short of taking it straight from the artist's own hands.
The best-known models in Britain when it comes to acquiring art are Charles Saatchi, our latter-day Guggenheim, and Sir Nicholas Serota, the head of Tate Modern. Yet although the Tate does get first dibs on the work at Frieze, with an exclusive preview yesterday morning and the night before - "they've got £125,000 to spend and with that they get to go hog wild," said one of the Frieze organisers - there are hundreds of other buyers at the fair. What kind of people are they, the buyers of contemporary art, so different from the recipients of creativity in other fields - neither like the publisher nor the reader of a book, neither like the producer nor the audience of a film, neither like the record company nor the listener to a song?
Amir Shariat is a collector. He's 34, works for a bank in London, and lives in a two-storey flat in Chelsea which, as he admits with the grin of an enthusiast, is not really big enough for the works he has already bought, let alone any new ones. He hopes to open a gallery in his native Tehran soon. In the meantime, 80-90% of the work he owns is in storage. He likes Maricio Guillen, Haluk Akakce and Barnaby Hosking. I visited his flat at the beginning of the week. You have to squeeze past an enormous Shirin Neshat and a Guy Richards Smit, not much smaller, to get from the living room to the master bedroom. "Space," he says, "is a major pain in the neck."
Some of the pitfalls for the starter-out are not obvious. Such as: if you buy a big, heavy painting, don't try to hang it on the wall yourself. "If you don't do it professionally for pieces that are very heavy, you run the risk of damaging them, because they fall off the wall," he says. "I had a piece which fell off the wall. Twice. It was my fault."
Shariat's father was a dealer in old masters in Vienna. Shariat's collection of contemporary art dates from about the time of his father's death. "Historically, art was done for the church, or for princes or kings. I think art has become much more available to the masses," he says. "Prices are much lower than 600 years ago."
These masses must be masses with a certain amount of ready cash. Shariat is not one of your bejewelled Ferrari-driving hedge fund managers for whom an Elizabeth Peyton is just another twinkle in the galaxy of bling - he drives an Audi A3 - but he's sceptical of collectors who say they don't notice the numbers. "Art, for sure, is investment. I don't agree with anybody who says, 'I only buy it because I love it.' That's crap. Obviously it's an asset class."
He is uneasily conscious that so many collectors chasing the Next Big Thing are making the contemporary art market boil till the lid jiggles. In a tiny spare room upstairs in his flat, there is a work by the Zurich-based Caro Niederer. It is still sealed in bubble-wrap and brown parcel tape. "I bought it in March 2004. I can tell you the price has trebled." Shariat puts his hands together and shakes them at me. "I mean trebled, James! I'd have to be a Colombian drugs dealer to pay this money. I think it's a bit out of control."
Competition and admiration:
Hilary Hatch-Rubenstein, a Manhattan psychoanalyst and collector who flies in for Frieze every year, tells the story of a lavish invitationonly show given by the Greek collector Dakis Joannou. To mark the opening of his new private museum in Athens, he flew several hundred guests in on a chartered plane from Basel, pampered them and showed them round. "On the bus coming back from seeing the collection, one of the guests said, rather aggressively, 'So what was all that about?'" Hatch-Rubenstein tells me. "And a guy screams from the back of the bus: 'It means he has it, and you don't!'
"There is an element of that. There's a lot of competition, a lot of acquisitiveness, a lot of greed, but also an enormous amount of admiration for artists - a vicarious living through artists' self-expression."
In a Soho hotel this week, looking alert for someone who had only had four hours' sleep on an overnight flight from New York, Hatch- Rubenstein was remembering her first acquisition and looking forward to Frieze. The first piece she bought was 20 years ago, when she was 15: an Andy Warhol print of Greta Garbo. It used up her entire summer holiday allowance - $1,000.
"My brothers thought I was completely insane ... For $2,000, I could have had a Mari- lyn Monroe. For some reason, the Garbo was more intriguing. The Marilyn would have been worth more now, but the Garbo is still on my wall, and I don't think the Marilyn would be." As a psychologist, Hatch-Rubenstein has given more thought than most to why people collect. "There's a lot of enjoyment," she says. "Sometimes I come home after a long day, flop down in a chair, look at the wall and become lost in thought staring at a piece I've had for years. One of the books I read about collecting says that it's like collecting friends or people. There's an actual relationship to a work of art ... there's some kind of aliveness, or a dialogue."
Like most collectors, Hatch-Rubenstein is shy of talking about the value of her collection. She does say that the most she has ever paid for a single work was $60-70,000. She owns pieces by Yayoi Kusama, Jim Lambie, Nick Relph and Oliver Payne, Franz West and Tomma Abst. At last year's Frieze, she bought Marc Leckey's video, Made in 'Eaven. "Sometimes you come to the fair and know there's something you're looking for. You've communicated with a dealer, they've sent you an image, and you say, 'At two o'clock, I'll go to your booth,' and they say, 'OK, but I'm only going to hold it for the first 10 minutes.' Sometimes, you don't go in looking for anything. This year, I'm really open to seeing something new."
The collectors fly in to Frieze from all over the rich world, from America in particular. The fair is not only an innovation but an indicator of how the arts scene in Britain has been commercialised along American and European lines. Fifteen years ago, there were only about five commercial galleries dealing in contemporary art in London. Now there are 10 times as many. The balance of the 160 galleries represented is from other countries. The effect of this global market intensely focused on one spot is to make for a steep range of prices, from £500 to as much as £1m.
"London now matters in the international art world in a very significant way," says Dennis Scholl, who with his wife Debra has amassed a huge collection of contemporary art in their home town of Miami. "It's not just about what happened with the YBAs. There is a significant number of dealers here who matter on the international art scene. If you want to be involved in the contemporary art world on a major level, these are people you have to know and places you have to go."
The Scholls, who made their fortune in property development, are among the most powerful and influential in the world of private collectors. They have a collection worth millions, and hire a professional curator each year to rehang the works in their house. They own work by, among others, Thomas Demand, Olafur Eliasson, Andreas Gursky and Richard Prince. What, I wonder, about sharing? Is a work in a private collection a work which is out of circulation for the wider world? "Nobody really owns a collection," says Scholl. "You get to be stewards of the work for a certain period of time."
Public and corporate buyers:
"We open our home to most groups and interested collectors and curators and tours," he says. "So on average, in one year, more than 2,000 people will see the collection, in our personal residence, where we sleep and eat. We make a commitment, to young artists in particular, to get their work seen." I ask Scholl whether there is any particular artwork he covets. He laughs. "We've just come from the Sistine chapel," he says, "and I've got to tell you, that ceiling painting wouldn't be bad."
Some collectors heading for Frieze are sharers by definition. Andrea Kusel arrived for the fair by train from the west of Scotland. As keeper of art at Paisley Museum, she has a share of cash from a lottery-funded programme, the National Collecting Scheme for Scotland, which was set up to help public museums and galleries buy contemporary art. "Within the next few months we have to spend the remainder of the kitty, which is about £18,000, so I suppose the race is on a little bit," she says.
An Enrico David work that Kusel bought at the inaugural Frieze fair two years ago is now part of Paisley's collection. She tells me that she plans to make a beeline for the stall run by a Mexican gallery called kurimanzutto. "I've been interested for a little while by one of the artists represented by them, Abraham Cruzvillegas. I've been trying to keep track of him and trying to find the right piece by him."
Unlike the private collectors, Kusel has more limits to her freedom of action than price and personal taste. "It's not just a case of finding something that would look nice in the gallery. You have to look at conservation, storage, safety, interpretation. Paisley, until recently, hasn't had a lot of challenging contemporary work. I'm not able to, and wouldn't want to, race up to a stall and see something and say, 'Yes, yes, I'll take it.' It's very important to discuss it with my colleagues and the Contemporary Art Society."
And might a private buyer not snap up the piece she was interested in while she was consulting? "There would always be that risk, but quite often you find that artists want their art to go into a public collection, so even though there's been quite a delay in identifying the work and coming up with the cash, people have been fairly patient about it."
Of all the collectors at Frieze yesterday, perhaps Alistair Hicks is most to be envied. He has whole square miles of white wall on which to hang pictures, considerable heft of wallet and no pressure to follow fashion.
Strictly speaking, Hicks is not really an art collector. He is the art adviser to Deutsche Bank in London; worldwide, the bank owns 50,000 pieces of contemporary art, the largest collection in the hands of any commercial corporation. The firm's huge UK headquarters in London Wall - Deutsche Bank is the largest employer in the City - seethes with art, from the reflective two-tonne stainless steel Anish Kapoor near-sphere in the lobby to the Bacons, Freuds and Moore sketches adorning the otherwise anodyne carpeted conference rooms. (The bank is the main sponsor of Frieze.)
Another monster in Deutsche Bank's London lobby is a panel the size of a bus by the US pop artist James Rosenquist. Called The Swimmer and the Economist, it is, says Hicks, a comment on "consumerism gone mad", and follows up an earlier work, F-111, about "the cost of capitalism".
I wonder aloud about the irony. Given its size, and the size of the cheque he presumably pocketed, Rosenquist could hardly claim to have smuggled a satirical comment on consumer capitalism, Banksy-style, into the offices of one of the world's biggest enablers of consumer capitalism. Was it the bank's satirical comment on the biddability of artists?
"In the 1970s, the hostility between the art world and the business world was probably at its height, and a lot of artists were questioning the role of business as a sponsor, and there were lots of artists who refused to sell to the people they were attacking," says Hicks. "Which is probably one of the reasons we devised a concept based on the idea that we were categorically not buying for investment. Our aim is, one, to support artists, and two, to help make the working environment more stimulating.
"It's interesting to go back to the 1970s. Then you would have found a lot of curators and a lot of artists who would say anything to do with commerce was bad, and you did get a lot of artists who almost survived without any patronage. I don't know how they did it."
They were just poor, maybe?
"Yes, maybe. But I think if you look back at the number of important performance artists for whom no record is available because they weren't collected perhaps as much as they deserved ... their work hasn't survived. Collectors are usually a good way to make sure artworks survive for posterity, and make sure artists eat."
Although four-fifths of the visitors to Frieze will never buy an artwork there, many of those who pay their £15 to get in after the big collectors have moved on may be thinking of taking the plunge. What advice would Hicks give to the novice art collector?
"Don't ever expect to like too much. That's the cardinal rule," he says. "So many people are put off by disliking something and then dislike all contemporary art. At any one time you're probably only going to respond to a certain amount of it. I think that's the great joy, finding the occasional thing that really lets you into something different."
Dennis Scholl's take is similar. "You need to look at anywhere between 1,000 and 10,000 objects before you purchase the first one," he says. "I think a common mistake when first starting out is not looking enough." Ninety minutes after the maelstrom begins, I bump into Kusel. Her eyes are full of art. She hasn't bought anything. She is encouraged to see that the artist she had taken a chance on two years earlier, Enrico David, is growing in stature. "He's probably a lot more expensive now as well, ha ha ha," she says.
"I think the things I've seen so far are things I already know. All the things I've seen are by people I've already collected or artists whom I've been thinking about. But probably I've been around a third of the exhibition. And it'll be going back to something and seeing it again that might make me think, hmm, perhaps."
Two and a half hours in, and Hatch-Rubenstein's heart is already aflutter. I meet her in the stall of the Matthew Marks gallery of New York. She has just finished leafing through a folder of photographs of sculptures by the British artist Rebecca Warren. Safe enough; but four stalls away, in the Maureen Paley gallery of London, are two full-sized Warrens, B and Can, £28,000 and £26,000 respectively. Hatch-Rubenstein is on the brink of buying one. She looks worried and excited.
"The problem is, they are quite huge, so I don't know whether we would be able to live with them," she says. "The smaller ones - it's not that they're not interesting, but the most collectable size is not what I most like. So are you buying something that fits into your home, or a piece you really love?"
At least one buyer I come across later seems untroubled by this dilemma. At the Maureen Paley stand, a woman with an Italian accent is gesturing to Wolfgang Tillmans' enormous colour print, Einzelgänger V. "I love this burgundy one," she says to the gallery rep. "If you had something like that, but smaller?"
-www.guardian.co.uk/arts
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