What are they for?
Two friends – both loyal readers of this column – have made me read two disturbing books which challenge the role of the collector in the art market. Who and what are collectors? What are they for? Are we, in Lenin’s famous phrase, the art world’s ‘useful idiots’? Or are we, as we would like to think, patrons and benefactors, sustaining and bringing into the light of day the creative work of inspired makers? This collector has been forced to confront some searching questions.
In her Author’s Note at the end of Seven Days in the Art World, Sarah Thornton describes that world as a ‘bunch of squabbling subcultures, which embrace very different definitions of art and often feel a measure of hostility towards each other.’ The book is an ethnographic survey of various actors and institutions – auction houses, art schools, art fairs, magazines, studios, events such as the Turner Prize and the Venice Biennale –exposing rival and conflicting aims in the creation, appreciation and dissemination of works of art. The question she impliedly provokes for collectors is: what is the allure of acquiring these works? Is it vanity, money, greed, fashion or the competitive instinct? Thornton acknowledges but does not have much to say about collectors. She singles out some high-minded individuals at the multi-million-dollar end of the market; but collectors, at least as art-lovers, otherwise appear as innocent bystanders in a fierce multi-party war.
Orlando Whitfield in All that Glitters recounts his own experience of working in the market. He set out with a fellow art history student from Goldsmiths College to enter the world of dealing, picking up an early Paula Rego print and selling it on at a good price. They were both wellconnected with the art world through their parents. Whitfield’s father had been an auctioneer at Christie’s and Sotheby’s. His precocious friend was the son of American museum curators. They got to know and worked with Jay Jopling at White Cube and set up some business of their own in Mayfair. But Whitfield’s partner was Inigo Philbrick, the now notorious fraudster jailed in New York for what might be described as a Ponzi scheme in art dealing. Orlando Whitfield himself suffered a breakdown and, disillusioned, has walked away.
These books tell us much about the art market that collectors might not like to know. It is an unregulated market in which, at least in the case of contemporary art, price bears very little relationship to merit.
Philbrick thrived and then crashed in highend auctions where works change hands at the most extravagant prices – seven, eight, and nine-figure dollar sums. Works in that rarified world are only sometimes bought for exhibition or display. Many are syndicated, like racehorses. Different investors own different shares. Works are consigned to secure warehouses in Switzerland until the owners put them back into auction, hopefully when prices have gone up. Let’s face it: it can’t be too stressful if you and your friends buy a Jeff Kooning for $6m and wait for the next punters to pay $11m for it. But was that work ever ‘worth’ anything like that? Philbrick was finally caught selling or pledging the same shares over and over again in a work which he thought would finally sell at a price to cover all his debts. It did not, and the birds of prey closed in.
He had exploited the secondary market at its most investment-heavy end. But works by past and living artists across the entire spectrum of reputation, achievement and monetary value are put up for sale at auction. Sellers, especially families of deceased collectors, come from a diverse cross-section of owners. Auctions attract commercial galleries and dealers, well known to the auctioneers, who are adept at buying a piece at auction and flipping it into the retail collectors’ market at a favourable profit. (I once bought a picture for three times as much as I later discovered the gallery had recently paid for it at auction.)
The straightforward collector, whose simple quest is for the aesthetic enjoyment of an attractive work in their own home, has to treat the secondary market with caution. The prices are arbitrary and sometimes impossible to fathom, but for those reasons they are usually negotiable. Provenance of ownership, the quality of the work and the reputation of the artist are of course important, but so is fashion, which as both authors show has a huge influence on price.
The primary market, where galleries present newly produced work for sale for the first time, is a completely different place. It is more secure for the collector but it is (I suspect) less profitable for the intermediary gallery, which might also be taking a huge risk on an emerging talent. In my column in the last edition of ROSA, I commended art fairs as one of the best places for the non-commercial lay collector. These books, despite Thornton’s cynical account of some of the highly commercialised transactions at Art Basel, have convinced me that I was right. Art fairs mix primary and secondary sales openly in a world which, as these authors show, can otherwise be for the collector, obscure, impenetrable, highhanded and fraught with risk.