Sticker Shock a Hazard, Even When the Artists Are Only Potential Stars
By HARRY HURT III
Published: December 15, 2007
I PLOTTED my executive pursuit of starting a contemporary art
collection from a supercaffeinated base camp in the Empire Diner at
10th Avenue and West 22nd Street in Manhattan. It was dark and early on
a wintry Thursday morning. The sky outside the diner's Art Deco-style
windows looked like an ominous gray abstraction. But my guide, Simon
Watson, a 52-year-old art consultant with close-cropped silver hair and
indigo clothes, was in a sunny mood.
"This is very exciting!" Simon exclaimed. "We're going on a safari in the Chelsea zoo!"
I
nodded, sipping a cappuccino with the affected nonchalance of a novice
collector who knows just enough to be a danger to himself and his bank
account. Unfazed by my naïve pretensions, Simon urged me to take a "portfolio approach" to collecting contemporary art.
"Don't put
all your eggs in one basket," he advised. "If your total budget is
$5,000, divide it up and buy six pieces for around $800. It makes
financial sense to diversify your portfolio from an asset value
perspective. Also, it's more fun."
Although my budget was so
small as to be virtually indivisible, Simon had arranged visits to five
galleries and two artists' studios. I figured that gave me at least an
outside chance to pick up a bargain in what he'd called the zoo, the
West Chelsea district, bordered by 30th and 20th Streets and 10th
Avenue and the Hudson River. With more than 300 galleries and countless
studio spaces, it is one of the world's most fertile cultural
preserves.
Simon and I were hunting for rather elusive quarry: emerging artists
with potential star quality. As Simon defined the term, an emerging
artist is just about any heretofore mostly unrecognized and/or widely
undervalued painter, sculptor or photographer between the ages of 19
and 95 whose work sells for prices in the three- to four-digit range.
"When their work sells for over $10,000, they're not emerging artists anymore," Simon said. "They've made it to the big time."
If
the entry fees for collecting contemporary art are relatively low, the
financial returns can be of hedge fund proportions. Last year, sales of
works by Picasso and Andy Warhol totaled over half a billion dollars, according to artnewsblog.com.
Living artists are commanding astronomical prices as well. In August, "For the Love of God," a diamond-encrusted skull by the 42-year-old Damien Hirst, who was regarded as an emerging artist barely two decades ago, sold for $100 million.
"The
obvious question is, Who's going to be the next artist to make the leap
to warp speed?" Simon noted. "But there's no way of predicting that.
Art collecting is not about posing. It's not about amassing wealth. The
base line is genuine interest in the artist's work. One hundred years
from now, people will look back and wonder what it was like to live in
the moment in 2007, to feel the anxiety about the stock market and the
political shifts in the world. Artists are the ones who are capturing
that."
Simon spoke from nearly 40 years of art collecting
experience. Raised in Rochester by parents who collected Asian art, he
started buying art at age 14 with money from his paper route, and he
went on to study art history at Williams College. From 1979 to 1991, he
operated a gallery devoted to emerging visual artists, including some
who are now well known, like Sherrie Levine and Richard Prince. In
2002, he was a co-founder of Scenic, an independent curatorial and
corporate art consulting agency that has produced 20 shows for emerging
artists in New York, Chicago and Los Angeles.
At the first stop
on our safari, the D'Amelio-Terras Gallery on West 22nd Street, I
suffered serious sticker shock. One of the featured emerging artists
was Noah Sheldon, whose "Pink and Tan" installation of environmental
photographs and sculpture under pink fluorescent light was going to be
displayed at the Art Basel Miami Beach
show the following week. Mr. Sheldon's photos were priced at $2,500
each. The price for a set of chimes made of metal fence post caps was
$12,000.
I got my first taste of "participatory" art at the
Daniel Reich Gallery on West 23rd Street. A Brazilian-born artist,
Jarbas Lopes, showed us a series of ballpoint pen drawings that
included a clown face, a mouse and a pool table, priced at $2,000. But
the piece that caught my fancy was "Short Environment," which was
basically a body-size condom made of yellow vegetable fiber. At Mr.
Lopes's behest, I took off my shirt and slipped into the condom. I
discovered to my delight that I could see out, but the other people in
the room could not see in. According to Mr. Reich, the condom was meant
to give the wearer "a break from the cellphone world we live in today."
"I'll take it," I announced. "How much?"
"We haven't set a price on it yet," Mr. Reich replied. "I'll have to get back to you."
My breath still bated, Simon escorted me to the Derek Eller Gallery
on West 27th Street. It featured André Ethier's paintings of Star
Wars-like creatures for $3,000 to $5,000. The nearby Clementine Gallery
offered DVDs of decomposing and recomposing words made of alphabet soup
by the dyslexic artist Hugh Walton for $5,000. Evan Gruzis, a
28-year-old Hunter College
graduate student, showed us some provocative ink drawings in his
Midtown studio for $900. But my favorites, "Cosmic Wayfarer" and "Shadow Man," had already been snapped up by a prominent collector.
By
the time we entered the Cheim & Read gallery on West 25th Street, I
was beginning to think that collecting contemporary art was simply
beyond my means. An 8-foot-tall sculpture composed of tan and rust
wedge-shaped pillows by the 95-year-old artist Louise Bourgeois
was priced at $1 million. A large-scale painting entitled "Breaking and
Entering" by Louise Fishman, 68, a second-generation abstract
expressionist, was listed at $100,000.
"Louise Fishman is an
undervalued artist," Simon insisted. "Historically, women artists have
been so overlooked by collectors. But many of them are now making a
late-career jump. Louise Fishman could be the next Louise Bourgeois."
Simon
proceeded to steer our safari to Louise Fishman's studio on West 26th
Street. The artist greeted us in a paint-splattered sweatshirt and
jeans and red horn-rimmed glasses. She displayed several of her "little-little paintings," which were 8 inches by 10 inches and priced
at $9,000. Then I spied two multicolored rectangular scraps of paper on
her worktable. They turned out to be "leftovers" from her contribution
to the annual AIDS benefit "Postcards From the Edge." The postcard I
liked most featured a bright red curlicue. Louise said she'd sell it to
me for $800, and I immediately wrote her a check.
A few minutes
later, Simon and I left Louise's studio en route to a late lunch at
Bottino restaurant. The sticker shock I'd suffered all day paled in
comparison to the sinking sensation I felt in my stomach. "I just paid
$800 for a postcard," I moaned. "What was I thinking?"
Louise
must have been reading my mind. Shortly after Simon and I ordered a
round of adult beverages, she arrived at Bottino with the second
postcard I had seen on her worktable, a predominantly blue and yellow
abstraction with an enticing three dimensionality. She insisted on
giving it to me, declaring, "Your postcard should have its mate."
My buyer's remorse all but evaporated. Louise had just doubled the size
of my holdings, and halved my average acquisition cost to $400 a
postcard, which suddenly seemed like a bargain.
"Congratulations!"
Simon exclaimed as the three of us raised our glasses in a toast. "Now
you're a real contemporary art collector!"