Lamentable 2006 Artworld Developments---Part II: The Hegemony of the Money-No-Object Collector

(Part I is here.)

You know some of the names: Ronald Lauder, Alice Walton, Steven Cohen---collectors who don't mind spending whatever it takes to buy a work that they covet, even if it means negotiating privately and paying a price well beyond what the market might bear if the object of their obsession were sold at auction.

It used to be that most megacollectors came by their fortunes through hard work in fields that had an underlying intrinsic value to society: They were industrialists, bankers, corporate executives. By virtue of their professions, they knew the value of a dollar, even though they were enormously wealthy. They were willing to stretch for objects they wanted, but they still, for the most part, used their business-honed understanding of value and negotiating skills to avoid wildly overpaying.

Now the ranks of megacollectors are increasingly swelled by the offspring and heirs of wealthy families, and the new breed of financial-industry alchemists, whose metier is to take investors' wealth and multiply it. Money in those hands has a different meaning than it did in the hands of old-style collectors: When deciding how much they are willing to pay for a trophy artwork they crave, they look at previous prices and then triple or quadruple them. Trampling previous records makes them feel powerful, not preposterous.

Take Lauder, as depicted in last week's New Yorker profile. Rebecca Mead reported that when an errant elbow caused the $139-million Picasso deal between Steve Wynn and Steven Cohen to fall through, "Lauder could barely conceal his satisfaction at having his record for immoderation unbroken....Lauder prides himself on buying only the best, and on doing so at any price"---witness the $135-million Klimt.

Lauder's "satisfaction" with his preeminent profligacy was shortlived, however: Cohen bought de Kooning's "Woman III" from David Geffen this fall for a price variously reported as $137.5 million (NY Times) and $142.5 million (Wall Street Journal). And Geffen is said to have recently sold his drip Pollock for about $140 million.

What has this heedless one-upsmanship meant to the artworld? Some laudable philanthropic benefactions, to be sure. But also a sea change in the nature of the art market, the museum world and possibly the nature of art itself. Blowing the lid off the top of the market has caused participants at all levels to flip their lids, as visions of profit plums dance in their heads.

More and more business is done in art-fair booths and auction salerooms, where quick looks and snap judgments have replaced careful study and solitary scrutiny. At a recent New York panel discussion on the art market, Amy Capellazzo, Christie's co-head of contemporary art, observed that she no longer has any "fuzzy moments" when standing before an artwork with a potential buyer:

I used to talk about what was special about an artist's work and what its merits were. Now I'm just fulfilling some larger banking function...It's about how to make the deal.

When the market rules, the old rules of collecting and connoisseurship are overturned: Quality judgments seem out-of-whack in a wacky world where Rembrandt's auction record of $28.69 million is eclipsed by Klimt's auction record of $87.9 million. Art investors formerly expected to hold onto works for five years or more to turn a profit; now big bucks are made on quick flips. Young artists, still wet behind the ears, sell still-wet canvases and become instant (if ephemeral) art stars.

Museums can't begin to compete at this stratospheric level, and new tax-law changes, restricting fractional gifts, are making even donations of major works harder to come by. What's more, collectors like Lauder and Walton, who once might have donated the bulk of their collections to existing museums, are now establishing museums of their own.

Artists, not insensitive to the allure of a big payout for a show that's a sellout, are tempted to create for the market, avoiding content (such as political comment) that might be more a sore point than a selling point. This has always been an issue, but it's more so now, because the stakes are so much higher and the sought-after artists are so much younger. If art is now being traded like securities, the output of younger artists is the speculative investment---low cost, high risk, big potential returns.

I don't demonize the money-no-object collectors. They are in the happy position of having more money than they know what to do with. It's unfair to accuse Alice Walton, as Michael Kimmelman recently did in the NY Times, of "raiding the New York Public Library in 2005 for a civic landmark, Asher B. Durand's 'Kindred Spirits.'"

She didn't "raid" the library; the work was put on the market and she bought it. The library, not Walton, was to blame, and more financially strapped institutions are likely to do the same. The emergence of money-no-object collectors means that public institutions are going to have a harder time sticking to their mission of preserving, not selling, the public's patrimony.

It's not the fault of money-no-object collectors that connoisseurship, museum ethics and artistic integrity are under assault. They are entitled to do what they want with their megamillions. But the effect of their extravagant outlays, intended or not, may be to compromise culture, not enrich it.