Collecting contemporary (2006)
Book by Adam Lindemann. Book review by John A. Walker.
artdesigncafé | Creative Business & Entrepreneurship | Published 7 October 2010
This review was written in 2006.
This book is a response to the current boom in the art market. It consists of 40 interviews with leading art collectors, auction house experts, dealers, museum professionals, curators and consultants who are questioned about their beliefs, tastes, histories and practices. [A very similar British book is Owning Art: the Contemporary Art Collector’s Handbook by Louisa Buck and Judith Greer (Cultureshock Media, 2006).] Most interviewees are American or European. Collectors include Eli Broad, François Pinault and Charles Saatchi. (The latter interview is not new—it is reprinted from The Art Newspaper.) Dealers include Sadie Coles, Jeffrey Deitch, Larry Gagosian and Barbara Gladstone. Museum professionals include Glenn Lowry and Julia Peyton-Jones. Art consultants include Diego Cortez and Sanford Heller.
No artists were interviewed and only one critic (David Riminelli). The exclusion of artists—the primary producers or worker bees of the system—seems paradoxical. They are essential and yet they are considered irrelevant. I feel sure a British artist such as Jake Chapman would have provided some trenchant comments on the art market. The almost total exclusion of critics is an indication of their marginal role in the contemporary art market because dealers and collectors are now so much more powerful. “Contemporary” in the title refers to art by living young and “emerging” artists and by dead artists such as Andy Warhol and Joseph Beuys who followed the great moderns Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse.
Lindemann, the compiler, is a wealthy, well-educated, New York businessman and art collector. He decided to produce the book as a guide to help others become collectors. He had a head start in life due to the fact that his parents were rich and also keen art collectors. Furthermore, he is currently married to an art dealer—Amalia Dayan of the Bortolami-Dayan Gallery in New York. No doubt his insider status within the art world enabled him to gain access to the famous names in the book. After the interviews, additional useful information is supplied in the form of a conversation with a director of a major art fair, a glossary of art terms, a list of art magazines and websites, and a calendar of art events.
There is a good deal of repetition in the observations of dealers and collectors, and although the latter nearly all claim to be following their personal tastes it is remarkable how herd-like they are because the top collectors tend to buy the same big-name artists: Andy Warhol, Jeff Koons, Damien Hirst, Cindy Sherman, Richard Prince, Tracey Emin, etc. However, those who know little about the machinations of the art market will find the book illuminating. To some degree it does demystify the art market and here and there are some interesting complaints by dealers about auction houses and about collectors who do not play the art game fairly; for example, those who are simply after profits on the sale of art works they claim to have bought but have not even paid for or bothered to pick up. Rules of the game include courting dealers for months or years to join a waiting list for a work by a fashionable artist; agreeing to offer the work back to the dealer first before selling it; agreeing to loan and donate works to public exhibitions and museums.
Collecting Contemporary book: 1 | 2
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