AS the sun sets for another day in London, a new generation of art buyers eagerly looks forward to the evening’s hunt. Chantal Smith is barely in her 30s yet she has invested an enormous amount of time and money to amass what she calls a “modest” art collection. The rounds begin. She’s off to the first gallery in her must-see list, a compendium of art London’s up and comers.
Hours later, she arrives back home and announces that she’s managed to make a “dazzling connection.” Scattered on the floor of her spacious loft are what she calls evidence of a storied past, a few early drawings of a particularly overpriced artist, and stacks of canvasses by newer discoveries leaning against the walls. What exactly was a “connection”?
Chantal says she bumped into one of those uber-rich billionaires, traded cards under the glare of gallery lighting, and that was all. Perhaps this could lead to a job upgrade? But she says she’d rather be his art-buying assistant. In today’s highly specialized economies, such divisions of labor exist. Karl Lagerfeld was reported by Vogue as having for a time maintained a full-time curator to oversee a vast collection of 18th-century artefacts, including a manor here and there.
Yet, there is no doubt that today’s uber-rich art collector may claim the same amount of good taste as tastemakers and trend-setters in their own right. Recently it was revealed by Pagesix.com that billionaire Steve Cohen was the mystery buyer behind Christie’s record-breaking sale of the most expensive sculpture to hit the secondary market, namely Alberto Giacommetti’s L’Homme au doigt (1947) which went under the gavel for $141.3 million.
Yet that record was not the coup de grace of that storied night. Christie’s Looking Forward to the Past sale was dominated by the $179.3-million record set for Pablo Picasso’s Les Femmes d’Algers (Version “O”), which hushed whispers say was bought by former Qatari Prime Minister Hamad bin Jassim bin Jaber Al Thani.
Of course all this celebration of high prices pales in comparison with the private sale to the Qatari royal family of a fork of Paul Cezanne’s Card Players for not less than $250 million. The royal Al Thani family does not comment on the purchase. But there seems to be a insatiable taste for fine art in some regions once considered peripheral to the art markets of London and New York.
The evidence becomes undisputed when one considers the development of Qatar Museums under the helm of Sheikha Mayassa Al Thani, described by Forbes as the “undisputed queen of the art world.” Under her chairmanship, this new cultural superpower now enjoys a budget of $1 billion a year for the procurement and management of fine art.
The world’s top art buyers also include other names, but it’s such a short and compact list. Perhaps the most famous of all would be Charles Saatchi, cofounder of advertising multinational firm Saatchi & Saatchi, and an art lover who pursued a longtime dream of establishing a repository that would be open to the public, namely the influential Saatchi Gallery in London. This project went on to give birth to the Young British Artists (YBAs), a movement inaugurated by the quite shocking Sensation exhibition at the gallery.
Sensation’s reviews were not so good. But it scattered blood all over the landscape and made headlines everywhere. Today the YBAs are darlings of the global market, with names like Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin, Chris Ofili and others who are credited for shaking up once-stodgy definitions of art.
Clearly the evidence shows it that it may take an iconoclast like a Medici to produce a Michelangelo. The jump in time of metaphor may be a bit jarring but the context is logical. The 16th-century accounts that detailed how Lorenzo de Medici spurred his fellow Florentines to humanist perfection not only entailed the spending of money but the creation of an esprit de corps and a set of values to follow up.
Perhaps a similar robustness of spirit can be seen in the contemporary works of Andy Hall, Glenn Fuhrman, Leon Black, Francois Pinault, Rosa de la Cruz, Patricia Phelps de Cisneros, the Rubells, Samuel Irving Newhouse Jr., Norman L. Braman, Nasser David Khalili and David Geffen who among them are said to own art amounting to at least $500 million. This follows an ancient tradition whose origins go back to antiquity. Art has always been a means of giving back to society as Medici had shown.
In the 1510s, The Garden was established within the Medici courtyard as a “replacement” of the Platonic Academy, also a garden of knowledge but situated in Athens of long ago. The Medici Garden was an educational and apprenticeship construct centered on the development of art that had lagged after the fall of Rome. For centuries, many had looked up to dreams of reviving the empire not only as the source of security and power but of culture. Of course the history of collecting art will remain a mystery. Early evidence of art buying in ancient Sumer and Mesopotamia point to a predilection for fantastical monsters and alien-looking humanoids. Judging from the decline of quality in most of today’s art, it seems the past is even better.