That’s a great collection. You’ve got a lot of heart, kid

You’re going to buy a car. Some advice. Ignore other people’s opinions about the best models, forget resale value in your decision-making process, and don’t get bogged down with research. Go on! Buy the mauve open-top, you know you want to. This is pretty much the advice dealt out to prospective art collectors in the latest issue of NZ Listener (you can read it here) in the unsurprisingly titled The fine art of buying art. Of course and that's fine art as in paintings - sit down sculpture you're making a spectacle of yourself. We’ve reviewed these how-to-make-a-great-art-collection articles before but this one deserves some attention. It’s had time put into it, a range of people in Auckland (and one in Dunedin) have been consulted and it’s in a magazine with a heritage of cultural clout.

The consensus of the advice the art cognoscenti in the article offer is that if you’re going to buy art the best thing to follow is not your own research, not the market, not public collections but your passions. Of the wide range of experts quoted, only two suggest you might want to read up a bit on art before jumping in.

The two key dangers for potential collectors, according to the Listener anyway, are having something on your walls that ‘may cause guests to question your taste’ or (perhaps worse) cause you ‘to lose a lot of money’.

Eleanor Ainge Roy does conclude her article with the usual advice (these lists are also freely available on the internet) although it’s somewhat at odds with the views of the bunch of professionals she interviewed.

Colin McCahon or Douglas Badcock? What the hell, follow your heart.

Other OTN posts on advice to collectors 
Business Day
Poor collector’s guide
Keeper
Reframing

Fair enough

The Auckland Art Fair has announced the dealer galleries that will be participating in the 2016 fair opening on 25 May. The dealers have also named the artists they'll show. As you'd expect, it’s mainly an Auckland affair with nearly seventy percent of the galleries based there. Fifteen galleries are coming in from overseas of which 10 are from Australia and three from the South Island.

The male female ratio varies greatly between dealers with overall 63 percent being male. Just three galleries are exhibiting only women artists and they are all one person presentations. Eight galleries have only male artists on show.

This year you can also take advantage of My Art to grow your collection. The offer is that with a $2,500 deposit you can get a loan to buy up to $25,000 worth of art. Of course you have to pay it back at $2,500 per month over nine months. Nothing's perfect, but the payments are interest free. You can see the full list of galleries and artists here.

Erling rules

Once a year or so the local papers send out a junior reporter to ask art dealers and the odd collector for tips on how to collect art. As a rule the dealers all give their own artists as the best bet for starting a collecting binge and the collectors mutter on about having to love what you buy and never buy to make money. The other day though we came across some advice from Norwegian art collector Erling Kagge. Strangely enough he is best known (famous really) as an adventurer and explorer. His advice, which he offers in A poor collector’s guide to great art goes like this:

• There are no rules, only deals

• Love the piece not the price

• Collect strange work rather than fashionable work

• Realise that sometimes the best purchases won’t make commercial sense

• Be obsessed
 
.... so there you go.

Reframing

The art auction season is gearing up to start again and Webb’s has just released its latest broadsheet to attract lots and tout the benefits of the art market. To read it you wouldn’t think it was possible to lose a dime investing in art. This of course goes against the long-held wisdom of the art world that believes (well says anyway) you should only buy art for love and not for profit. 'We'd never dream of selling” is a commonly heard statement from art collectors (until they do). Even great collections usually find themselves on the market in the end.  Take the stellar selection of work put together by the Gibbs. It's been well published, much shown and seemed set in history, until it wasn't. In that case of course the sales have been paralleled by very generous gifting to public institutions.

Can you make money out of art? Sure you can. Should you? Why the hell not?
Here are a couple of random examples from auction records:

Colin McCahon, Let be, Let be was held in private hands for 14 years and sold for a profit of $38,000 per year for each of those years.
 
Bill Hammond, Zoomorphic lounge was held for 12 years and sold for a profit of  $10,000 per year.
 
Tony Fomison Hilltop watcher  was held for 10 years and sold for a profit of  $7,500 per year.

Michael Smither’s Family in a van was held for 26 years returning about $7,500 per year.

And these are two-times-to-the-block resales. As the Les and Milly Paris auction showed, there is also a heap to be made on first-to-auction sales probably around $10,600 a year for the 37 years they owned Gordon Walter’s painting Mokoia.

So you want to make money collecting art? OK. Buy figurative paintings. Always buy the most typical and attractive-looking works of the top-ranked artists.  And remember, there are only ever a very small number of artists who sell for high prices. Forget sculpture and ignore anything unusual. Now fly my pretties.

Less is more

"That would be vulgar"

Art dealer Leo Castelli to art collector Robert Scull on being asked to sell him all the works in Jasper Johns' second exhibition (Scull purchased two but would eventually own 22 major works by Jasper Johns)

Good to know

“Art prices are not pulled out of thin air”
ArtBusiness

Advice to collectors

"You can either buy clothes or buy pictures. It’s that simple. No one who is not very rich can do both. Pay no attention to your clothes and no attention at all to the mode, and buy your clothes for comfort and durability, and you will have the clothes money to buy pictures."
Gertrude Stein

Feed me

For some reason Webb’s didn’t go with a live internet feed for its last contemporary art auction and that was a shame.  Online purchasing is getting momentum internationally and an online stream feels like a smart way to spread a brand beyond Auckland. Fortunately Art + Object are still committed to streaming so wherever you are in the world tonight at 6.30pm you can watch or join in by going here.

The A+O auction is a rare chance to pick up a terrific work by Giovanni Intra. It’s one of a set shown in Wellington at Cubewell House in March 1993 when the Teststrip headed south to show their stuff.

A+O will have fingers crossed that there won’t be any drama to upset the rhythm of their sale like the kerfuffle that punctuated Webb’s last auction. Webb’s got the word that one of the Sunday papers was going to 'out' the Colin McCahon Elias painting that was a start turn of their offering as over-cooked conservation wise. It has been owned by Canterbury painter Doris Lusk and then by members of her family so it had an impeccable provenance. When we saw it at Webb’s exhibition in Wellington we (and everyone else we talked to) thought it looked just great. But what the hell would we all know? To the surprise of everyone in the auction rooms, it was removed from sale.
 
Images: top Giovanni Intra with his work from the Teststrip exhibition and bottom, the full suite of works including the one for sale at A+O second from the left

Desk bound

The second in our ongoing series of art collectors and furniture. This time it's Los Angeles collector Mary (Moo) Anderson perched on a desk alongside her husband Harry, known as 'Hulk'.

Advice for collectors

Don't lie on the table

Image: art collectors Michael and Seren Shvo

Dead reckoning

What is it about rich people and death? Put the average rich person together with a skull or a juicy nature morte or something dead and stuffed and you’re talking happy-rich-person #wildgeneralisation. Start with the never-blink gambler David Walsh in Tasmania. His MONA (Museum of Old and New Art) is dedicated to death as well as to sex as we have written about before. The place is full of the requisite skulls, skins, bones, carcasses, even a time of death wager. Plus there's always the offer of a final resting place for your ashes if you want to stump up for a handcrafted reliquary. And we have discovered what you can find in Tasmania you can see reflected in Berlin, or maybe it's the other way around. The modestly titled me Collectors Room (the me stands for moving energies which will surely come as a surprise to all the cynics out there) is in fact a substantial new building in the centre of Berlin. Its purpose is to display the works owned by another very rich collector, Thomas Olbricht, as well as his international collecting colleagues. With all this money sloshing around you've got an ideal seedbed for lots of death stuff especially in Olbricht's own Wunderkammer. Crucifixes and taxidermy and skeletons are front and centre. So here's an idea. ME and MONA. They’re rich, they're men, they're both deep into death, they should get together. It’s a partnership to die for.

Images: top, death wish at me. Middle and bottom MONA keyring and mummy merchandise

The one that got away

Every collector you meet has a one-that-got-away story. The best one we've heard was from a couple of LA collectors we met via Giovanni Intra. They had a major collection of  Jean-Michel Basquiat’s work but the work that haunted them was one by Jeff Koons.

The story goes that in the 1980s they had walked into a Jeff Koons exhibition in New York and been transfixed by a stainless steel rabbit. “We both were ready to buy it but for that particular exhibition Koons had more than doubled his prices so we thought we should give it a bit of thought. We were almost back to our hotel when we looked at one another and said, 'This is crazy, we have to buy it’. On the way back to the gallery we met the director of one of the big art museums. ‘Where are you off to?’ he asked us. ‘To the Koons' show,’ we told him. ‘Don’t waste your time. It’s just rubbish. Expensive rubbish,’ he said. And we lost our nerve, turned around and went home.”

You can read some more hunt and miss stories here.

Shock choc

It’s probably only once or twice in a lifetime that anyone thinks “God if only we had a life-sized chocolate torso to put on the table”. But these things do happen. Now, thanks to the OTN Global Research Team (OTNGRT), we can tell you that an order into Jean Paul Hevin in Roppongi’s Mid City Centre will solve the gotta-have-a-choc-o-torso problem just like that.

Other chocolate art stories that have featured on OTN:
Choc-o-Jesus
Choc-o-not to night dear I’ve got a headache
Choc-o-Pitt
Choc-o-statue
Choc-o-de Milo
Choc-o-eggs
Choc-o-Dali
Choc-o-lookalike
Choc-o-coffin

Follow the money

When Andy Warhol said, “Making money is art and working is art and good business is the best art,” he might have been thinking of Webb’s recent broadsheet publication outlining where the contemporary art money flows through auction.

The big bucks all go to paintings of course and mostly painted by guys. And so (via the Australian Sales Digest) Webb’s tells us that the 50 most valuable works by Bill Hammond sold at auction raked in $3.7 million at an average of $74,000 each. Remember though that just three of the top 50 went for a combined total of $858,000 including Hammond’s top dollar sale of $293,000.

In the last 20 years Webb’s alone have sold 194 works by Colin McCahon bringing in $12 million. But Ralph Hotere, we hear you ask, what about Hotere? Well, his top 50 sales at auction have attracted $5.9 million with Webb’s best effort bringing in $315,000. The other heavy auction hitter of course is Shane Cotton with $2 million coming in from the top 50 sales and a highest price of $257,000.

Saturday stock report

Everybody wanted to know what was really in the 90 cans of artist’s shit (Merda d’artista) that Piero Manzoni soldered shut back in 1961 but it took artist Bernard Bazille to find out for sure. Or attempt to anyway. In the same spirit that spurred Robert Rauschenberg to erase a Willem de Kooning drawing in 1953, Bazille ripped off the top of one of the Manzoni cans (number 005 as it happens) to look inside. What he found appears to be another tin swathed in cotton wool. At that point Bazille lost his nerve so we still have to take Manzoni’s word for the can contents. 

As an update on our previous shit post about Manzoni, who priced his work at the same value per gram as the cost of gold at the time, the current cost of gold is $NZ1,604 and the most recent sale price for Manzoni’s Merda d’artista (May this year) is $NZ180,000. Sell gold, buy Manzoni
Image: Manzoni’s Merda d’artista apres Bernard Bazille

Department of LOL

“There is a difference between the ‘dealer’ and the ‘gallerist.’ A dealer matches an autonomous work of art with an individual or institution. A gallerist is in the business of discovering, developing, and introducing art that would not be known otherwise.”
Elizabeth Dee in a Art Basel panel discussion

Keeper

"If you love it, buy it. If you choose well, one day you'll be able to sell it for a profit, and if you choose very well you probably won't want to."
Advice on collecting art from Abigail Esman, art journalist and collector on CNN

Advice to collectors

Suck it up.

One of many cards filled in by visitors in response to the exhibition of a selection of 250 works donated by Viki and Kent Logan to SFMoMA. The loan includes works by Warhol, Hirst, Nauman, Richter and Basquiat.

Sitting ducks

Anyone who is a regular at art openings will have been to at least one after show dinner. At worst you’re trudging the streets in a pack of twenty looking for a restaurant (“no, we won’t have to book, there’s plenty of places") or the place has been pre-booked ("there’s 30 of us now and we're two hours late, can you manage?”). Even if you get inside the doors though, you'll still be left with the biggest question of all: where do I sit? Or, even more importantly, who will I end up sitting next to?

Fortunately help is at hand thanks to some brain time by Alex Cornell. He points out that “as the diameter of the table increases so does the importance of who you sit next to.” Safest are four person round or square tables where at least one of the three should be good company and is easily available from every sitting position.

A room with two tables of any size? As Mr Cornell says, “You’re fucked.“ He explains. “Whenever you make your choice of where to sit you will always choose too soon. You can only lament as the other table’s attendance crystallizes into what is clearly the superior group. Sometimes it’s best to visit the bathroom while seats are chosen, so any seating disasters are the result of chance, and not your own miscalculation.” You can read Cornell’s comments on other table arrangements and important concepts like diagonals, quiet spaces and lonely end-seats here.

And if you want a reminder of just how bad these dinners can be, try watching the ultimate glad-I-wasn’t-there after opening party in this clip from Julian Schnabel’s movie Basquiat.

Image: 'Andy' and Co. at the diner from hell in Basquiat

Open door policy

‘If that’s coming in, you’re going out.’

Mega UK collector Frank Cohen’s wife Cherryl in response to a new art acquisition as reported by the Financial Times.