Seven Days in the Art World

by Sarah Thornton

  “We are supposed to be second in the queue. We have known this dealer for a long time,” she says woefully. “All I know about the collector ahead of us is that he has his own museum. We are going to have to set up a public foundation in order to compete for the best works.” More and more collectors are opening their own exhibition spaces. Their official reasons are philanthropic, but their covert motives have more to do with marketing. The work of living artists needs to be promoted if it is to generate consensus. Moreover, collectors of contemporary art have to be proactive about developing the aura of their collection. In our cluttered multimedia culture, a significant collection does not just arise; it is made.

  Why do you collect? I continue.

  “I’m an atheist, but I believe in art. I go to galleries like my mother went to church. It helps me understand the way I live.” She pauses; then, as if too tired to restrain herself, she adds in a low voice, “We’re so passionate about art that it has become a bigger part of our financial portfolio than we intended. Art collecting is an addiction. Some people might think I am a shopaholic who has graduated up from Gucci to Pucci to art, but we really don’t look at it that way.”

  When Ricci lines up for free ice cream and espresso (collectors can’t be expected to carry small change for such trifles), I resume my participant observation. No one is paying a blind bit of notice to the gargantuan diamond necklaces under glass in the makeshift Bulgari store. The bling will not distract the hardcore art crowd from their purpose today. The time-share jet service NetJets has its own VIP room within this VIP room. “It is an oasis; there is no art on the walls,” says the company’s receptionist with a beatific smile. The organizers of London’s relatively new, extremely successful Frieze Art Fair stand at the edge of the room. Like me, they seem to be analyzing the scene.

  3:30 P.M. I head back to the stands. The clamor of the hall has died down. People roam, less stressed. In the distance, down the long stretch of industrial carpet, I catch sight of the wild white hair and beard of John Baldessari. He towers above the collectors, in much the same way that biblical characters are depicted in altarpieces as twice the size of their patrons. I imagine that they are asking the great artist about the meaning of art and life. Later he tells me that he was entangled in a stream of small talk.

  Five galleries, each covering a different geographical territory, are representing Baldessari’s photo-based dadaist work here. Nevertheless, it is often said that “an art fair is no place for an artist.” One of Baldessari’s oft-repeated jokes is that an artist entering an art fair is like a teenager barging into his parents’ bedroom while they’re having sex. “At fairs, gallerists are reduced to merchants,” explains Baldessari, “a role in which they’d rather not be seen by their artists. The alarmed expressions on the parents’ faces say, ‘What are you doing here!’”

  Artists tend to view art fairs with a mixture of horror, alienation, and amusement. They feel uneasy when all the hard work of the studio is reduced to supplying the voracious demand, and they wince at the sight of so much art accompanied by so little substantive conversation. When I ask Baldessari whether he has been at the fair since it opened this morning, he replies, “Are you kidding? I wouldn’t set foot in the fair anytime before lunch. I’d be trampled. I’d be an innocent to the slaughter.”

  Last night Baldessari had a fair-related nightmare and subsequently very little sleep. In his dream, he was flattened. He became a portrait of himself, cut up and pasted together. “I vaguely remember being physically examined by a lot of doctors. I was under visual and physical scrutiny,” he says in his gravelly voice. “Nothing was said, but they were all staring at me.”

  For many years Baldessari stayed free of the burden of socializing with collectors. “I came out of a generation where there was no connection between art and money, then all of a sudden, in the 1980s, money came into the picture,” he says. “Before that, collectors were very scarce, so when they turned up, I just reacted. I didn’t want to have that connection. It was like being seen with a hooker. I wanted to stay pure. I thought, ‘You buy my art, not me. I don’t want to be at your dinners.’” He takes a deep breath and looks around the fair. “Then slowly I realized, hmmm, that collector, he knows a lot about art, he’s not so bad. One at a time, gradually, it dawned on me that you can’t condemn by type.” Still, Baldessari sees the art market as unwholesome and irrational. When it comes to the relationship of artistic and monetary value, “You can’t use money as an index of quality. That is a fallacy. That will drive you crazy!”

  This is one of the reasons Baldessari has taught in art schools for all these years. For him, teaching has been a way of maintaining independence from the market (so “I could change my art whenever I wanted”) and a way of getting to know the future through the rising generation (“whether you like it or not, you might as well get to know it early,” he says). Baldessari is adamant about preserving his artistic autonomy; if you do your own thing, you might be a step ahead of the market. As he tells his students when they’re going through hard times, “You have to make the new work to sell the old work.”

  As Baldessari drifts away, I bump into an American curator. He is acting as a sounding board for his museum’s trustees and keeping track of which patrons are buying what, for the works bought here today could eventually be loaned or given to the museum. He’s also trying to look at the art so that, at the museum’s reception tonight, he’ll be able to respond to the recurring question “So what have you seen? What should I look at?” Normally dealers are happy to give curators special attention, but today their focus is on collectors. As the curator explains, “Out of a sense of courtesy, I try to hang back on the first day, unless I am negotiating a discount for one of our trustees. It’s a six-day fair—I’ll have my conversations with dealers tomorrow or the day after.”

  It’s almost five o’clock. By now I’m over-refrigerated by the well-conditioned air. I’m thirsty, and my handbag feels heavy. I’m attracted to a large-scale self-portrait by Sophie Calle. In the black-and-white photo, she’s standing on top of the Eiffel Tower in her nightgown with a pillow propped up behind her head. Called Room with a View, the work refers to a night she spent atop the Parisian landmark during which twenty-eight different people read her bedtime stories. At this moment, I’m desperate to walk into its fictive space. Is it an amazing image, or am I fascinated because it acts as a balm to the fair’s confusion of visual stimuli and social interaction? I’m not sure; I have fair fatigue.

  I ricochet aimlessly around the stands until I find myself at the booth of Blum & Poe. The two men have scrubbed up well for the big day. Blum is wearing an assortment of rarefied made-to-measure clothes by Italian designers, no tie. Poe is wearing a pinstripe Hugo Boss suit and brown suede shoes, no tie. While Blum chats with the Hollywood agent and collector Michael Ovitz, Poe ambles over and tells me that they’ve sold everything.

  Who bought the Takashi Murakami painting? I ask.

  “I can’t say,” he replies firmly.

  Then tell me how much, I cajole.

  “One point two million, but officially one point four,” he says, wringing his hands in mock glee. Here the discrepancy between the real price and the PR price is a respectful embellishment compared to the shameless whoppers told by other dealers. For example, Charles Saatchi has manipulated perceptions and gleaned headlines for work by artists he owns by inflating prices by the millions. When he sold Damien Hirst’s The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living (otherwise known as “the shark”), a “spokesman for Mr. Saatchi” said he’d received an offer of $12 million, when in fact the deal was only for $8 million. I see Saatchi out of the corner of my eye, walking with his hands behind his back, a short-sleeved linen shirt draped over his well-fed paunch, while his wife, Nigella Lawson, a celebrity chef and “domestic goddess,” smiles professionally at a painting that looks as if it were made with rather too many ingredients.

  “I need a beer,” proclai
ms Poe. Just then we hear the tinkle of glasses. A waitress dressed in black with a white pinafore pushes a champagne cart around the corner. “That’ll do.” He beams, grabbing a bottle of Moët and four glasses. We take a seat at the desk at the front of the stand.

  When I ask Poe what makes a good dealer, he leans back and thinks for a moment. “You have to have an eye—a savantish ability to recognize work that is symptomatic of an artist with real intelligence, originality, and drive.” While artists tend to be critical of the notion, dealers and collectors usually revere a “good eye.”* The resolutely singular expression evokes a connoisseur with a monocle or a Cyclops with infallible instincts. While its opposite, a “good ear,” is disparaged for being dependent on the opinions of others, an eye enjoys the thrill of recognizing something ineffable, picking the best artists and, from within those artists’ oeuvres, the best work. “Then you’ve got to stick with your artists,” continues Poe. “Look to the horizon, point at the genius, and get everyone behind you to nod in agreement.” He stares into his champagne as if he could read bubbles like tea leaves, then looks up. “You also have to have a good business sense. If two plus two makes three, you’re fucked.” With regard to actually selling the works, Poe adds, “You have to do the chat. Create narratives and riff. The market is demented—unregulated but with loads of pretensions about how we are supposed to behave.”

  Poe believes that an art fair can be a tough environment for an artist. “If they are any good, they make art because they have to,” he says. “They don’t do it to please the market. So for some artists, hanging out here can mess with their heads. Also, let’s face it, this is not the optimum place to exhibit work. The subtle notes in artworks are drowned out by the cacophony.” Poe chuckles. Impressed with his own music metaphor, he gives it another spin. “It’s like a free jazz concert in here, with a drunken monkey working the mixing board.”

  A German collector interrupts with a pressing question about an abstract painting by Mark Grotjahn. While Poe is taking care of business, I savor the problem. Dealers are middlemen. While they like to supervise direct contact between artists and collectors, they have greater anxieties about chance encounters between their most lucrative artists and rival dealers who might be looking to poach them. In this regard, fairs are dangerous. Plus there’s still an ideological antithesis between art and commerce, even if the two are inextricably intertwined and even when artists make the market an overt or ironic part of their practice. In a world that has jettisoned craftsmanship as the dominant criterion by which to judge art, a higher premium is put on the character of the artist. If artists are seen to be creating art simply to cater to the market, it compromises their integrity and the market loses confidence in their work.

  The stand has been filling slowly, and suddenly it’s packed. Blum looks at Poe in exasperation, as if to say, “Get off your butt and give me a hand here.” I’m about to leave when I see David Teiger, the collector who came to smell the aroma of the Christie’s evening sale. Teiger tells me that he has finished his buying for the day, his consultant has gone off with another client, and his girlfriend, whom I know to be blond and half his age, won’t arrive until tomorrow. He’s in need of a companion. He admits that it was he who owned Murakami’s original 727 painting and gave it to MoMA. Then we head downstairs to look around the blue-chip galleries with their more expensive art.

  Teiger has been collecting on and off since 1956 and has developed a wise eye. “There are learners and there are the learned,” he explains. “The former like contemporary art, living artists, the art of their time. The latter like the art of the past.” As he approaches eighty, he wants more than ever to keep his mind alive, and emergent art fulfills that desire. Teiger has a certain genteel humility. “I’m just an ordinary rich person,” he says. “These young billionaires with their private jets—they’re in a different league. My ‘new money’ is now ‘old money,’ which nowadays means ‘less money.’” He laughs. Teiger describes his collection as “life-affirming,” then displays extreme modesty when he says, “I don’t know if I have a collection. I have a load of stuff.”

  His self-effacing joke betrays a deep-seated anxiety shared by many collectors. More people than ever are buying contemporary art, and chances are that most of it is historically insignificant. It may be personally meaningful, intelligent, even edifying, but in the long term many of these collections will end up looking like the tattered silks of an age gone by or the archeological remains of an ancient garbage heap. They won’t be definitive or influential. They will not have changed the way we look at art.

  As Teiger and I enter each stand, dealers jump to their feet and come over to welcome him. At a time of day when many are exhausted and can barely raise the energy to answer other people’s questions, it is entertaining to see them so lively. Teiger always finds something complimentary to say. Even on a rather disappointing stand, he’ll commend the dealer on the well-made display cases. There appears to be a lot of genuine affection between him and these dealers, even though he hasn’t bought anything from them today. The dealers all thank him for visiting their stands. For me, the situation is less comfortable. Teiger plays the gentleman and introduces me by first and last name. The dealers are all exceedingly polite, but they obviously think I’m his latest moll. At one point a senior New York dealer whispers in Teiger’s ear. I can’t hear what they’re saying, but from the exchange of looks and the glance over at me, I can tell the dealer is asking something like “Is she the latest addition to your collection?”

  Teiger’s phone rings symphonically. The chief curator of a major American museum is calling. He has a long, affectionate chat with her. He informs her of his activities but doesn’t explicitly seek her approval. Of the mysterious major acquisition made today, he teases, “If you don’t like it, then”—Teiger mumbles a name—“will take it.” (The person mentioned is the chief curator of a more adventurous, rival institution with an excellent collection of postwar art.) After that call, Teiger has a long conversation with another curator from a prominent public space that has hit hard times. He obviously loves these relationships. He enjoys being a player in the power game of art, particularly at this level, where patronage can have an impact on public consciousness. As he puts away his phone, he admits with a fiendish grin, “My goal is to acquire works that great museums letch after.”

  I press Teiger to show me his newly acquired masterpiece. We walk down one aisle, around a corner, and then bang, it’s towering over us. A steel sculpture, twelve and a half feet high, with a gold mirror finish. Jeff Koons’s Elephant. It looks like a giant number 8 with a phallic crown. We can see ourselves reflected in its lustrous finish, and as we step back the whole fair appears to be a gold bubble. A girl of seven or eight notices her reflection in the sculpture, stops in her tracks, and sticks out her tongue. She frowns. She gnashes her teeth, flares her nostrils, moves her eyebrows up and down, then skips off to catch up with her parents.

  8:00 P.M. Less than an hour to go before the fair closes. Among the weary shoppers trudging in the direction of the front exit, a lone cowboy walks with a spring in his step. Sandy Heller greets me with a phone in one hand and a fair map in the other. The thirty-four-year-old art consultant is wearing a button-down shirt, with the sleeves rolled up and the tails hanging out. “It looks like we’re going to come away with about forty good pieces,” he says triumphantly. Heller manages the art collections of six Wall Street money managers, several of whom are billionaires. They’re all aged between forty and fifty. “They’re family men,” says Heller. “They all know and respect each other. Some are close friends.” Although Heller won’t go into detail because it would violate his stringent confidentiality agreements, it is well known that one of his clients is Steve Cohen, whose $500 million art collection includes Damien Hirst’s shark. According to Business Week, Cohen’s hedge-fund firm “routinely accounts for as much as 3 percent of the New York Stock Exchange’s daily trading” and its credo is to
“get the information before anyone else.”

  I ask Heller to tell me about his day.

  “My day started six weeks ago. You can’t imagine the work I put into Art Basel. I have four people in the office. We’re all working like mad going into the fair. We’re on the phone every day, getting information, sifting it, then passing it on to our clients,” he says. “So this morning, I have my checklist. I run around and say, ‘Okay, we’ll buy this, we’re passing on this, we’ll buy this, we’re passing on that.’ We don’t buy anything without looking at it in the flesh. What’s great about a work often doesn’t show up in a JPEG—plus I’m a condition freak.”

  We find a bench. Heller sits forward with his elbows resting on his knees as if he were a baseball player in the dugout. “By afternoon you can have more complicated conversations,” he continues. “Dealers whose programs I respect who don’t know me, I talk to them and say, ‘Look, I’m a human being and these are the clients I represent. We’re not flipping things. We are not speculators.’” Hedge-fund managers are relatively new arrivals to the art world, so some worry that they might be acquiring art as if it were stock in order to turn a profit. Others argue that they’re above it; hardworking billionaires have no need to make a few million on art. “What starts them collecting is a curiosity for a life fully lived,” says Heller. “And nowadays, in America, it’s what you do if you have money, just like it has been for decades for Europeans.”

  Heller’s phone rings. “Hold on a sec. Don’t move,” he instructs. “Hey,” he says warmly to his caller. “Takashi gave them a masterpiece to mark their return to Basel,” I overhear him say as he walks out of earshot. He paces the floor in the distance. He meanders back as he’s saying goodbye.

  “You bought the Murakami!” I declare.

  “No comment!” says Heller aggressively. His face clouds, then clears. “All I can say is that everyone’s blown away by that new 727 painting. You don’t usually see primary material that good at an art fair. Everybody’s talking about it. Price is a little heavy. Maybe it’s worth it.”