essay on art collectors

American oil executive, multi-millionaire art collector John Paul Getty attends a private viewing of the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition in London, April 1965. Photo by McKeown/Express/Getty

Why people collect art

Collectors drive the art world, but what drives art collectors it’s less about aesthetics than self-identification.

by Erin Thompson   + BIO

The oil billionaire J Paul Getty was famously miserly. He installed a payphone in his mansion in Surrey, England, to stop visitors from making long-distance calls. He refused to pay ransom for a kidnapped grandson for so long that the frustrated kidnappers sent Getty his grandson’s ear in the mail. Yet he spent millions of dollars on art, and millions more to build the Getty Museum in Los Angeles. He called himself ‘an apparently incurable art-collecting addict’, and noted that he had vowed to stop collecting several times, only to suffer ‘massive relapses’. Fearful of airplanes and too busy to take the time to sail to California from his adopted hometown of London, he never even visited the museum his money had filled.

Getty is only one of the many people through history who have gone to great lengths to collect art – searching, spending, and even stealing to satisfy their cravings. But what motivates these collectors?

Debates about why people collect art date back at least to the first century CE. The Roman rhetorician Quintilian claimed that those who professed to admire what he considered to be the primitive works of the painter Polygnotus were motivated by ‘an ostentatious desire to seem persons of superior taste’. Quintilian’s view still finds many supporters.

Another popular explanation for collecting – financial gain – cannot explain why collectors go to such lengths. Of course, many people buy art for financial reasons. You can resell works, sometimes reaping enormous profit. You can get large tax deductions for donating art to museums – so large that the federal government has seized thousands of looted antiquities that were smuggled into the United States just so that they could be donated with inflated valuations to knock money off the donors’ tax bills. Meanwhile, some collectors have figured out how to keep their artworks close at hand while still getting a tax deduction by donating them to private museums that they’ve set up on their own properties. More nefariously, some ‘collectors’ buy art as a form of money laundering, since it is far easier to move art than cash between countries without scrutiny.

But most collectors have little regard for profit. For them, art is important for other reasons. The best way to understand the underlying drive of art collecting is as a means to create and strengthen social bonds, and as a way for collectors to communicate information about themselves and the world within these new networks. Think about when you were a child, making friends with the new kid on the block by showing off your shoebox full of bird feathers or baseball cards. You were forming a new link in your social network and communicating some key pieces of information about yourself (I’m a fan of orioles/the Orioles). The art collector conducting dinner party guests through her private art gallery has the same goals – telling new friends about herself.

People tend to imagine collectors as highly competitive, but that can prove wrong too. Serious art collectors often talk about the importance not of competition but of the social networks and bonds with family, friends, scholars, visitors and fellow collectors created and strengthened by their collecting. The way in which collectors describe their first purchases often reveals the central role of the social element. Only very rarely do collectors attribute their collecting to a solo encounter with an artwork, or curiosity about the past, or the reading of a textual source. Instead, they almost uniformly give credit to a friend or family member for sparking their interest, usually through encountering and discussing a specific artwork together. A collector showing off her latest finds to her children is doing the same thing as a sports fan gathering the kids to watch the game: reinforcing family bonds through a shared interest.

Even the seeming exceptions prove the rule. Another wealthy oilman, Calouste Gulbenkian, accumulated a fabulous art collection and called the works ‘my children’. Mostly ignoring his flesh-and-blood son and daughter, he lived to serve his art. Claiming that ‘my children must have privacy’ and ‘a home fit for Gulbenkians to live in’, he built a mansion in Paris with barricades, watchdogs and a private secret service. He routinely refused requests to loan his art to museums, and did not allow visitors, since ‘my children mustn’t be disturbed’. But even this extreme of a collector who prefers art to people shows the importance of the social role of collecting, since Gulbenkian simply treated artworks as if they were people. And, when Gulbenkian left his collection to found an eponymous museum in Lisbon upon his death in 1955, he showed that he cared about people after all – just not the ones he happened to know.

Collectors are not only interested in creating social links; they are also motivated by the messages they can send once these social networks are created. We all know that art is a powerful way for the artist to express thoughts and feelings – but collectors know that art can serve as an expressive vehicle for collectors too. Many thus carefully curate their collections, purchasing only artworks whose display backs up a claim that the collector wishes to make.

Almost always, this claim is about the identity of the collector. Like sporting a nose ring or carrying a public radio totebag, displaying art can send a message about who the collector really is – at least who she sees herself as. From the beginning of art-making, we have believed that artworks capture and preserve the essence of their makers and even their owners. As identity can derive from lineage, owning artworks is therefore also a way for an owner to communicate with the past. In art collecting, the past is usually about the collector’s perceived affiliations with notable people.

T he Attalids were probably the first art collectors to lay claim to an august lineage. After the death of Alexander the Great, one of his generals left a treasure of 9,000 talents in the care of his treasurer Philetaerus in the small but strongly defended hilltop town of Bergama, on the western coast of modern-day Turkey. Philetaerus promptly betrayed his master by locking the town’s gates and using the treasure to establish his own kingdom. The new dynasty, known as the Attalids, went to great lengths to acquire as many artworks as possible from a high period of Greek art. King Attalus I even purchased an entire island, the art-rich Aegina, just off the Greek mainland, and then denuded its towns and sanctuaries of artistic masterpieces to decorate Pergamum.

The Attalids surrounded themselves with Greek art because they needed to appear to be Greek, and thus the legitimate successors to Alexander the Great – despite their betrayal of his general. The other dynasties that ruled the area around the Mediterranean during this period – the Seleucids, Antigonids, and Ptolemies – were actually descended from Alexander’s generals. They could thus justify their continued rule over the native populations by their connection to Alexander the Great, whose fame and authority shone for centuries. Indeed, maintaining proper bloodlines was so important to the Ptolemies, who ruled Egypt, that their kings routinely married their sisters, so as to not introduce foreign ancestry. Cleopatra, the last of the Ptolemaic rulers of Egypt before their full conquest by the Romans, was married to not just one but two of her brothers, in succession. She had time for affairs with Julius Caesar and Mark Antony as well, perhaps because, unlike the Attalids, she did not need to amass an art collection to prove her political authority.

Vast numbers of dynasties and politicians, from Charlemagne to Saddam Hussein, have followed the Attalids’ example, collecting art to communicate messages about themselves in order to justify their rule. On a smaller scale, individual collectors have acted out of the same motive. For example, Getty pouring millions of dollars into art makes much more sense when we think about how his purchases gave him an alternative identity: as a sophisticated European rather than an uncultured American.

Getty was not even from New York or Boston. He grew up in the scraped-together oil-boom towns of the Great Plains and the brand-new expanses of Los Angeles. But he made his first million by the time he was 24, prospecting for oil in Oklahoma in 1916. He promptly retired, declaring that he would henceforth live a life of enjoyment of beaches and fast cars. But Getty’s California idyll proved to bore him, and he began to work again after little more than a year. He did so for the rest of his long life, travelling constantly, sleeping little, trusting few, and accumulating a vast fortune – at $2 billion by the time of his death, thanks to Getty Oil’s worldwide network of oil production and distribution.

When Getty started to collect art, his focus on buying Greek and Roman antiquities went against the American zeitgeist. The 19th-century traveller Ralph Izzard Middleton of South Carolina expressed a characteristic American perspective on ancient art. After seeing the Belvedere Torso in the Vatican Museum, he wrote in a letter to his family that artists should go to look at it, but for people ‘who could not model a dog out of a piece of wax (among which I enroll myself) to go and spend hours together in the middle of winter in the Vatican constantly exclaiming how beautiful, how beautiful, when they are all the while thinking how cold, how cold, this I think utterly absurd’. In the same letter, he huffs that ‘triumphal arches and old tottering columns, the dilapidated statues and smoked frescoes, all these are fudge’.

Getty’s most important investment was in the identity-granting power of art

Middleton’s attitude (seemingly shared by many of the drooping tourist groups marching through Rome today) was characteristic of 18th- and 19th-century Americans. Classicism was simply never popular on a wide scale in the US. Perhaps because Americans formed a nation on the claim that their country broke decisively with the Old World, large-scale collections of antiquities seemed incongruous. Classical art collections, after all, were associated with European aristocracy, especially the same 18th-century English elite against whom Americans had rebelled.

Getty was different. He was obsessed with showing kinship with these very aristocrats. He consumed himself with his self-imposed goal of fluency in European cultures. He could have easily afforded the best translators, but he learned languages from records, practising alone late at night in his hotel rooms. Languages were not the only way he sought to blend in to the different cultures through which he travelled. He ‘did not mimic manners and mannerisms. He assumed them,’ as one of his wives describes, calling the result his ‘perfect coloration’.

But his most important investment was in the identity-granting power of art. Getty above all preferred to acquire antiquities previously owned by the emperor Hadrian or by 18th-century English aristocrats – or, ideally, by both, as he believed was the case for the Lansdowne Hercules. He purchased this sculpture from the noble English Lansdowne family, who had possessed it since its purchase in 1792 by the first Marquess of Lansdowne, after it was reportedly excavated at the site of Hadrian’s Villa in 1790.

Getty elevated this claim, which might have been merely part of the sales pitch offered by the 18th-century dealer, into a direct connection with Hadrian. He boasted that ‘there is evidence to suggest that this… statue was a great favourite of the Roman Emperor Hadrian, who was the most sophisticated of all ancient Roman emperors’. He was thrilled that his purchase of it meant that ‘this magnificent marble sculpture, which once delighted the Emperor Hadrian and for a century and a half was a pride of Britain, is now completely “Americanised” – on view for all to see at the Getty Museum’. There, all those whom Getty had left behind could see the proof that he was just as elevated as the former owners of his art.

O ther art collectors see their collections as having a broader power – to convey messages not just about themselves, but about the world as a whole. For example, the kid with the shoebox of bird feathers might show others her collection not just to make friends, but also to convince them about the importance of protecting endangered species. One such collector was Elie Borowski, who thought his collection of antiquities could prevent another Holocaust.

Born in Poland, Borowski spent most of the Second World War interned in Switzerland, where he was allowed to work part-time at a museum in Geneva. There, in 1943, he saw an ancient Near Eastern cylinder seal that sparked his interest in collecting antiquities. He wrote about this moment that the seal’s inscription, ‘ le-Shallum ’, ‘had a strange fascination for me, even though I suspected that my interpretation that it referred to Shallum ben Yavesh, king of Israel in 741 BCE, was doubtful. I was… working in the museum in a state of emotional isolation and deep depression, for I had already known for a year of the fate of my family in Warsaw.’

Borowski’s family – he was the sixth of seven children – had been killed by the Nazis. For him, as a collector, it makes absolute sense that seeing an artwork would bring up thoughts about his family, even if separated by thousands of miles and thousands of years.

Isolated and depressed, Borowski seized upon an antiquity that inspired in him notions of a very different state of affairs, a time when the Jews possessed a powerful and feared state. Even though he knew that the seal he held, and ultimately purchased, probably did not actually refer to a king of Israel, it caused him to plan a collection:

I visualised, perhaps dreaming, that the acquisition of this [seal] might form the beginning of a spiritual apothecary, filled with healing, cultural medicines which would prove to be efficacious against the horrors of those times [that is, the Second World War]. How wonderful it would be if I succeeded in forming a collection of works of art, the aim of which would be to strengthen the historical truths of the Bible, and thereby challenge individuals to rise above their ephemeral materialism in order to return to the eternal, spiritual values and beauty of the Bible and humanism. Thus began my collection of the art of the ancient world and the Bible.

Only a true collector would think that art’s power to tie people together could give a helping hand to the Bible.

Borowski was one of the many people who, after the horrors of Nazism, thought that society needed to be reconstituted on a new foundation to ensure that similar regimes could never again arise. He thought that Biblical morality and Greek humanitarianism, revived, would protect us. Accordingly, Borowski ‘solemnly pledged’ that he would ‘dedicate my life to creating a world centre for education about biblical cultures and art history’. He founded first the Lands of the Bible Archeology Foundation in Toronto in 1976 and then the Bible Lands Museum in Jerusalem in 1992, to which he donated more than 1,700 objects from his collection, along with nearly all the $12 million construction cost, having made his fortune as an art dealer. Just like Getty, Borowski invested heavily in communicating his message to the world.

But there is a downside to such a vision. Borowski’s feelings about the purpose of his collection were so strong that it overcame any scruples he might have had about antiquities laws. He bought directly from notorious smugglers, becoming one of the most important participants of the illicit trade in looted antiquities. Nor did he deny it. Batya, Borowski’s wife and partner in his museum-founding vision, responded to questions about the questionable origin of many of their collected antiquities by saying: ‘You’re right. It’s stolen. But we didn’t steal it. We didn’t encourage it to be stolen. On the contrary, we have collected it from all over the world and brought it back to Jerusalem. Elie’s not a stealer of artifacts. He has saved and preserved so much of our history and heritage by collecting these artifacts.’

Today, looters are attacking archeological sites from all periods and cultures of the past – from ancient Greek and Roman to Native American sites in the US. The problem of looting shows no signs of abating. Indeed, the reverse is true, with recent conflicts in Iraq, Afghanistan, Egypt, Syria and Yemen creating new opportunities for theft.

Understanding that art collecting is primarily a social activity is essential to addressing the problem of looting, and cultural theft. First, art moves through social networks. There are only so many possible buyers or destinations for valuable antiquities. Second, these social networks of art are so strong, and so important to collectors’ identities, that persuading collectors that what they are doing is harmful is extraordinarily difficult. It involves effectively convincing collectors that their past conduct, something they have almost certainly understood as an expression of their best possible self, their highest aspirations, has actually been harmful. It means, in effect, repudiating the bonds they have formed with other collectors. And, as Getty was hardly the first or the last to discover, that is a hard addiction indeed to overcome.

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The forgotten collectors: Five significant 19th-century collectors

The contributions of tobacco heiresses and banking magnates explored.

For every Henry Clay Frick or Albert Barnes, there are dozens of art collectors who have been forgotten by history. “It is astonishing how many tremendously important collectors are forgotten, even if they were donors to museums,” says Inge Reist, the director of the Center for the History of Collecting at the Frick Collection in New York. Art historians, to say nothing of the general public, rarely remember collectors whose holdings were sold or dispersed. Here are five lesser-known tastemakers and the fate of their collections.

Catherine Lorillard Wolfe (1828-87)

The tobacco heiress was one of the most prolific American collectors of contemporary painting during the mid-19th century. Crowds flocked to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York to see the works she donated by Rosa Bonheur, Ludwig Knaus and Jules Breton. Wolfe’s most enduring contribution to the museum was a gift of $200,000 to establish its first acquisition fund. She financed some of the museum’s most famous purchases, including Death of Socrates, 1787, by Jacques-Louis David.

Arthur Jerome Eddy (1859-1920)

The Chicago-based lawyer was an early collector of Modernist art. His interest in German and Russian Expressionism distinguished him from other US collectors who focused almost exclusively on French Modernism. In 1914, he published Cubists and Post-Impressionism, the first American book to examine the work of Wassily Kandinsky. After Eddy’s death, his son donated 23 works from the collection, including portraits by Auguste Rodin and James Whistler, to the Art Institute of Chicago.

Sir Francis Cook (1817-1901)

The British merchant and first Viscount of Monserrate accrued a collection of 510 sculptures and Old Master paintings from all over Europe, including Old Woman Cooking Eggs, 1618, by Diego Velázquez, and The Way to Calvary, 1527, by Albrecht Dürer. Cook’s grandson sold much of the collection after the Second World War and many of the works are now owned by US museums, including the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC.

Robert Stayner Holford (1808-92)

The landowner and MP for East Gloucestershire was described by the English writer A.N.L. Munby as “a collector with an eye for quality and the means to indulge it without stint”. A connoisseur of etchings by Rembrandt, illuminated manuscripts and tapestries, Holford displayed his collection at Dorchester House. By 1854, he owned more than 100 Old Master paintings, including major works by Titian, Tintoretto and Veronese. Most have been dispersed among museums and private collections in the US, Canada and Europe.

Robert Benson (1850-1929)

The banking magnate spent 30 years assembling a collection of more than 100 Italian pictures, including works by Giovanni Bellini and Carlo Crivelli. The legendary dealer Joseph Duveen bought the entire cache in 1927 for $4m. The most famous of Benson’s holdings—four panels painted by Duccio for Siena Cathedral, around 1310—are now in four museum collections: the Frick Collection in New York, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, the Thyssen-Bornemisza Foundation Collection in Madrid and the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas.

Walter Benjamin. On Collectors and Collecting

Considerations on the phenomenon of collection-eer-ing.

Walter Benjamin was a philosopher and art theorist. His essay “The Work of Art in the Era of Mechanical Production” became crucial to understanding the new conditions for the presence of art in industrial society.

The figure of the collector, in the opinion of the German philosopher Walter Benjamin, became one of the defining figures for the nineteenth century and for our contemporary era. A passionate collector himself, Benjamin was convinced that each collector represents a special form of grasping history and the material world close to the Marxist concept of historical materialism.

Three of Benjamin’s texts are collected in the book “On Collectors and Collecting”, two of which – the programmatic essay “Edward Fuchs: Collector and Historian” and an excerpt from his “Arcades” opus – are published in Russian for the first time.

Benjamin’s “Arcades” project, in which he strived to research the origins of the contemporary era, was undertaken over many years. The work was not completed and consists of a set of quotations, comments and extracts in several thematic sections (the so-called ‘convolutes’). One of them, convolute “N” under the title of “Collector” is presented in our edition.

Perhaps," Benjamin writes, "the most deeply hidden motive of the person who collects could be described this way: he takes up the struggle against dispersion. Right from the start, the great collector is struck by the confusion, by the scatter in which the things of the world are found.

– Walter Benjamin

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collecting for the kunstkammer, colonial kero cups, colossal temples of the roman near east, commedia dell’arte, company painting in nineteenth-century india, conceptual art and photography, constantinople after 1261, contemporary deconstructions of classical dress, contexts for the display of statues in classical antiquity, cosmic buddhas in the himalayas, costume in the metropolitan museum of art, the countess da castiglione, courtly art of the ilkhanids, courtship and betrothal in the italian renaissance, cristobal balenciaga (1895–1972), the croome court tapestry room, worcestershire, the crucifixion and passion of christ in italian painting, the crusades (1095–1291), the cult of the virgin mary in the middle ages, cut and engraved glass from islamic lands, cyprus—island of copper, daguerre (1787–1851) and the invention of photography, the daguerreian age in france: 1839–55, the daguerreian era and early american photography on paper, 1839–60, the damascus room, daniel chester french (1850–1931), daoism and daoist art, david octavius hill (1802–1870) and robert adamson (1821–1848), death, burial, and the afterlife in ancient greece, the decoration of arms and armor, the decoration of european armor, the decoration of tibetan arms and armor, design reform, design, 1900–1925, design, 1925–50, design, 1950–75, design, 1975–2000, the development of the recorder, direct versus indirect casting of small bronzes in the italian renaissance, divination and senufo sculpture in west africa, domenichino (1581–1641), domestic art in renaissance italy, donatello (ca. 1386–1466), drawing in the middle ages, dress rehearsal: the origins of the costume institute, dressing for the cocktail hour, dualism in andean art, duncan phyfe (1770–1854) and charles-honoré lannuier (1779–1819), dutch and flemish artists in rome, 1500–1600, eagles after the american revolution, early cycladic art and culture, early documentary photography, early dynastic sculpture, 2900–2350 b.c., early excavations in assyria, early histories of photography in west africa (1860–1910), early maori wood carvings, early modernists and indian traditions, early netherlandish painting, early photographers of the american west: 1860s–70s, early qur’ans (8th–early 13th century), east and west: chinese export porcelain, east asian cultural exchange in tiger and dragon paintings, easter island, eastern religions in the roman world, ebla in the third millennium b.c., edgar degas (1834–1917): bronze sculpture, edgar degas (1834–1917): painting and drawing, edo-period japanese porcelain, édouard baldus (1813–1889), édouard manet (1832–1883), edward hopper (1882–1967), edward j. steichen (1879–1973): the photo-secession years, edward lycett (1833–1910), egypt in the late period (ca. 664–332 b.c.), egypt in the middle kingdom (ca. 2030–1650 b.c.), egypt in the new kingdom (ca. 1550–1070 b.c.), egypt in the old kingdom (ca. 2649–2130 b.c.), egypt in the ptolemaic period, egypt in the third intermediate period (ca. 1070–664 b.c.), egyptian faience: technology and production, egyptian modern art, egyptian red gold, egyptian revival, egyptian tombs: life along the nile, eighteenth-century european dress, the eighteenth-century pastel portrait, eighteenth-century silhouette and support, eighteenth-century women painters in france, el greco (1541–1614), élisabeth louise vigée le brun (1755–1842), elizabethan england, elsa schiaparelli (1890–1973), empire style, 1800–1815, the empires of the western sudan, the empires of the western sudan: ghana empire, the empires of the western sudan: mali empire, the empires of the western sudan: songhai empire, enameled and gilded glass from islamic lands, english embroidery of the late tudor and stuart eras, english ornament prints and furniture books in eighteenth-century america, english silver, 1600–1800, ernest hemingway (1899–1961) and art, ernst emil herzfeld (1879–1948) in persepolis, ernst emil herzfeld (1879–1948) in samarra, etching in eighteenth-century france: artists and amateurs, the etching revival in nineteenth-century france, ethiopia’s enduring cultural heritage, ethiopian healing scrolls, etruscan art, etruscan language and inscriptions, eugène atget (1857–1927), europe and the age of exploration, europe and the islamic world, 1600–1800, european clocks in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, european exploration of the pacific, 1600–1800, european revivalism, european tapestry production and patronage, 1400–1600, european tapestry production and patronage, 1600–1800, exchange of art and ideas: the benin, owo, and ijebu kingdoms, exoticism in the decorative arts, extravagant monstrosities: gold- and silversmith designs in the auricular style, eynan/ain mallaha (12,500–10,000 b.c.), fabricating sixteenth-century netherlandish boxwood miniatures, the face in medieval sculpture, famous makers of arms and armors and european centers of production, fashion in european armor, fashion in european armor, 1000–1300, fashion in european armor, 1300–1400, fashion in european armor, 1400–1500, fashion in european armor, 1500–1600, fashion in european armor, 1600–1700, fashion in safavid iran, fatimid jewelry, fell’s cave (9000–8000 b.c.), fernand léger (1881–1955), feudalism and knights in medieval europe, figural representation in islamic art, filippino lippi (ca. 1457–1504), fire gilding of arms and armor, the five wares of south italian vase painting, the flavian dynasty (69–96 a.d.), flemish harpsichords and virginals, flood stories, folios from the great mongol shahnama (book of kings), folios from the jami‘ al-tavarikh (compendium of chronicles), fontainebleau, food and drink in european painting, 1400–1800, foundations of aksumite civilization and its christian legacy (1st–8th century), fra angelico (ca. 1395–1455), francisco de goya (1746–1828) and the spanish enlightenment, françois boucher (1703–1770), frank lloyd wright (1867–1959), frans hals (1582/83–1666), frederic edwin church (1826–1900), frederic remington (1861–1909), frederick william macmonnies (1863–1937), the french academy in rome, french art deco, french art pottery, french decorative arts during the reign of louis xiv (1654–1715), french faience, french furniture in the eighteenth century: case furniture, french furniture in the eighteenth century: seat furniture, french porcelain in the eighteenth century, french silver in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, frescoes and wall painting in late byzantine art, from geometric to informal gardens in the eighteenth century, from italy to france: gardens in the court of louis xiv and after, from model to monument: american public sculpture, 1865–1915, the fulani/fulbe people, the function of armor in medieval and renaissance europe, funerary vases in southern italy and sicily, furnishings during the reign of louis xiv (1654–1715), gabrielle “coco” chanel (1883–1971) and the house of chanel, gardens in the french renaissance, gardens of western europe, 1600–1800, genre painting in northern europe, geometric abstraction, geometric and archaic cyprus, geometric art in ancient greece, geometric patterns in islamic art, george inness (1825–1894), george washington: man, myth, monument, georges seurat (1859–1891) and neo-impressionism, georgia o’keeffe (1887–1986), gerard david (born about 1455, died 1523), german and austrian porcelain in the eighteenth century, the ghent altarpiece, gian lorenzo bernini (1598–1680), gilbert stuart (1755–1828), giovanni battista piranesi (1720–1778), giovanni battista tiepolo (1696–1770), gladiators: types and training, glass from islamic lands, glass ornaments in late antiquity and early islam (ca. 500–1000), glass with mold-blown decoration from islamic lands, the gods and goddesses of canaan, gold in ancient egypt, gold in asante courtly arts, gold in the ancient americas, gold of the indies, the golden age of french furniture in the eighteenth century, the golden harpsichord of michele todini (1616–1690), golden treasures: the royal tombs of silla, goryeo celadon, the grand tour, the graphic art of max klinger, great plains indians musical instruments, great serpent mound, great zimbabwe (11th–15th century), the greater ottoman empire, 1600–1800, greek art in the archaic period, greek gods and religious practices, greek hydriai (water jars) and their artistic decoration, the greek key and divine attributes in modern dress, greek terracotta figurines with articulated limbs, gustave courbet (1819–1877), gustave le gray (1820–1884), hagia sophia, 532–37, the halaf period (6500–5500 b.c.), han dynasty (206 b.c.–220 a.d.), hanae mori (1926–2022), hans talhoffer’s fight book, a sixteenth-century manuscript about the art of fighting, harry burton (1879–1940): the pharaoh’s photographer, hasanlu in the iron age, haute couture, heian period (794–1185), hellenistic and roman cyprus, hellenistic jewelry, hendrick goltzius (1558–1617), henri cartier-bresson (1908–2004), henri de toulouse-lautrec (1864–1901), henri matisse (1869–1954), henry kirke brown (1814–1886), john quincy adams ward (1830–1910), and realism in american sculpture, heroes in italian mythological prints, hinduism and hindu art, hippopotami in ancient egypt, hiram powers (1805–1873), the hittites, the holy roman empire and the habsburgs, 1400–1600, hopewell (1–400 a.d.), horse armor in europe, hot-worked glass from islamic lands, the house of jeanne hallée (1870–1924), the housemistress in new kingdom egypt: hatnefer, how medieval and renaissance tapestries were made, the hudson river school, hungarian silver, icons and iconoclasm in byzantium, the idea and invention of the villa, ife (from ca. 6th century), ife pre-pavement and pavement era (800–1000 a.d.), ife terracottas (1000–1400 a.d.), igbo-ukwu (ca. 9th century), images of antiquity in limoges enamels in the french renaissance, impressionism: art and modernity, in pursuit of white: porcelain in the joseon dynasty, 1392–1910, indian knoll (3000–2000 b.c.), indian textiles: trade and production, indigenous arts of the caribbean, industrialization and conflict in america: 1840–1875, the industrialization of french photography after 1860, inland niger delta, intellectual pursuits of the hellenistic age, intentional alterations of early netherlandish painting, interior design in england, 1600–1800, interiors imagined: folding screens, garments, and clothing stands, international pictorialism, internationalism in the tang dynasty (618–907), introduction to prehistoric art, 20,000–8000 b.c., the isin-larsa and old babylonian periods (2004–1595 b.c.), islamic arms and armor, islamic art and culture: the venetian perspective, islamic art of the deccan, islamic carpets in european paintings, italian painting of the later middle ages, italian porcelain in the eighteenth century, italian renaissance frames, ivory and boxwood carvings, 1450–1800, ivory carving in the gothic era, thirteenth–fifteenth centuries, jacopo dal ponte, called bassano (ca. 1510–1592), jade in costa rica, jade in mesoamerica, jain manuscript painting, jain sculpture, james cox (ca. 1723–1800): goldsmith and entrepreneur, james mcneill whistler (1834–1903), james mcneill whistler (1834–1903) as etcher, jan gossart (ca. 1478–1532) and his circle, jan van eyck (ca. 1390–1441), the japanese blade: technology and manufacture, japanese illustrated handscrolls, japanese incense, the japanese tea ceremony, japanese weddings in the edo period (1615–1868), japanese writing boxes, jasper johns (born 1930), jean antoine houdon (1741–1828), jean honoré fragonard (1732–1806), jean-baptiste carpeaux (1827–1875), jean-baptiste greuze (1725–1805), jewish art in late antiquity and early byzantium, jews and the arts in medieval europe, jews and the decorative arts in early modern italy, jiahu (ca. 7000–5700 b.c.), joachim tielke (1641–1719), joan miró (1893–1983), johannes vermeer (1632–1675), johannes vermeer (1632–1675) and the milkmaid, john constable (1776–1837), john frederick kensett (1816–1872), john singer sargent (1856–1925), john singleton copley (1738–1815), john townsend (1733–1809), jōmon culture (ca. 10,500–ca. 300 b.c.), joseon buncheong ware: between celadon and porcelain, joseph mallord william turner (1775–1851), juan de flandes (active by 1496, died 1519), julia margaret cameron (1815–1879), the julio-claudian dynasty (27 b.c.–68 a.d.), kamakura and nanbokucho periods (1185–1392), the kano school of painting, kingdoms of madagascar: malagasy funerary arts, kingdoms of madagascar: malagasy textile arts, kingdoms of madagascar: maroserana and merina, kingdoms of the savanna: the kuba kingdom, kingdoms of the savanna: the luba and lunda empires, kings and queens of egypt, kings of brightness in japanese esoteric buddhist art, the kirtlington park room, oxfordshire, the kithara in ancient greece, kodak and the rise of amateur photography, kofun period (ca. 300–710), kongo ivories, korean buddhist sculpture (5th–9th century), korean munbangdo paintings, kushan empire (ca. second century b.c.–third century a.d.), la venta: sacred architecture, la venta: stone sculpture, the labors of herakles, lacquerware of east asia, landscape painting in chinese art, landscape painting in the netherlands, the lansdowne dining room, london, lapita pottery (ca. 1500–500 b.c.), lascaux (ca. 15,000 b.c.), late eighteenth-century american drawings, late medieval german sculpture, late medieval german sculpture: images for the cult and for private devotion, late medieval german sculpture: materials and techniques, late medieval german sculpture: polychromy and monochromy, the later ottomans and the impact of europe, le colis de trianon-versailles and paris openings, the legacy of genghis khan, the legacy of jacques louis david (1748–1825), leonardo da vinci (1452–1519), letterforms and writing in contemporary art, life of jesus of nazareth, life of the buddha, list of rulers of ancient egypt and nubia, list of rulers of ancient sudan, list of rulers of byzantium, list of rulers of china, list of rulers of europe, list of rulers of japan, list of rulers of korea, list of rulers of mesopotamia, list of rulers of south asia, list of rulers of the ancient greek world, list of rulers of the islamic world, list of rulers of the parthian empire, list of rulers of the roman empire, list of rulers of the sasanian empire, lithography in the nineteenth century, longevity in chinese art, louis comfort tiffany (1848–1933), louis-rémy robert (1810–1882), lovers in italian mythological prints, the lure of montmartre, 1880–1900, luxury arts of rome, lydenburg heads (ca. 500 a.d.), lydia and phrygia, made in india, found in egypt: red sea textile trade in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, made in italy: italian fashion from 1950 to now, the magic of signs and patterns in north african art, maiolica in the renaissance, mal’ta (ca. 20,000 b.c.), mangarevan sculpture, the manila galleon trade (1565–1815), mannerism: bronzino (1503–1572) and his contemporaries, the mantiq al-tair (language of the birds) of 1487, manuscript illumination in italy, 1400–1600, manuscript illumination in northern europe, mapungubwe (ca. 1050–1270), marcel duchamp (1887–1968), maria monaci gallenga (1880–1944), mary stevenson cassatt (1844–1926), the master of monte oliveto (active about 1305–35), the materials and techniques of american quilts and coverlets, the materials and techniques of english embroidery of the late tudor and stuart eras, mauryan empire (ca. 323–185 b.c.), medicine in classical antiquity, medicine in the middle ages, medieval aquamanilia, medieval european sculpture for buildings, medusa in ancient greek art, mendicant orders in the medieval world, the mesoamerican ballgame, mesopotamian creation myths, mesopotamian deities, mesopotamian magic in the first millennium b.c., the metropolitan museum’s excavations at nishapur, the metropolitan museum’s excavations at ctesiphon, the metropolitan museum’s excavations at qasr-i abu nasr, michiel sweerts and biblical subjects in dutch art, the middle babylonian / kassite period (ca. 1595–1155 b.c.) in mesopotamia, military music in american and european traditions, ming dynasty (1368–1644), minoan crete, mission héliographique, 1851, miyake, kawakubo, and yamamoto: japanese fashion in the twentieth century, moche decorated ceramics, moche portrait vessels, modern and contemporary art in iran, modern art in india, modern art in west and east pakistan, modern art in west asia: colonial to post-colonial, modern materials: plastics, modern storytellers: romare bearden, jacob lawrence, faith ringgold, momoyama period (1573–1615), monasticism in western medieval europe, the mon-dvaravati tradition of early north-central thailand, the mongolian tent in the ilkhanid period, monte albán, monte albán: sacred architecture, monte albán: stone sculpture, monumental architecture of the aksumite empire, the monumental stelae of aksum (3rd–4th century), mosaic glass from islamic lands, mountain and water: korean landscape painting, 1400–1800, muromachi period (1392–1573), music and art of china, music in ancient greece, music in the ancient andes, music in the renaissance, musical instruments of oceania, musical instruments of the indian subcontinent, musical terms for the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, mycenaean civilization, mystery cults in the greek and roman world, nabataean kingdom and petra, the nabis and decorative painting, nadar (1820–1910), the nahal mishmar treasure, nature in chinese culture, the nature of islamic art, the neoclassical temple, neoclassicism, neolithic period in china, nepalese painting, nepalese sculpture, netsuke: from fashion fobs to coveted collectibles, new caledonia, the new documentary tradition in photography, new ireland, new vision photography, a new visual language transmitted across asia, the new york dutch room, nicolas poussin (1594–1665), nineteenth-century american drawings, nineteenth-century american folk art, nineteenth-century american jewelry, nineteenth-century american silver, nineteenth-century classical music, nineteenth-century court arts in india, nineteenth-century english silver, nineteenth-century european textile production, nineteenth-century french realism, nineteenth-century iran: art and the advent of modernity, nineteenth-century iran: continuity and revivalism, nineteenth-century silhouette and support, nok terracottas (500 b.c.–200 a.d.), northern italian renaissance painting, northern mannerism in the early sixteenth century, northern song dynasty (960–1127), northwest coast indians musical instruments, the nude in baroque and later art, the nude in the middle ages and the renaissance, the nude in western art and its beginnings in antiquity, nudity and classical themes in byzantine art, nuptial furnishings in the italian renaissance, the old assyrian period (ca. 2000–1600 b.c.), orientalism in nineteenth-century art, orientalism: visions of the east in western dress, the origins of writing, ottonian art, pablo picasso (1881–1973), pachmari hills (ca. 9000–3000 b.c.), painted funerary monuments from hellenistic alexandria, painting formats in east asian art, painting in italian choir books, 1300–1500, painting in oil in the low countries and its spread to southern europe, painting the life of christ in medieval and renaissance italy, paintings of love and marriage in the italian renaissance, paolo veronese (1528–1588), the papacy and the vatican palace, the papacy during the renaissance, papyrus in ancient egypt, papyrus-making in egypt, the parthian empire (247 b.c.–224 a.d.), pastoral charms in the french renaissance, patronage at the early valois courts (1328–1461), patronage at the later valois courts (1461–1589), patronage of jean de berry (1340–1416), paul cézanne (1839–1906), paul gauguin (1848–1903), paul klee (1879–1940), paul poiret (1879–1944), paul revere, jr. (1734–1818), paul strand (1890–1976), period of the northern and southern dynasties (386–581), peter paul rubens (1577–1640) and anthony van dyck (1599–1641): paintings, peter paul rubens (1577–1640) and anthony van dyck (1599–1641): works on paper, petrus christus (active by 1444, died 1475/76), the phoenicians (1500–300 b.c.), photographers in egypt, photography and surrealism, photography and the civil war, 1861–65, photography at the bauhaus, photography in düsseldorf, photography in europe, 1945–60, photography in postwar america, 1945-60, photography in the expanded field: painting, performance, and the neo-avant-garde, photojournalism and the picture press in germany, phrygia, gordion, and king midas in the late eighth century b.c., the piano: the pianofortes of bartolomeo cristofori (1655–1731), the piano: viennese instruments, pictorialism in america, the pictures generation, pierre bonnard (1867–1947): the late interiors, pierre didot the elder (1761–1853), pieter bruegel the elder (ca. 1525–1569), pilgrimage in medieval europe, poetic allusions in the rajput and pahari painting of india, poets in italian mythological prints, poets, lovers, and heroes in italian mythological prints, polychrome sculpture in spanish america, polychromy of roman marble sculpture, popular religion: magical uses of imagery in byzantine art, portrait painting in england, 1600–1800, portraits of african leadership, portraits of african leadership: living rulers, portraits of african leadership: memorials, portraits of african leadership: royal ancestors, portraiture in renaissance and baroque europe, the portuguese in africa, 1415–1600, post-impressionism, postmodernism: recent developments in art in india, postmodernism: recent developments in art in pakistan and bangladesh, post-revolutionary america: 1800–1840, the postwar print renaissance in america, poverty point (2000–1000 b.c.), the praenestine cistae, prague during the rule of rudolf ii (1583–1612), prague, 1347–1437, pre-angkor traditions: the mekong delta and peninsular thailand, precisionism, prehistoric cypriot art and culture, prehistoric stone sculpture from new guinea, the pre-raphaelites, presidents of the united states of america, the print in the nineteenth century, the printed image in the west: aquatint, the printed image in the west: drypoint, the printed image in the west: engraving, the printed image in the west: etching, the printed image in the west: history and techniques, the printed image in the west: mezzotint, the printed image in the west: woodcut, printmaking in mexico, 1900–1950, private devotion in medieval christianity, profane love and erotic art in the italian renaissance, the pyramid complex of senwosret iii, dahshur, the pyramid complex of senwosret iii, dahshur: private tombs to the north, the pyramid complex of senwosret iii, dahshur: queens and princesses, the pyramid complex of senwosret iii, dahshur: temples, qin dynasty (221–206 b.c.), the qing dynasty (1644–1911): courtiers, officials, and professional artists, the qing dynasty (1644–1911): loyalists and individualists, the qing dynasty (1644–1911): painting, the qing dynasty (1644–1911): the traditionalists, the rag-dung, rare coins from nishapur, recognizing the gods, the rediscovery of classical antiquity, the reformation, relics and reliquaries in medieval christianity, religion and culture in north america, 1600–1700, the religious arts under the ilkhanids, the religious relationship between byzantium and the west, rembrandt (1606–1669): paintings, rembrandt van rijn (1606–1669): prints, renaissance drawings: material and function, renaissance keyboards, renaissance organs, renaissance velvet textiles, renaissance violins, retrospective styles in greek and roman sculpture, rinpa painting style, the rise of macedon and the conquests of alexander the great, the rise of modernity in south asia, the rise of paper photography in 1850s france, the rise of paper photography in italy, 1839–55, the rock-hewn churches of lalibela, roger fenton (1819–1869), the roman banquet, roman cameo glass, roman copies of greek statues, roman egypt, the roman empire (27 b.c.–393 a.d.), roman games: playing with animals, roman glass, roman gold-band glass, roman housing, roman inscriptions, roman luxury glass, roman mold-blown glass, roman mosaic and network glass, roman painting, roman portrait sculpture: republican through constantinian, roman portrait sculpture: the stylistic cycle, the roman republic, roman sarcophagi, roman stuccowork, romanesque art, romanticism, saint petersburg, saints and other sacred byzantine figures, saints in medieval christian art, the salon and the royal academy in the nineteenth century, san ethnography, sanford robinson gifford (1823–1880), the sasanian empire (224–651 a.d.), scenes of everyday life in ancient greece, scholar-officials of china, school of paris, seasonal imagery in japanese art, the seleucid empire (323–64 b.c.), senufo arts and poro initiation in northern côte d’ivoire, senufo sculpture from west africa: an influential exhibition at the museum of primitive art, new york, 1963, seventeenth-century european watches, the severan dynasty (193–235 a.d.), sèvres porcelain in the nineteenth century, shah ‘abbas and the arts of isfahan, the shah jahan album, the shahnama of shah tahmasp, shaker furniture, shakespeare and art, 1709–1922, shakespeare portrayed, shang and zhou dynasties: the bronze age of china, shoes in the costume institute, shōguns and art, shunga dynasty (ca. second–first century b.c.), sienese painting, silk textiles from safavid iran, 1501–1722, silks from ottoman turkey, silver in ancient egypt, sixteenth-century painting in emilia-romagna, sixteenth-century painting in lombardy, sixteenth-century painting in venice and the veneto, the solomon islands, south asian art and culture, southern italian vase painting, southern song dynasty (1127–1279), the spanish guitar, spiritual power in the arts of the toba batak, stained (luster-painted) glass from islamic lands, stained glass in medieval europe, still-life painting in northern europe, 1600–1800, still-life painting in southern europe, 1600–1800, the structure of photographic metaphors, students of benjamin west (1738–1820), the symposium in ancient greece, takht-i sulaiman and tilework in the ilkhanid period, talavera de puebla, tanagra figurines, tang dynasty (618–907), the technique of bronze statuary in ancient greece, techniques of decoration on arms and armor, telling time in ancient egypt, tenochtitlan, tenochtitlan: templo mayor, teotihuacan: mural painting, teotihuacan: pyramids of the sun and the moon, textile production in europe: embroidery, 1600–1800, textile production in europe: lace, 1600–1800, textile production in europe: printed, 1600–1800, textile production in europe: silk, 1600–1800, theater and amphitheater in the roman world, theater in ancient greece, theseus, hero of athens, thomas chippendale’s gentleman and cabinet-maker’s director, thomas cole (1801–1848), thomas eakins (1844–1916): painting, thomas eakins (1844–1916): photography, 1880s–90s, thomas hart benton’s america today mural, thomas sully (1783–1872) and queen victoria, tibetan arms and armor, tibetan buddhist art, tikal: sacred architecture, tikal: stone sculpture, time of day on painted athenian vases, tiraz: inscribed textiles from the early islamic period, titian (ca. 1485/90–1576), the tomb of wah, trade and commercial activity in the byzantine and early islamic middle east, trade and the spread of islam in africa, trade between arabia and the empires of rome and asia, trade between the romans and the empires of asia, trade relations among european and african nations, trade routes between europe and asia during antiquity, traditional chinese painting in the twentieth century, the transatlantic slave trade, the transformation of landscape painting in france, the trans-saharan gold trade (7th–14th century), turkmen jewelry, turquoise in ancient egypt, tutankhamun’s funeral, tutsi basketry, twentieth-century silhouette and support, the ubaid period (5500–4000 b.c.), ubirr (ca. 40,000–present), umberto boccioni (1882–1916), unfinished works in european art, ca. 1500–1900, ur: the royal graves, ur: the ziggurat, uruk: the first city, valdivia figurines, vegetal patterns in islamic art, velázquez (1599–1660), venetian color and florentine design, venice and the islamic world, 828–1797, venice and the islamic world: commercial exchange, diplomacy, and religious difference, venice in the eighteenth century, venice’s principal muslim trading partners: the mamluks, the ottomans, and the safavids, the vibrant role of mingqi in early chinese burials, the vikings (780–1100), vincent van gogh (1853–1890), vincent van gogh (1853–1890): the drawings, violin makers: nicolò amati (1596–1684) and antonio stradivari (1644–1737), visual culture of the atlantic world, vivienne westwood (born 1941) and the postmodern legacy of punk style, wadi kubbaniya (ca. 17,000–15,000 b.c.), walker evans (1903–1975), wang hui (1632–1717), warfare in ancient greece, watercolor painting in britain, 1750–1850, ways of recording african history, weddings in the italian renaissance, west asia: ancient legends, modern idioms, west asia: between tradition and modernity, west asia: postmodernism, the diaspora, and women artists, william blake (1757–1827), william henry fox talbot (1800–1877) and the invention of photography, william merritt chase (1849–1916), winslow homer (1836–1910), wisteria dining room, paris, women artists in nineteenth-century france, women china decorators, women in classical greece, women leaders in african history, 17th–19th century, women leaders in african history: ana nzinga, queen of ndongo, women leaders in african history: dona beatriz, kongo prophet, women leaders in african history: idia, first queen mother of benin, woodblock prints in the ukiyo-e style, woodcut book illustration in renaissance italy: florence in the 1490s, woodcut book illustration in renaissance italy: the first illustrated books, woodcut book illustration in renaissance italy: venice in the 1490s, woodcut book illustration in renaissance italy: venice in the sixteenth century, wordplay in twentieth-century prints, work and leisure: eighteenth-century genre painting in korea, x-ray style in arnhem land rock art, yamato-e painting, yangban: the cultural life of the joseon literati, yayoi culture (ca. 300 b.c.–300 a.d.), the year one, years leading to the iranian revolution, 1960–79, yuan dynasty (1271–1368), zen buddhism, 0 && essaysctrl.themev == 'departments / collections' && essaysctrl.deptv == null">, departments / collections '">.

Articles and Features

Meet the Next Gen Collectors: Who Are They and How Are They Changing the Art Market? 

By Lucija Bravic

“ I can post a painting and it will sell before the paint is dry “ Ashley Longshore

This article explores the dynamic world of the contemporary art market under the influence of the new generation of art buyers. The new art buyers, popularly called ‘Next Gen’ collectors, are continuously reshaping and restructuring the established format of the traditional art market. A new generation is actively using technology and social media to acquire, showcase and sell their collections. They perceive art as an extension of their personal brand and, compared to their forerunners, theirs purchasing practices are more dynamic and transparent. 

Below, we will dig deeper into the demographics, artistic taste, and buying practices of the Next Gen collectors and explore the implications they have on the ever-changing art market. This article is based on the most recent art market research. Data is sourced from the Hiscox Online Art Trade report 2020 , The Art Market 2021 report by Art Basel & UBS and The Next Gen Collectors report by Larry’s List.     

Who are Next Gen collectors?  

It is quite a challenge to put a solid demographical frame around the Next Gen collectors. However, they can be loosely defined as a group belonging to either generation Z, Millennials, or generation X collectors who are actively participating in the art market by buying or selling artworks. Geographically, they are mostly located in the US, Europe, and Asia with New York, London, Seoul, Beijing, Shanghai, and Hong Kong as the central hubs. 

Wealthiest then ever

The wealth of the Nex Gen is both inherited and self-made. The Art Basel & UBS report (2021) describes how it is predicted that the millennial generation will inherit between 20 and 70 trillion dollars in wealth and assets by the year 2030, becoming the wealthiest generation so far, considering that the boomers had fewer children on average than their parents. On the other hand, there is a growing number of self-made millennial billionaires as a result of the rapid growth of industries relating to tech, energy, and real estate. Young art buyers mainly acquire artworks as a form of investment, which was also confirmed during the pandemic. As Art Basel & UBS (2021) reports, 30% of millennial collectors spent over $1 million on art and collectibles during 2020, compared to only 17% of boomers who ventured into acquiring artworks during the crisis. This current state of the market shows that we will probably witness further growth of the art industry in the following years.

What kind of art do Next Gen collectors like to collect?

When it comes to the taste of Next Gen collectors, painting and sculptures are still preferred art mediums, even though their interest in digital art and NFT’s is on the rise ( Larry’s List 2021 ). They appreciate and collect blue-chip art with popular names such as KAWS, Warhol, Banksy, Hirst, Basquiat, and Hockney. Nevertheless, they are also open to welcoming works of emerging artists in their collections. Especially if their work relates to the collectors’ personal believes and lifestyles. 

It’s all about personal branding

For the Next Gen, art ties strongly with personal branding. Because of technology and social media, collectors have a chance to be more transparent about their collections and it is important that art speaks for them. Collectors are attracted to art that not only relates to their aesthetic but also brings certain social value. Remembering the popular saying  – art is the reflection of the world or its semantic variations, describing art as the reflection of emotions, values, society, or culture, explains why collectors care so much about the representation their collection has for their personal brand. It can be climate change, racial injustice, gender inequality, or any other cause they feel passionate about, Nex Gen collectors really care that their art collections are in line with it.

Larry’s list (2021) has conducted in-depth interviews with a couple of young collectors and asked them about the importance of networks and relations to artists. Most collectors agree that knowing the artists personally and understanding their perspective makes them like the artworks even more. In particular, Oleg Guerrand, an art collector located in New York, reflects on the importance of meeting the artists:  

“I try to meet and interact with artists all the time. I am always trying to pick the brains of artists. I have had some incredible and unforgettable experiences and conversations with some artists. Whenever I get access to a studio, I am like a kid in a candy store, I am so very appreciative and never take it for granted. I prefer being around artists than dealers….” Oleg Guerrand (Larry’s list, 2021) 

In sum, Next Gen collectors still mostly enjoy traditional mediums but, compared to the previous generation of collectors, they like to keep their collections transparent, mostly in a digital format and, partially, by opening exhibitions spaces. Because of transparency, collectors see artworks as the extension of their personal brand. The new generation likes to engage with emerging artists and buy woke art that relates to their personal beliefs. 

How are Next Gen collectors buying art?

Already in 2014, Olivia Fleming wrote an article for Vogue titled  Why the World’s Most Talked-About New Art Dealer Is Instagram? where she explores the implications of new media on the art market and buyers’ practices. She uses the example of the Instagram art phenomenon Ashley Longshore, the artist who managed to overlook the traditional structures of the art market and successfully sell her artworks directly through Instagram. Since then, the digital art trade has evolved immensely. Instagram is still the most widely used social media channel amongst art buyers as reported by Art Basel & UBS (2020) , but there is a growing number of online platforms, marketplaces, and autonomous galleries that are using advanced technology to showcase the artworks online. 

Art and tech

Next Gen collectors like to buy things online. E-commerce activities are on the rise in recent years, additionally boosted by the global lockdowns caused by the Covid-19 pandemic. The necessity makes people adopt change and novelty faster and e-commerce is a valid example. In this type of environment, it is no wonder that the new generation of art collectors would embrace buying art online so easily. Certainly, technology plays a big role in this transition. Tech companies are fast evolving and designing a variety of ways to present and sell artworks online. 3D online galleries, extended reality, and similar features have become extremely popular amongst the new generation of art collectors. Thanks to technology, buying artworks online is closer to reality than ever. It is simple, fast, and secure  – which makes young art buyers willing to purchase even at higher prices online ( Art Basel 2021 ).

How is the market adopting changes?

The traditional art industry needs to embrace the changes and new technology to stay relevant amongst Next Gen collectors, either by building an independently strong online presence or by joining one of the online platforms with the established community of art buyers. In the Hiscox report (2020), it is predicted how it is likely that an outsider such as an existing company or a start-up with superior technology could disrupt the art and collectibles market. The intuitive and transparent trading environment could be what it takes to attract the Next Gen ( Hiscox, 2020 ).  Another crucial factor for the Nex Gen collectors is price transparency. Online art marketplaces tend to keep prices more transparent compared to the exclusivity of the traditional art market where prices of the artworks are kept in the private dialogue between dealer and buyer, making it a more appealing alternative.   

The hybrid model

The apparent question coming out of this discussion is the following: what is the position of the traditional brick-and-mortar galleries in the immense world of the online art market? Most of the art collectors, including the Next Gen, agree that seeing artworks in person is still better than seeing them through the screen. Having a physical space brings an additional value to galleries and buyers will likely visit it before making a final purchase, if they have a chance (Art Basel, 2021) . Buying art, just like other luxury goods is oftentimes a long-term process and much of the research goes on up to the point of making a purchase. The hybrid business model that combines a strong online presence with a physical space seems to have a potential for success. Galleries and art fairs have been embracing the hybrid model in recent years, and the ones with already established online presence showed much better performance during the pandemic.

The art market is not immune to changes in social and political streams, trends, and technology, and the Next Gen collectors and artists are the ones driving the change. It is likely that we will witness more of the digital side of the art world where online marketplaces will dominate the industry. Digital representation of the artworks and online sales will break the geographical boundaries and allow for an even bigger expansion of the market. As for art, it will undoubtedly keep on reflecting the world, either physical or digital.

Relevant sources to learn more

Art Basel & UBS report (2021) Hiscox Online Art Trade Report (2020) The Next Gen Art Collectors report (2021)

More on the art market on Artland Magazine:

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Wondering where to start?

By Will Fenstermaker

June 14, 2017

There has never been a time when art critics held more power than during the second half of the twentieth century. Following the Second World War, with the relocation of the world’s artistic epicenter from Paris to New York, a different kind of war was waged in the pages of magazines across the country. As part of the larger “culture wars” of the mid-century, art critics began to take on greater influence than they’d ever held before. For a time, two critics in particular—who began as friends, and remained in the same social circles for much of their lives—set the stakes of the debates surrounding the maturation of American art that would continue for decades. The ideas about art outlined by Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg are still debated today, and the extent to which they were debated in the past has shaped entire movements of the arts. Below are ten works of criticism through which one can trace the mainstreaming of Clement Greenberg’s formalist theory, and how its dismantling led us into institutional critique and conceptual art today.

The American Action Painters

Harold Rosenberg

Harold Rosenberg, a poet who came to art through his involvement with the Artist’s Union and the WPA, was introduced to Jean-Paul Sartre as the “first American existentialist.” Soon, Rosenberg became a contributor to Sartre’s publication in France, for which he first drafted his influential essay. However, when Sartre supported Soviet aggression against Korea, Rosenberg brought his essay to Elaine de Kooning , then the editor of ARTnews , who ran “The American Action Painters” in December, 1952.

RELATED: What Did Harold Rosenberg Do? An Introduction to the Champion of “Action Painting”

Rosenberg’s essay on the emerging school of American Painters omitted particular names—because they’d have been unfamiliar to its original French audience—but it was nonetheless extraordinarily influential for the burgeoning scene of post-WWII American artists. Jackson Pollock claimed to be the influence of “action painting,” despite Rosenberg’s rumored lack of respect for the artist because Pollock wasn’t particularly well-read. Influenced by Marxist theory and French existentialism, Rosenberg conceives of a painting as an “arena,” in which the artist acts upon, wrestles, or otherwise engages with the canvas, in what ultimately amounts to an expressive record of a struggle. “What was to go on the canvas,” Rosenberg wrote, “was not a picture but an event.”

Notable Quote

Weak mysticism, the “Christian Science” side of the new movement, tends … toward easy painting—never so many unearned masterpieces! Works of this sort lack the dialectical tension of a genuine act, associated with risk and will. When a tube of paint is squeezed by the Absolute, the result can only be a Success. The painter need keep himself on hand solely to collect the benefits of an endless series of strokes of luck. His gesture completes itself without arousing either an opposing movement within itself nor the desire in the artist to make the act more fully his own. Satisfied with wonders that remain safely inside the canvas, the artist accepts the permanence of the commonplace and decorates it with his own daily annihilation. The result is an apocalyptic wallpaper.

‘American-Type’ Painting

Clement Greenberg

Throughout the preceding decade, Clement Greenberg, also a former poet, had established a reputation as a leftist critic through his writings with The Partisan Review —a publication run by the John Reed Club, a New York City-centered organization affiliated with the American Communist Party—and his time as an art critic with The Nation . In 1955, The Partisan Review published Greenberg’s “‘American-Type’ Painting,” in which the critic defined the now-ubiquitous term “abstract expressionism.”

RELATED: What Did Clement Greenberg Do? A Primer on the Powerful AbEx Theorist’s Key Ideas

In contrast to Rosenberg’s conception of painting as a performative act, Greenberg’s theory, influenced by Clive Bell and T. S. Eliot, was essentially a formal one—in fact, it eventually evolved into what would be called “formalism.” Greenberg argued that the evolution of painting was one of historical determinacy—that ever since the Renaissance, pictures moved toward flatness, and the painted line moved away from representation. Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso were two of the landmarks of this view. Pollock, who exhibited his drip paintings in 1951, freeing the line from figuration, was for Greenberg the pinnacle of American Modernism, the most important artist since Picasso. (Pollock’s paintings exhibited in 1954, with which he returned to semi-representational form, were regarded by Greenberg as a regression. This lead him to adopt Barnett Newman as his new poster-boy, despite the artist’s possessing vastly different ideas on the nature of painting. For one, Greenberg mostly ignored the Biblical titles of Newman’s paintings.)

Greenberg’s formalist theories were immensely influential over the subsequent decades. Artforum in particular grew into a locus for formalist discourse, which had the early effect of providing an aesthetic toolkit divorced from politic. Certain curators of the Museum of Modern Art, particularly William Rubin, Kirk Varnedoe, and to an extent Alfred Barr are credited for steering the museum in an essentially formalist direction. Some painters, such as Frank Stella , Helen Frankenthaler , and Kenneth Noland, had even been accused of illustrating Greenberg’s theories (and those of Michael Fried, a prominent Greenbergian disciple) in attempt to embody the theory, which was restrictive in its failure to account for narrative content, figuration, identity, politics, and more. In addition, Greenberg’s theories proved well-suited for a burgeoning art market, which found connoisseurship an easy sell. (As the writer Mary McCarthy said, “You can’t hang an event on your wall.”) In fact, the dominance of the term “abstract expressionism” over “action painting,” which seemed more applicable to Pollock and Willem de Kooning than any other members of the New York School, is emblematic of the influence of formalist discourse.

The justification for the term, “abstract expressionist,” lies in the fact that most of the painters covered by it took their lead from German, Russian, or Jewish expressionism in breaking away from late Cubist abstract art. But they all started from French painting, for their fundamental sense of style from it, and still maintain some sort of continuity with it. Not least of all, they got from it their most vivid notion of an ambitious, major art, and of the general direction in which it had to go in their time.

Barbara Rose

Like many critics in the 1950s and 60s, Barbara Rose had clearly staked her allegiance to one camp or the other. She was, firmly, a formalist, and along with Fried and Rosalind Krauss is largely credited with expanding the theory beyond abstract expressionist painting. By 1965, however, Rose recognized a limitation of the theory as outlined by Greenberg—that it was reductionist and only capable of account for a certain style of painting, and not much at all in other mediums.

RELATED: The Intellectual Origins Of Minimalism

In “ABC Art,” published in Art in America where Rose was a contributing editor, Rose opens up formalism to encompass sculpture, which Greenberg was largely unable to account for. The simple idea that art moves toward flatness and abstraction leads, for Rose, into Minimalism, and “ABC Art” is often considered the first landmark essay on Minimalist art. By linking the Minimalist sculptures of artists like Donald Judd to the Russian supremacist paintings of Kasimir Malevich and readymades of Duchamp, she extends the determinist history that formalism relies on into sculpture and movements beyond abstract expressionism.

I do not agree with critic Michael Fried’s view that Duchamp, at any rate, was a failed Cubist. Rather, the inevitability of a logical evolution toward a reductive art was obvious to them already. For Malevich, the poetic Slav, this realization forced a turning inward toward an inspirational mysticism, whereas for Duchamp, the rational Frenchman, it meant a fatigue so enervating that finally the wish to paint at all was killed. Both the yearnings of Malevich’s Slavic soul and the deductions of Duchamp’s rationalist mind led both men ultimately to reject and exclude from their work many of the most cherished premises of Western art in favor of an art stripped to its bare, irreducible minimum.

How I Spent My Summer Vacation

Philip Leider

Despite the rhetorical tendency to suggest the social upheaval of the '60s ended with the actual decade, 1970 remained a year of unrest. And Artforum was still the locus of formalist criticism, which was proving increasingly unable to account for art that contributed to larger cultural movements, like Civil Rights, women’s liberation, anti-war protests, and more. (Tellingly, The Partisan Review , which birthed formalism, had by then distanced itself from its communist associations and, as an editorial body, was supportive of American Interventionism in Vietnam. Greenberg was a vocal hawk.) Subtitled “Art and Politics in Nevada, Berkeley, San Francisco, and Utah,” the editor’s note to the September 1970 issue of Artforum , written by Philip Leider, ostensibly recounts a road trip undertaken with Richard Serra and Abbie Hoffman to see Michael Heizer’s Double Negative in the Nevada desert.

RELATED: A City of Art in the Desert: Behind Michael Heizer’s Monumental Visions for Nevada

However, the essay is also an account of an onsetting disillusion with formalism, which Leider found left him woefully unequipped to process the protests that had erupted surrounding an exhibition of prints by Paul Wunderlich at the Phoenix Gallery in Berkeley. Wunderlich’s depictions of nude women were shown concurrently to an exhibition of drawings sold to raise money for Vietnamese orphans. The juxtaposition of a canonical, patriarchal form of representation and liberal posturing, to which the protestors objected, showcased the limitations of a methodology that placed the aesthetic elements of a picture plane far above the actual world in which it existed. Less than a year later, Leider stepped down as editor-in-chief and Artforum began to lose its emphasis on late Modernism.

I thought the women were probably with me—if they were, I was with them. I thought the women were picketing the show because it was reactionary art. To the women, [Piet] Mondrian must be a great revolutionary artist. Abstract art broke all of those chains thirty years ago! What is a Movement gallery showing dumb stuff like this for? But if it were just a matter of reactionary art , why would the women picket it? Why not? Women care as much about art as men do—maybe more. The question is, why weren’t the men right there with them?

Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?

Linda Nochlin

While Artforum , in its early history, had established a reputation as a generator for formalist theory, ARTnews had followed a decidedly more Rosenberg-ian course, emphasizing art as a practice for investigating the world. The January 1971 issue of the magazine was dedicated to “Women’s Liberation, Woman Artists, and Art History” and included an iconoclastic essay by Linda Nochlin titled “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?”

RELATED: An Introduction to Feminist Art

Nochlin notes that it’s tempting to answer the question “why have there been no great women artists?” by listing examples of those overlooked by critical and institutional organizations (a labor that Nochlin admits has great merit). However, she notes, “by attempting to answer it, they tacitly reinforce its negative implications,” namely that women are intrinsically less capable of achieving artistic merit than men. Instead, Nochlin’s essay functions as a critique of art institutions, beginning with European salons, which were structured in such a way as to deter women from rising to the highest echelons. Nochlin’s essay is considered the beginning of modern feminist art history and a textbook example of institutional critique.

There are no women equivalents for Michelangelo or Rembrandt, Delacroix or Cézanne, Picasso or Matisse, or even in very recent times, for de Kooning or Warhol, any more than there are black American equivalents for the same. If there actually were large numbers of “hidden” great women artists, or if there really should be different standards for women’s art as opposed to men’s—and one can’t have it both ways—then what are feminists fighting for? If women have in fact achieved the same status as men in the arts, then the status quo is fine as it is. But in actuality, as we all know, things as they are and as they have been, in the arts as in a hundred other areas, are stultifying, oppressive, and discouraging to all those, women among them, who did not have the good fortune to be born white, preferably middle class and above all, male. The fault lies not in our stars, our hormones, our menstrual cycles, or our empty internal spaces, but in our institutions and our education.

Doctor, Lawyer, Indian Chief

Thomas McEvilley

One of the many extrapolations of Nochlin’s essay is that contemporary museum institutions continue to reflect the gendered and racist biases of preceding centuries by reinforcing the supremacy of specific master artists. In a 1984 Artforum review, Thomas McEvilley, a classicist new to the world of contemporary art, made the case that the Museum of Modern Art in New York served as an exclusionary temple to certain high-minded Modernists—namely, Picasso, Matisse, and Pollock—who, in fact, took many of their innovations from native cultures.

RELATED: MoMA Curator Laura Hoptman on How to Tell a Good Painting From a “Bogus” Painting

In 1984, MoMA organized a blockbuster exhibition. Curated by William Rubin and Kirk Varnedoe, both of whom were avowed formalists, “‘Primitivism’ in 20th Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern” collected works by European painters like Paul Gaugin and Picasso with cultural artifacts from Zaire, arctic communities, and elsewhere. McEvilley takes aim at the “the absolutist view of formalist Modernism” in which MoMA is rooted. He argues that the removal tribal artifacts from their contexts (for example, many were ritual items intended for ceremonies, not display) and placement of them, unattributed, near works by European artists, censors the cultural contributions of non-Western civilizations in deference to an idealized European genius.

The fact that the primitive “looks like” the Modern is interpreted as validating the Modern by showing that its values are universal, while at the same time projecting it—and with it MoMA—into the future as a permanent canon. A counter view is possible: that primitivism on the contrary invalidates Modernism by showing it to be derivative and subject to external causation. At one level this show undertakes precisely to coopt that question by answering it before it has really been asked, and by burying it under a mass of information.

Please Wait By the Coatroom

Not content to let MoMA and the last vestiges of formalism off the hook yet, John Yau wrote in 1988 an essay on Wifredo Lam, a Cuban painter who lived and worked in Paris among Picasso, Matisse, Georges Braque, and others. Noting Lam’s many influences—his Afro-Cuban mother, Chinese father, and Yoruba godmother—Yau laments the placement of Lam’s The Jungle near the coatroom in the Museum of Modern Art, as opposed to within the Modernist galleries several floors above. The painting was accompanied by a brief entry written by former curator William Rubin, who, Yau argues, adopted Greenberg’s theories because they endowed him with “a connoisseur’s lens with which one can scan all art.”

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Here, as with with McEvilley’s essay, Yau illustrates how formalism, as adapted by museum institutions, became a (perhaps unintentional) method for reinforcing the exclusionary framework that Nochlin argued excluded women and black artists for centuries.

Rubin sees in Lam only what is in his own eyes: colorless or white artists. For Lam to have achieved the status of unique individual, he would have had to successfully adapt to the conditions of imprisonment (the aesthetic standards of a fixed tradition) Rubin and others both construct and watch over. To enter this prison, which takes the alluring form of museums, art history textbooks, galleries, and magazines, an individual must suppress his cultural differences and become a colorless ghost. The bind every hybrid American artist finds themselves in is this: should they try and deal with the constantly changing polymorphous conditions effecting identity, tradition, and reality? Or should they assimilate into the mainstream art world by focusing on approved-of aesthetic issues? Lam’s response to this bind sets an important precedent. Instead of assimilating, Lam infiltrates the syntactical rules of “the exploiters” with his own specific language. He becomes, as he says, “a Trojan horse.”

Black Culture and Postmodernism

Cornel West

The opening up of cultural discourse did not mean that it immediately made room for voices of all dimensions. Cornel West notes as much in his 1989 essay “Black Culture and Postmodernism,” in which he argues that postmodernism, much like Modernism before it, remains primarily ahistorical, which makes it difficult for “oppressed peoples to exercise their opposition to hierarchies of power.” West’s position is that the proliferation of theory and criticism that accompanied the rise of postmodernism provided mechanisms by which black culture could “be conversant with and, to a degree, participants in the debate.” Without their voices, postmodernism would remain yet another exclusionary movements.

RELATED: Kerry James Marshall on Painting Blackness as a Noun Vs. Verb

As the consumption cycle of advanced multinational corporate capitalism was sped up in order to sustain the production of luxury goods, cultural production became more and more mass-commodity production. The stress here is not simply on the new and fashionable but also on the exotic and primitive. Black cultural products have historically served as a major source for European and Euro-American exotic interests—interests that issue from a healthy critique of the mechanistic, puritanical, utilitarian, and productivity aspects of modern life.

Minimalism and the Rhetoric of Power

Anna C. Chave

In recent years, formalist analysis has been deployed as a single tool within a more varied approach to art. Its methodology—that of analyzing a picture as an isolated phenomena—remains prevalent, and has its uses. Yet, many of the works and movements that rose to prominence under formalist critics and curators, in no small part because of their institutional acceptance, have since become part of the rearguard rather than the vanguard.

In a 1990 essay for Arts Magazine , Anna Chave analyzes how Minimalist sculpture possesses a “domineering, sometimes brutal rhetoric” that was aligned with “both the American military in Vietnam, and the police at home in the streets and on university campuses across the country.” In particular, Chave is concerned with the way Minimalist sculptures define themselves through a process of negation. Of particular relevance to Chave’s argument are the massive steel sculptures by Minimalist artist Richard Serra.

Tilted Arc was installed in Federal Plaza in lower Manhattan in 1981. Chave describes the work as a “mammoth, perilously tilted steel arc [that] formed a divisive barrier too tall to see over, and a protracted trip to walk around.” She writes, “it is more often the case with Serra that his work doesn’t simply exemplify aggression or domination, but acts it out.” Tilted Arc was so controversial upon its erecting that the General Services Administration, which commissioned the work, held hearings in response to petitions demanding the work be removed. Worth quoting at length, Chave writes:

A predictable defense of Serra’s work was mounted by critics, curators, dealers, collectors, and some fellow artists…. The principle arguments mustered on Serra’s behalf were old ones concerning the nature and function of the avant-garde…. What Rubin and Serra’s other supporters declined to ask is whether the sculptor really is, in the most meaningful sense of the term, an avant-garde artist. Being avant-garde implies being ahead of, outside, or against the dominant culture; proffering a vision that implicitly stands (at least when it is conceived) as a critique of entrenched forms and structures…. But Serra’s work is securely embedded within the system: when the brouhaha over Arc was at its height, he was enjoying a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art…. [The defense’s] arguments locate Serra not with the vanguard but with the standing army or “status quo.” … More thoughtful, sensible, and eloquent testimony at the hearing came instead from some of the uncouth:

My name is Danny Katz and I work in this building as a clerk. My friend Vito told me this morning that I am a philistine. Despite that I am getting up to speak…. I don’t think this issue should be elevated into a dispute between the forces of ignorance and art, or art versus government. I really blame government less because it has long ago outgrown its human dimension. But from the artists I expected a lot more. I didn’t expect to hear them rely on the tired and dangerous reasoning that the government has made a deal, so let the rabble live with the steel because it’s a deal. That kind of mentality leads to wars. We had a deal with Vietnam. I didn’t expect to hear the arrogant position that art justifies interference with the simple joys of human activity in a plaza. It’s not a great plaza by international standards, but it is a small refuge and place of revival for people who ride to work in steel containers, work in sealed rooms, and breathe recirculated air all day. Is the purpose of art in public places to seal off a route of escape, to stress the absence of joy and hope? I can’t believe this was the artistic intention, yet to my sadness this for me has become the dominant effect of the work, and it’s all the fault of its position and location. I can accept anything in art, but I can’t accept physical assault and complete destruction of pathetic human activity. No work of art created with a contempt for ordinary humanity and without respect for the common element of human experience can be great. It will always lack dimension.

The terms Katz associated with Serra’s project include arrogance and contempt, assault, and destruction; he saw the Minimalist idiom, in other words, as continuous with the master discourse of our imperious and violent technocracy.

The End of Art

Arthur Danto

Like Greenberg, Arthur Danto was an art critic for The Nation . However, Danto was overtly critical of Greenberg’s ideology and the influence he wielded over Modern and contemporary art. Nor was he a follower of Harold Rosenberg, though they shared influences, among them the phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Danto’s chief contribution to contemporary art was his advancing of Pop Artists, particularly Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein .

In “The End of Art” Danto argues that society at large determines and accepts art, which no longer progresses linearly, categorized by movements. Instead, viewers each possess a theory or two, which they use to interpret works, and art institutions are largely tasked with developing, testing, and modifying various interpretive methods. In this way, art differs little from philosophy. After decades of infighting regarding the proper way to interpret works of art, Danto essentially sanctioned each approach and the institutions that gave rise to them. He came to call this “pluralism.”

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Similarly, in “Painting, Politics, and Post-Historical Art,” Danto makes the case for an armistice between formalism and the various theories that arose in opposition, noting that postmodern critics like Douglas Crimp in the 1980s, who positioned themselves against formalism, nonetheless adopted the same constrictive air, minus the revolutionary beginnings.

Modernist critical practice was out of phase with what was happening in the art world itself in the late 60s and through the 1970s. It remained the basis for most critical practice, especially on the part of the curatoriat, and the art-history professoriat as well, to the degree that it descended to criticism. It became the language of the museum panel, the catalog essay, the article in the art periodical. It was a daunting paradigm, and it was the counterpart in discourse to the “broadening of taste” which reduced art of all cultures and times to its formalist skeleton, and thus, as I phrased it, transformed every museum into a Museum of Modern Art, whatever that museum’s contents. It was the stable of the docent’s gallery talk and the art appreciation course—and it was replaced, not totally but massively, by the postmodernist discourse that was imported from Paris in the late 70s, in the texts of Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Jean Baudrillard, Jean-François Lyotard, and Jacques Lacan, and of the French feminists Hélène Cixous and Luce Irigaray. That is the discourse [Douglas] Crimp internalizes, and it came to be lingua artspeak everywhere. Like modernist discourse, it applied to everything, so that there was room for deconstructive and “archeological” discussion of art of every period.

Editor’s Note: This list was drawn in part from a 2014 seminar taught by Debra Bricker Balken in the MFA program in Art Writing at the School of Visual Arts titled Critical Strategies: Late Modernism/Postmodernism. Additional sources can be found here , here , here (paywall), and here . Also relevant are reviews of the 2008 exhibition at the Jewish Museum, “Action/Abstraction: Pollock, de Kooning, and American Art, 1940–1976,” notably those by Roberta Smith , Peter Schjeldahl , and Martha Schwendener .

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The Impact of Sigmund Freud’s Theories on Art

From art critic to collector and influencer, the great psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud had a profound impact on visual art. Here we examine the many ways Sigmund Freud’s theories left an indelible mark on art history.

Widely recognised as the “father of psychoanalysis”, Austrian neurologist Sigmund Freud forever altered the way we see ourselves. Believing our adult behaviour is driven by repressed childhood experiences of love, loss, sexuality and death, he wrote extensively on the subject, as well as practicing psychoanalytical therapy with many patients in distress. Nowadays, most of Freud’s ideas have generally been replaced by a more rational, scientific approach to human psychology. But within the arts, the creativity and inventiveness of Sigmund Freud’s theories continue to fascinate and inspire countless creative thinkers.

Sigmund Freud’s Role In The Arts

Freud’s involvement with the arts during his lifetime included several strands of activity. He wrote extensively about the lives and personalities of artists, particularly those from the Renaissance. Freud was also an avid art collector. Throughout his life, he amassed a vast archive of over 2,500 antiquities from ancient civilisations around the world. He displayed his collection in his home office in Vienna, and later in London. Such was the extent of his collection, that his London home was converted into the Freud Museum in 1986, to showcase his impressive archive to the world.

Although Freud’s personal preference was for ancient art, his psychoanalytical theories had a lasting influence on the early 20 th century avant-garde. As artists moved increasingly beyond the visible world into explorations of the individual human mind, Freud’s theories encapsulated the spirit of the times, and his techniques of dream analysis and free association had a particularly profound impact on the international Surrealist movement. Even today, artists continue to find fertile source material in Freud’s fascinating theories, while his grandson, Lucian Freud , is one of the 21 st century’s most popular painters.

Sigmund Freud’s Writings on Art

Freud was fascinated by art. Dissecting the minds of creative thinkers became an important strand of his practice as a writer, allowing him to search for the deeper drives that compelled these creative geniuses. He wrote analytical essays on individual artworks, including The Moses of Michelangelo, and even published an entire book on Leonardo da Vinci, titled Leonardo Da Vinci and a Memory of his Childhood, 1910, exploring the artist’s childhood, sexuality and how it came to inform his art as an adult. Although Freud was sometimes criticised for bringing too much autobiographical content into his art essays, the way he intrinsically linked artists’ lives with their work has undoubtedly shaped the way we understand art today.

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Another fascinating theory Freud developed around art was his concept of “ideational mimetics.” He argued an artwork could cause a powerful exchange of energy between viewer and work of art, similar to the experience of empathy. Freud argued this experience was a fundamental part of life in higher level civilisation, revealing how important he saw the role of art in society.

An Astonishing Art Collection

In 1986, Freud’s London home was converted into an art museum, showcasing to the world the extent of his vast art collection. One hundred years earlier, in 1896, the young Freud was still living in Vienna, while his father had just passed away. During this period of dramatic upheaval and re-evaluation, he began collecting art objects. Still relatively unknown and with a limited income, Freud’s earliest purchases were plaster replicas of Italian Renaissance artworks . But as his career flourished in the years that followed, Freud’s collection became increasingly diverse and adventurous. He developed a particular taste for rare antiquities, seeing in ancient civilisations intrinsic meanings about human society, which in turn came to inform much of his writing and theories. Many of his art objects were bought from Vienna’s markets, originating from ancient kingdoms around the world, including Egypt, Greece, Rome, India, China and Etruria. 

Freud displayed this astonishing collection in his Vienna office, and later in London, when forced to run from Nazis during the Second World War. On the walls, they were arranged in an eclectic, haphazard way, as Bryony Davies, assistant curator at the Freud Museum points out: “Freud’s own display style was personal … his objects appear in his own unique way.” On his desk, he had his smallest and most precious objects laid out, which he was said to enjoy touching, or even carrying around with him while he was working, while cabinets were packed with objects arranged into groupings including Greek vessels and Eros statues. Freud had a particular fascination with two faced figures, which feature prominently in his collection, and reflect his theories on dualisms, such as pleasure/reality, life/death, and conscious/subconscious.

Freud’s statuette of Athena, the goddess of wisdom and war, was one of his most prized possessions, which he would sit on the centre of his writing desk. A copy of a Greek original, Freud’s version most likely dates from the 1 st or 2 nd century A.D. Freud smuggled Athena with him when he fled from Austria to London following the Nazi invasions of the Second World War, and she still sits proudly on the desk of his London Museum today.

Sigmund Freud’s Impact on Surrealism

Freud’s theories had a particularly profound impact on the Surrealist Movement of the early 20 th century. They, in turn, brought his ideas into the public eye, making him more popular than ever. His iconic text, The Interpretation of Dreams, 1899, was particularly important to Surrealist artists. Connecting with Freud’s belief that dreams could reveal hidden meanings about our innermost desires, which were often erotic or sexualised, the Surrealists discovered and pioneered a wide range of techniques, unleashing the wondrously complex, unconscious world of dreams into their art. 

Many Surrealists adopted Freud’s techniques of free association and automatic drawing, working in a way that they believed could release unconscious thoughts. These included automatic writing without forethought, or drawing and painting with free flowing, improvised methods, as seen in the freewheeling line drawings of Paul Klee and Joan Miro . Max Ernst also made rubbings, scrapings and collages that relied on chance, play and accident. Collage was a popular technique that allowed artists to work quickly, combining images from clashing sources in strange and unexpected ways. French poet Andre Breton , who led the Parisian Surrealist group, called these ideas, “Thought expressed in the absence of any control exerted by reason, and outside all moral and aesthetic considerations.” These ideas, in turn, shaped the intuitive art of the American Abstract Expressionists in the 1950s, including Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock .

Some Surrealists took inspiration from their own dreams and nightmares to invoke a Freudian world, creating startlingly life-like depictions of a strange, alternate reality. In Dorothea Tanning’s Eine Kleine Nachtmusik, 1943, a domestic scene turns into a horrific nightmare, while in Salvador Dali’s strange, mystical landscapes, objects are stretched, distorted and turned into monstrous beings. Dali claimed his imagery came from his visionary dreams, which he would see just as he was falling asleep, calling this phase “the slumber with a key.”

Freud’s essay on The Uncanny, published in 1919, also had a lasting impact on Surrealist art. Freud argued that “the uncanny” was a translation of something once familiar into the haunting and disturbing, making it strangely familiar, such as eerie dolls coming to life, doppelgangers, or mirrors and shadows. These theories proved immensely popular with artists working in a wide range of media, including sculpture, photography and film. In the wake of the First World War, Freud’s theories on the uncanny had particularly jarring resonance with many, because the once ordinary and familiar had been transformed into the fearful and menacing. Hans Bellmer’s haunting dolls took on this uncanny quality, as did Man Ray’s transformation of a flat iron into a weapon in Cadeau, 1921. 

Freud was said to be somewhat bemused and baffled when, as he wrote, “the Surrealists have apparently chosen me as their patron saint.” Unimpressed by much of their art, he argued their attempts to create the illusion of automatic thought and dream-like imagery were too self-conscious and driven by ego to be convincing. 

Sigmund Freud’s Theories And Its Influence In Art Today

The Surrealists did much to popularize Freud’s theories in the modern and contemporary art world. One of the most prominent artists to follow on their legacy was the French sculptor Louise Bourgeois. She argued the best art of the 20 th century had a confessional, autobiographical element and was “a form of psychoanalysis.” Citing her own troubled childhood as the inspiration for much of her art, she regularly underwent psychoanalysis four times a week for most of her adult life. Her artworks are brimming with sexual innuendo, and make reference to Freud’s theories on gender, particularly his belief that we have both male and female aspects to our identity. Janus Fleuri, 1968, has a two-part, hybrid sexuality, and the horrifyingly graphic The Destruction of the Father, 1974, envisions her destroying her father in a truly Freudian scenario. 

Many of the Young British Artists in the 1990s played with Freud’s theories, particularly the British sculptor Sarah Lucas. Reimagining Freud’s concept of the uncanny with a cheeky, laddish slant, her famous installation Au Naturel, 1994, transforms seemingly banal, found objects into an arrangement loaded with crude sexual references. Other works draw on the lewd sexual languages of Hans Bellmer and Louise Bourgeois , made from stuffed tights filled with foam, which become lumpy or dangling mutations resembling both male and female body parts.

Alongside Freud’s own extensive art collection, The Freud Museum stages regular solo and group displays, as well as commissioning site specific projects, which reveal the psychoanalyst’s long-lasting influence on contemporary art practices. To celebrate 100 years since the publication of The Uncanny, in 2019 the Freud museum staged The Uncanny: A Centenary, featuring artworks by Hans Bellmer alongside contemporary practitioners, including Elizabeth Dearnley, Martha Todd and Karolina Urbaniak; this display revealed how Freud’s endlessly recyclable theories continue to ignite sparks of inspiration in the next generation.

What Can Psychoanalysis Tell Us About Hamlet?

By Rosie Lesso MA Contemporary Art Theory, BA Fine Art Rosie is a contributing writer and artist based in Scotland. She has produced writing for a wide range of arts organizations including Tate Modern, The National Galleries of Scotland, Art Monthly, and Scottish Art News, with a focus on modern and contemporary art. She holds an MA in Contemporary Art Theory from the University of Edinburgh and a BA in Fine Art from Edinburgh College of Art. Previously she has worked in both curatorial and educational roles, discovering how stories and history can really enrich our experience of art.

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Investigating preferences in art collecting: the case of the François Pinault Collection

• Review Article
• Open access
• Published: 23 September 2021
• Volume 2022 , pages 107–133, ( 2022 )

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This article focuses on private art collections that play a relevant role on the art market while reducing its information asymmetry. Knowledge of how art consumers such as private art collectors show preferences for specific artworks may allow to identify collecting patterns based on the preference of some artworks’ signs. Understanding these patterns is essential for evaluating the impact of art collectors on the art market. The evolution of the art market shows complex consumption systems that shape the cognition and behavior of actors such as private art collectors. Consequently, to be a key art collector and to progress as such in today’s art world implies a constant reinterpretation about what it means to consume and to collect art. This paper explores the collection of one of the most important art collectors in the world, the French tycoon François Pinault. More precisely, his background as a key collector was examined, and a number of preferences toward particular signs which connote his collected artworks were identified. All the collected artworks were observed through a descriptive data analysis of the Pinault Collection’s exhibition catalogues, published from 2006 to 2015, enforced by the statistical decision tree classifier. Results show how the Pinault Collection is shaped by collecting preferences that can be described as collecting patterns. As a preeminent collector and owner of one of the two major auction houses in the world, Pinault’s consumption preferences and decisions may impact the art market, for instance through signals and by influencing other art market players or the artists’ careers.

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1 Introduction

Compared to other product categories, the consumption of cultural and art products is especially linked to subjective features such as emotions or feelings (Hand, 2018 ; Holbrook, 1980 ). In other words, it is possible to assess that the artistic product’s value primarily depends on subjective feelings induced in the consumer. Only secondarily, it may be related to its functional meaning. According to literature, cultural products are consumed as a consequence of particular behavioral patterns deriving from preferences (Holbrook, 1980 ; Mellander et al., 2018 ). In this paper, it is assumed that the consumption of art is equally based on the one hand on a set of functional and extrinsic product’s features, and on the other on a series of intangible and intrinsic features (e.g., aesthetic, symbolic, hedonic, etc.). While the former set only deals with objective characteristics, the latter set of features is inherently connected to the consumer’s subjectivity. Taking into account the ‘art as an industry’ debate, some researchers have merely seen the artwork as an industrial product, while others have used semiotics to interpret artworks as products that own an aesthetic sign, which is defined by culture (Barrère & Santagata, 1999 ).

The framework of consumption might be of some help in identifying and valuing some behavioral topics related to arts consumption. According to Belk, collecting is a form of consumption (Belk, 1995 ) therefore art collecting is a form of art consumption. In order to deepen the observation of the topic of art consumption this paper focuses then on art collectors. It appears, also, that collecting is a consumption activity that is more often perpetuated by individuals rather than groups (e.g. families). As a consequence, a case study concerning the collection of one of the most important today’s art collectors seemed to be of particular interest. Moreover, as collecting deals with competition with others and exhibitionistic grandeur (Belk, 1995 ; Jackson, 1976 ; Muensterberger, 1994 ) the public figure of François Pinault appeared notably appropriate. In fact, Pinault is a French luxury magnate who competes with few others (e.g. the direct competitor is the French billionaire Bernard Aranult who, just like Pinault, deals with luxury and owns one of the most important private art collections in the world). Finally, it is evident how a person like Pinault inevitably plays a key role in the art market and in the art world essentially by transmitting signals and influencing the market through many levels (artists’ economic and symbolic values, artists’ careers, auctions’ results, other preeminent art collectors’ consumption preferences and choices, etc.). This is the reason behind this paper which aims to observe this important collection and to identify and examine any potential consuming and collecting pattern based on some artwork signs’ preference.

As for theoretical implications, despite the recent surge in academic articles on private art collections, there is a lack of research on the collectors’ preferences that shape their collections. This article aims to fill this gap by studying such preferences, and in particular the signals that preeminent private art collectors send on the market through the collected artists and artworks. In doing this, this article contributes to the literature on art markets and on the more recent topic of private art collections with the development of a new multifaceted theoretical approach. This approach, while observing the implications of consumption in art collection, also applies signaling theory to the study of art goods in art collections in order to better understand how these collections reduce information asymmetry regarding their role on symbolic, economic, and market value.

Moreover, the advancement in the exploration of the Pinault case implies an unusual combination of humanities and social science qualitative and quantitative techniques. This choice is due to the fact that the topic of collecting in itself has been so far multifaceted in literature.

This essay is structured as follows. Following the Introduction section, Sect.  2 looks into the literature concerning information asymmetry, signs, signals, and art consumption. This will help better to define a consumption theoretical background, specifically related to fine arts. Such composite speculative framework will contribute to the observation of a key art market subject such as the one of art collectors in order to understand if they respond to some consuming preferences. Section  3 highlights how this study approaches such novel issue by analyzing the case of a private art collection and attempts to discover if the collected artworks and the collected artists are bought and collected randomly, or if they are bought and collected following specific patterns. Practical evidence of the above is provided in Sect. 4 by an in-depth examination of one of the most significant private art collections, the François Pinault’s collection, through a database that includes all the 885 artworks exhibited by the François Pinault Foundation in four different countries such as Italy, France, South Korea and Russia, from 2006 until 2015. This time frame covers almost ten years of the collection’s history as it goes from the first exhibition, “Where Are We Going? A Selection of Works from the François Pinault Collection”, in Palazzo Grassi, Venice, in 2006, to the exhibition “Prima Materia”, Punta della Dogana, Venice, ended in 2015. Section  5 strengthens the data descriptive analysis of the Pinault Collection’s exhibition catalogues through the statistical decision tree classifier analysis which shows how the Pinault Collection is shaped by patterns that can be described as collecting preferences and consequently, as art consumer behaviors. Finally, while Sect.  6 , after some concluding remarks, draws attention to some possible managerial implications, Sect.  7 points to the limitations of the research conducted and suggests some avenues for further investigations.

2 Literature review

2.1 characterization of art goods.

Every artwork encompasses artistic-cultural and economic features. Whereas the economic features relate to the artwork’s price (Baumol, 1986 ), the artistic-cultural features relate to quality. However, both price and quality in relation to art goods are hard to define (Caves, 2000 ), as in the art market the level of information varies and is never homogeneous (Candela & Scorcu, 2004 ; Coffmann, 1991 ; Ginsburgh & Throsby, 2006 ; Rasmunsen, 2006 ; Shönfeld & Reinstaller, 2007 ; Tirole, 1998 ). The theories on information asymmetry (Akerlof, 1970 ; Connelly et al., 2011 ) seem to be particularly appropriate.

Candela et al., ( 2012 ) observe that “When the condition of symmetric dis/information holds, the agents agree on the evaluation of the artwork. However, in the art market neither symmetric information nor symmetric disinformation happen frequently” (290), as the condition of asymmetric information is more common (Candela et al., 2009 ; Candela et al., 2012 ; Shönfeld & Reinstaller, 2007 ). For the sake of this study, the research of Candela et al., ( 2012 ) has proved to be highly significant. In order to examine the issue of artworks’ quality evaluation under the conditions of information asymmetry, the authors create a model based on signs and signals intrinsic to the work. Both drive the art market by influencing its demand and supply (Candela et al., 2012 ).

The above mentioned authors distinguish between signs that are clearly manifested, as “observable” and “unalterable” intrinsic features of the artworks, and signals that, following the signaling theory, are “interpretable” features that parties trade on the market (Connelly et al., 2011 ). Although signs refer to semiotics and, as concerns to visual art, are based on the visuality of Pierce’s semiotics (Leja, 2000 ), the authors simplify their conceptual implications by indicating that they relate to artworks features such as materials, technique, style, etc. Signals, conversely, are marketer-controlled and easy-to-acquire information that consumers can use in order to infer the product quality and value (Bloom & Reve, 1990 ). Scholars have interpreted signals as institutions able to act against the effects of quality uncertainty. They have also identified sets of these institutions, going from guarantees, brand names, licensing practices (Akerlof, 1970 ), to certification and quality labels (Jahn et al., 2005 ), and to environmental alliances (Jolink & Niesten, 2020 ). In the art field the signals that play a crucial role in reducing information asymmetries are typically associated to the individual artwork and consist on its certificate of authenticity, attribution, provenance, condition, loss history (e.g. Art Loss Register), and literature. Signals, in the art field, refer then also to exhibitions and catalogues.

If we look at the art market’s demand and competitors perspective, some of the observable signs and signals inevitably become criteria of guidance or preference and choice when, for instance, a collector prefers specific artworks with determined characteristics, purchases them and inserts them into his/her collection. As for the classification of product attributes based on the level of information asymmetry existing between the supplier and the customers, where Potemkin assigns them the maximum level of asymmetry (Jahn et al., 2005 ), the above mentioned artworks’ signs and signals may impact differently. For instance, while signs are characterized by qualities which can be appraised before and after each purchase (search and experience attributes), signals (e.g. certifications or catalogues) are characterized by qualities that rely on third-party judgments (credence attributes) or by process-oriented qualities unknown to both third parties and customers (Potemkin attribute). In the art world, in fact, no certification is absolutely certain.

Due to the art object’s nature, its value dimension based on functional and utilitarian features is linked to its symbolic, aesthetic, and hedonic dimensions. As a consequence, research on art economics touches a multitude of different aspects. Nevertheless, if we explore the aspect of art consumption, we find that only few studies focus on art consumption preferences and choices (Bourgeon-Renault, 2000 ; Bradshaw, 2010 ; Grappi & Montanari, 2009 ; Slack et al., 2008 ). Botti’s perspective ( 2000 ) appears here of special interest. Botti observed the concept of the value of consumption through the process of artistic consumption and the enhancement of artistic value among the diverse involved actors. According to this author, the transmission of value among the actors involved in the symbolic and economic process of art is the result of a blending between product centered and consumer centered patterns.

The literature on art markets confirms that the concept of ‘art product’ is still being debated as, by its nature, an art object pertains to both the materialistic and the creative world (Hirschman, 1983 ; Kubacki & Croft, 2011 ; Lehman & Wickham, 2014 ). The ‘product’ itself results from a blending of tangible and intangible assets (Levitt, 1980 ). Indeed, on the one hand, it is defined by a set of tangible features such as color, shape, material, size, etc.; on the other hand, it represents and transmits a set of symbolic features such as taste, social status, etc. Together, these two different categories of features enclose all the benefits the consumer obtains when he or she purchases the product.

When we translate such an argument into the arts world’s language, any definition of ‘art product’ verges on complexity. Approaches from all different disciplines concerning this topic show abstract or blurring theoretical boundaries. For instance, Fillis ( 2006 ), among others, explained that the difference between consumer products and arts products lies in the fact that this last group has poor or no utilitarian nor functional value. Still, when you think about art with its systems and markets (e.g., museums, galleries, collectors, etc.), often, in addition to symbolic motivations, there are functional and/or utilitarian stimuli. Nevertheless Hirschman ( 1983 ) assessed that, differently from the conventional market model, an art product is created in principle as a consequence of the artist’s (the producer) own self-aspiration. Only then, such a product is inserted into the art market whose actors and consumers decide whether to accept (and/or buy) it or not. Hirschman has been one of the first authors who have categorized the various audiences and has analyzed the impact of specific networks in the art production process. Thanks to similar perspectives (Boorsma, 2006 ; Botti, 2000 ; Hirschman, 1983 ), it is possible to identify one of the primary roles of key art market’s actors such as dealers or private collectors, i.e. the capability to transform a creative and artistic good into an art product. Hence, an art product possesses both intrinsic and extrinsic assets.

If we take into account the art context, it may be interesting to consider the distinction between symbolic products and substantive products developed by Khalil ( 2000 ). If symbolic products convey a self-regarding value, the substantive ones convey a functional monetary value. The author assessed that symbolic products may perform, among various possibilities, as vanity goods or as prestige goods , both able to generate self-esteem and admiration. In other contexts, they can serve as pride goods in order to enhance a sense of ‘respect’, or even function as identity goods in order to increase a sense of ‘dignity’. When a private art collector purchases artworks with an investment perspective (e.g., following artists’ monetary values and ranking), such artworks may certainly be seen as substantive products . Nevertheless, they may also function as symbolic products : in fact, art collectors’ motivations are very often connected to intangible features such as vanity, prestige, status, well-being, etc. (Wheatley & Bickerton, 2017 ; Belk et al., 2003 ; Belk et al., 1991 ). Solomon ( 1983 ) states that products help build and structure social roles that consumers rely on in order to define themselves. Such consumption behavior along with its social objectives is frequently linked to aesthetic-orientated consumption (Venkatesh & Meamber, 2006 ). This type of consumption clearly includes fine art consumption.

2.2 The implications of consumption in the field of art collection

From a consumption point of view, an artwork can be consumed through two different forms: it can be acquired and then possessed or it can be observed and contemplated in a private or public exhibition space. Nevertheless, the process of consumption which is represented by the appreciation of the artwork, is analogous in both forms. The artworks consumption forms (that of either acquiring or appreciating in an exhibition space) offer “two different circumstances of consumption: one is through a private, permanent, and ownership-linked approach; the other is through a public, temporal, and circumstantial approach” (Chen, 2009 ).

Even though many forms of consumption may be found in art (a paying visitor of a museum’s permanent collection or temporary exhibition is ‘consuming’ art; museums’ buyers and curators who buy artworks are ‘consuming’ art; etc.), this paper focuses on the particular case of art collectors. In fact, when they acquire artworks and construct their collection, they can rightly be viewed as art consumers.

Although economics, marketing, and social sciences have certainly contributed to addressing the issue of consumption in arts and culture, the specific topic of consumer behavior in arts appears to be rather peripheral. In particular, research that approaches the topic of consumer behavior in art collecting is scant although some studies do exist (e.g. Chen, 2009 ; Shönfeld & Reinstaller, 2007 ). All the same, in order to better understand the implications of consumption in art collecting, a brief understanding of how consumer behavior theory may relate to art can result of some interest.

The classical economic model of consumer behavior envisages a consumer exploiting a product’s value, given the limitations of a specific monetary sum. Moreover, a product’s value is determined by considering the product itself as a unique entity. In opposition to this view, thanks to Lancaster’s new consumption theory, the product is viewed as a sum of diverse features ( properties ) that affect the consumer’s decision (Lancaster, 1971 ). Therefore, a consumer decides by choosing among the features of diverse available products, depending on monetary disposition, price, and utility. More precisely, the choice of a consumer depends on a product’s best aggregation of features in terms of convenience and efficacy. A similar speculation allows us to define art products’ consumer behavior. An artwork, in fact, rather than being viewed as a whole entity, must be viewed, understood, consumed, and eventually bought, through the variety of its natural characteristics (e.g., the material or the media, the size, the colors, the context in which it is displayed or showed, etc.). Moreover, artworks’ intangible features may also include the artist/producer’s gender, age, nationality, economic value, degree of popularity, etc.

Taking into account the case of art collectors, all these single characteristics and assets of an artwork, are indeed truly valued and may strongly impact on buying and collecting decisions (Belk et al. 1991 ; Codignola, 2015 ).

In their study, Firat and Venkatesh ( 1993 ) assessed how in postmodern society an individual makes decisions through hedonistic experiences and emotions. They also stated that as consumption is essentially a social function, individuals consume images instead of functional products and that, through such form of consumption, they build their identity. An art collector who buys selected artworks from selected artists, does live aesthetic, emotional, and hedonistic experiences. At the same time, he is building his own particular identity as a collector.

Part of the consumer behavior’s theory affirms that consumers estimate products in different ways, depending on various individual factors (Cova, 1996 ; Cyert & March, 1983 ; Holt, 1995 ). It is clear that especially in arts, where we deal with aesthetics and symbolic goods, taste, which can influence a consumer decision, changes from one individual to the other. As far as the implications of time in decision-making processes are concerned (Becker, 1965 ; Bergadaà, 1988 ), it has been proven that the art collectors’ taste also varies depending on the different periods of their lives (Belk et al. 1991 ).

An interesting part of consumer theory allows us better to frame art collectors’ consuming practices. This part refers to the studies of Cova ( 1996 ) and Hetzel ( 1996 ). While Cova observed how in postmodernity the behavior of the consumer is basically ‘erratic’, Hetzel noted that such behavior is ‘hedonic’ and ‘eclectic’. More precisely, Hetzel assessed that the postmodern consumer prefers to blend styles and products that are able to reproduce his individuality. At the same time, he seeks consumption experiences that he can perceive as ‘ludic’. Once again, these descriptions about postmodern consumer behavior appear particularly appropriate when we take into consideration the subject of art collectors. By their very nature, in fact, art collectors consume actively and longitudinally; search for the joy of an artwork’s intrinsic symbolic, hedonic, and aesthetic pleasure; pursue certain dictates of taste and fashion; try to acquire marks of personal status, and so on (Belk et al. 1991 ; Sherry & Joy, 2003 ).

By recalling the traditional marketing theories on cultural consumption, the experiential analytical framework observes the symbolic assets of products’ features (Bourgeon-Renault, 2000 ; Holbrook & Hirschman, 1982 ). Aside from looking for a ‘solution’, individuals, through cultural and art products, demand ludic and hedonistic experiences, and “imaginary and sensory stimulation” (Bourgeon-Renault, 2000 , 11). With regard to consumers’ search for experiences, the work of Bourgeon-Renault on consumer behavior in arts and culture marketing (2000) interestingly showed how “the search for experiences is concerned less with the general characteristics of the consumer (such as socio-demographic variables) than with the intrapersonal characteristics of the individual” (Bourgeon-Renault, 2000 , 11). Among the characteristics assembled by the author (Bourgeon-Renault, 2000 ; Holbrook, 1986 ; Holbrook & Batra, 1987 ; Lee & Crompton, 1992 ; McAlister & Pessemier, 1982 ; Zuckerman, 2014 ), some typical features of art collectors can be observed: sensation-seeking; variety-seeking; novelty-seeking; emotions; intrinsic or extrinsic motivations of the individual concerning the cultural product; and visual orientation.

2.3 The experiential and the semiological perspective

The study of Bourgeon-Renault ( 2000 ) pointed out that the two major contributions of marketing to the observation of consumption in arts and culture derive from two paradigms: the experiential and the semiological. According to the first one, the consequences of consumers’ choices are related to the personal enjoyment experienced by the consumer, rather than to the products’ tangible and objective functions. As a consequence, the benchmarks used to estimate the “success of consumption” are aesthetic (Bourgeon-Renault 2000 12). Conversely, according to the semiotic model (Baudrillard, 1972 ), semiotics is able to understand certain patterns of consumption. All products are made of meanings and these diverge from one individual to the other. If this is true in the field of culture (Baudrillard, 1972 ; Gourdon, 1982 ), it is even more evident for art. This means that when we look at an artwork, each of us may consume a different product. In fact, beyond the objective and tangible features of the artwork, we can all respond in a different way depending on our personal feelings.

It is clear that art collectors, as any visitor of an art exhibition in a gallery or museum, correspond perfectly to these consumption patterns. However, an even more appropriate theoretical marketing contribution on art collection consumption behavior derives perhaps from the works of the economic sociologists, Veblen ( 1899 ) and Bourdieu ( 1979 ). In fact, as will emerge in the next paragraph, one of the most critical dimensions in being an art collector is represented by the social dimension. Both authors examined the divergences between personal approaches and cultural assets over time, in relation to the individual’s affiliation to a particular social cluster. Following such reasoning, it is easier to understand and interpret art collectors’ consuming patterns. Because an art product exists as a symbol and emanates signs, through the selection of certain artworks or artists an art collector can build a social code and show if he or she belongs to a specific social group or not, or to which social group he or she belongs.

To buy artists that are included in certain quotation price ranges or that appear (or do not appear) in some official rankings of ‘success’, or, to buy artworks that follow (or do not follow) specific art fashion trends (e.g., figurative art, performances, African art, young emergent art, etc.), may allow the collector to create his own identity and to distinguish himself from the other collectors.

Baudrillard ( 1972 ) argued that art consumption is evidenced through sign-goods and depends on social status. Moreover, taking into account the relationship with art products, the process of art consumption is achieved through three stages: possession, organization, and social practice. These phases represent the primary ‘moments’ of the majority of a collector’s being (Belk et al. 1991 ).

2.4 Art collection as art consumption

Collecting is intrinsically ‘acquisitive’ for the reason that its major objective is getting more of something. As observed by Belk et al. ( 1991 ), in today’s patterns of collecting, “the objects collected are acquired through marketplace purchase; used – through maintenance, display, and related curatorial activities” (Belk, Wallendorf, Sherry, and Holbrook 1991 , 179). If one examines the most common existing patterns of art collecting, it seems that the artworks collected are acquired through purchase in the art market and are often maintained and displayed (privately or publicly) with the support of one or more curators. Thus, art collecting is a specific variety of art consumption where art products are purchased, used, managed, and displayed. Belk and colleagues ( 1991 ) claimed that collecting represents the greatest example of a consumption activity that is also a form of production in the sense that collectors contribute to producing a “unique, valuable, and lasting contribution to the world” (Belk, Wallendorf, Sherry, and Holbrook 1991, 180). This is obvious in the case of art collectors who opt to display to the public their art collections through the medium of private foundations or galleries. Here, a general public made of various kinds of visitors can have privileged access to great art pieces while, for instance, enriching their education and knowledge. Following the definition of ‘collecting’ made by Belk and colleagues ( 1991 ), an art collection can also be viewed as an activity that is “selective, active, and longitudinal acquisition, possession, and disposition of an inter-related set of differentiated objects (…) that contribute to and derive extraordinary meaning from the entity (the collection) that this set is perceived to constitute” (Belk et al. 1991 , 180).

The art collector conceives his collection as a single body due to a perceived wholeness in its elements. The foundation of such wholeness is acknowledged by the labeling of the set of these elements as “a collection of…” and is secondarily defined through the borders that the collector stipulates. These observations strengthen this paper’s analysis. In fact, this paper aims to investigate, through the observation of one of the most important private art collections in the world, how the single body of such collection has been constructed along the years; by which signs the set is composed; if there are any recognizable boundaries fixed by the collector; etc. This will help understand if François Pinault purchases and collects artworks by preferring determined artworks’ signs. In that case, results will generate a François Pinault’s consumption and collecting pattern useful for other art market players such as artists, other collectors, etc. If we interpret Pinault as a signaler, the collecting pattern of one of the major private collectors in the world could represent a significant signal able to reduce the art market information asymmetry.

3 Research framework

The art market is a complex system articulated over different levels—global, national, and local—structured around a heterogeneous and complex institutional system built around various players. These players represent a circuit of production, diffusion, and commercialization of the artistic items. Therefore, the art market might be seen as a cluster in which heterogeneous (by nature and by influencing relevance) subjects interact, all driven by the purpose of satisfying the aesthetical and cultural needs displayed by the art beneficiary or the art consumer. Together with this classic purpose, art consumers may also be driven by speculative and investment objectives (Mei & Moses, 2005 ).

Through the years, the art market has suffered a radical reshaping and has been revolutionized from its core (Velthuis, 2012 ). Evidence of these changes is to be found in longitudinal observations concerning the subjects and the institutions that play a role in the field. The end of the government patronage era in the late nineteenth century led to the advent of a market for artworks that slowly grew to become the multi-billion business that is today. This transition led to an impressive change in the art market actors’ concept of such a market or the creation of new institutions (e.g., publicly accessible private art collections).

The flow of time and the evolution of the artistic scenario have always shaped the art market. The foremost peculiarity of the field is its perpetual transformation and its constant evolution in a never-ending stream of new forms. Thus, today’s art market is shaped by heterogeneous segments of subjects and products (e.g., among the art products distribution system or among the production field itself). It may depend on the degree of appreciation of the consumers and on their personal preferences.

The heterogeneity of the field is also determined by many other criteria, based, for instance, in spatiality (global market, national market, local market); temporality (ancient art, modern art, contemporary art, etc.); genre (painting, sculpture, photography, performance, video, etc.); distribution (primary, secondary market, etc.); and consumption power (the level of the purchasing power of buyers). The mechanisms through which such criteria function and revolve around the economic rationale and the artistic rationale may be extremely complex. In fact, today, they mostly depend on the interaction of players that constantly reinterpret what it means to produce and consume art (Frey, 2000 ).

3.1 Today’s categories of art collectors

Art collectors have always been central in the demand for artworks. Usually, the uniqueness of the product and its possession are behind their consumer motivations. Unlike collectors of other cultural products, for whom the possession of a reproduction does not weaken its intrinsic value, art collectors are affected by the connection between the aesthetical message and the original material support of the artwork, which is directly and uniquely created by the artist.

What from now on we describe as large-sized art collectors (LAC) consists of a special category of collectors who often show all their numerous acquired artworks in a private museum or a section therein. In the LAC case, the role of the collector is double. On the one side, the direct aesthetical fruition of the artwork for the broad public (described as the public’s cultural consumption act) is guaranteed; on the other side, the personal need to privately possess the artwork is satisfied. In other words, LACs are simultaneously guided by the artistic and aesthetic ratio, by values linked to fruition , and by the economic ratio and values linked to possession . As for the standard art collector’s profile, there is consensus on the fact that LACs, besides the aesthetical ratio, are also shaped by specific psychological, social, and economic values (Molfino et al., 1997 ). For instance, the need to collect artworks, increased in line with the improvement of the western’s standard of living, is the result of a desire for self-assertion through a process of materialization of artistic values. For that reason, aesthetic values are of crucial importance because cultural knowledge and aesthetic sensitivity are both fundamental conditions in the building of high-quality art collections. Not only they allow distinguishing authentic artistic values from trendy ephemeral values, but they also allow for profitable investments in a perspective that is both economic-driven and prestige-driven (Cesarano, 1967 ).

Zorloni and Willette ( 2014 ), however, suggested that the artworks’ demand is conditioned by limiting factors, such as an expendable income. Therefore, the willingness to buy artworks increases with the increase of income provided that, simultaneously, art knowledge and art culture also increase (Zorloni & Willette, 2014 ). In fact, an individual benefits in the highest degree from an artwork purchase when both the personal cultural level and the social-cultural participation in shows, vernissages, biennials, fairs, etc. are high. Thus, in light of these considerations and taking into account a basic criterion such as the dimensional one (founded on the collection’s density), it is possible to distinguish LAC from the category represented by the small and medium-sized art collectors (SMAC). This category consists of the medium and high sections of the middle class and by individuals who desire, for passion’s sake, to enter the process of artworks accumulation by investing moderate amounts. SMACs are indeed an active part of the art market demand, but from a strategic perspective, they do not have any particular influence. Their importance is directly linked to the total turnover they contribute to as buyers. Individually, they do not have any relevant role.

Instead, LACs help to evaluate art collecting also as a business. Publicly available data (e.g., interviews; newspaper and magazine articles; other media contents) all view their involvement through financial lenses. In fact, LACs’ semantics revolve almost exclusively around the collectors’ financial features and avoid other perspectives, such as personality, aesthetic or artistic-driven ideas and attitudes, and cultural knowledge.

As a consequence, media under-represent LACs’ fundamental cultural role. LACs do sustain the living artists they choose for their collection and make their economic and artistic affirmation possible. When they open a private museum, LACs also contribute to develop and enhance the opportunity for the public to benefit from an important cultural and artistic flow that in turn may create new cultural knowledge.

Besides the diverse amounts of their investments, another way to distinguish between today’s art collectors is to take into account their consumer behavior in terms of purchasing choices. One can easily categorize traditional and conservative art collectors (TAC) as well as avant-garde and innovative art collectors (AIC). Still, intermediate situations exist that are characterized by diversified interests and needs. This is the reason why art collections constantly evolve and are renovated, just like artistic movements. All in all, if TACs generally show less risky attitudes and buy artists with stable quotations or with a solid and recognized name, AICs are more sensitive to novelty. Thus, they are more inclined to risk by choosing artists who are young, emergent, or even unknown. ARTNews 200 Top Art Collector figures (ARTnews, 2018 ) showed that AICs’ interest in art can be interpreted as an expression of a dynamic lifestyle (in terms of professional career, income, travels, social life, etc.) characterized by cultural ambitions. Moreover, AICs mostly belong to the category of extremely wealthy individuals who at some point decide to create their personal collection. Their motivations range from the love of art to the enhancement of their social image, to a financial one, etc. In any event, AICs play concrete roles and produce tangible consequences in the art market (Polveroni & Agliottone, 2012 , 89).

Therefore, today’s art collections are indeed a product of their times. Not only do they give testimony to the contemporary artworks and in doing so represent the taste and the culture of their era, but when they interrupt conventional and recognized patterns, they also reveal the innovative power of change. That is why every era reinterprets what it means to consume art through new models and diverse conceptualizations of collecting.

3.2 The François Pinault Collection

Pinault is a French luxury goods magnate who is honorary chairman of the luxury group Kering Pinault’s. His huge business involvement and his passion for art, sustained by a strong financial capability—according to Forbes, his worth amounted to $28.4 billion in 2019—have made the realization of one of the most important art collections (from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries) of the world. He owns a 3000-piece art collection which he variously houses and exhibits all around the world. The Pinault Collection's museums are housed in two buildings in Venice: Palazzo Grassi, inaugurated in 2006, and Punta della Dogana, opened in 2009. Artworks in the Pinault Collection are displayed in exhibitions that often involve the artists directly through specific commissions to create new works in situ. The Teatrino, inaugurated in 2013, is organized in collaboration with institutions and universities in Venice and abroad. In 2020, the new museum of the Pinault Collection will open in Paris, inside the Bourse de Commerce. Artworks in the Pinault Collection are also recurrently presented in exhibitions across the world. Solicited by public and private institutions, the Pinault Collection loans many of its works to international exhibitions (Palazzo Grassi, n.d.).

The importance of the collection also resides in the dramatic number of contemporary artists collected – most of them living, emerged, and emerging artists – and in the artistic and economic potential of their artworks. Pinault’s several interviews always humbly point out how he nourishes the passion for art by learning from the art world and by actively participating in it (Elkann, 2012 ; Gnyp, 2015 ). He explains that in the selection of his artworks, he has always considered extremely important to build a relationship with the artist. Thus, his role as a collector does not consist only in the detached purchase of an artwork, but it involves an authentic relationship with its creator – a most important element when considering his ability to positively influence an artist’s career.

In sum, taking into account public available data and interviews, it is possible to identify Pinault has a preeminent art market player (LAC); besides, it emerges how in his approach to his profession and collection the symbolic (e.g., aesthetic) and the functional (e.g., market rationales) are both evident and constantly alternate. The analysis of the database along with the recognition of some collecting patterns will instead help us to identify whether Pinault belongs to the TAC or the AIC collector categories.

4 Data collection and procedures

The examination of the Pinault Collection provides practical evidence that allows us to observe for the first time the process behind an art collection as a consumption process within specific preferences that can be interpreted as collecting patterns.

Until now, this paper has first contextualized the process of art collection through the theoretical framework of consumption; secondly, it has defined its research context by focusing on today’s art market and today’s collector categories. Finally, the collector’s background in terms of values has been taken into account in order to examine his role – with regard to the collected artists and other players of the art market – and to examine his general attitude as a relevant collector.

The specific collecting features and motivations of Pinault are observed through an objective validation. More precisely, by interpreting exhibitions alongside with their catalogues as signals, a significant part of the publicly displayed collection is analyzed in order to identify some collecting patterns of Pinault.

To do so, Pinault Collection’s data were collected, and a database was constructed to include all the 885 artworks realized by 212 artists and shown through fifteen exhibitions held around the world from 2006 to 2015 (Palazzo Grassi and Punta della Dogana, Venice, Italy; Conciergerie, Paris, France; Song Eun Foundation, Seul, South Korea; Dinard, Bretagne, France; Garage Melnikov, Moscow, Russia; Tri Postal, Lille, France). Artworks’ data were extracted from the exhibitions’ catalogues, both online and printed ( www.Palazzograssi.it ).

This database lists the title of the artwork, some information about the artist (e.g., name, date and country of birth, country of work), and the name and time of the exhibition. The fifteen exhibitions examined are the following: À Triple Tour ; Prima Materia ; Voice of Images ; A Selection from the François Pinault Collection ; The World Belongs to You ; In Praise of Doubt; Agony and Ecstasy ; Qui a peur des artistes? ; Mapping the Studio: Artists from the François Pinault Collection ; Un certain état du Monde ; Passage du Temps ; Sequence I: Painting and Sculpture from the François Pinault Collection ; François Pinault Collection: a Post-Pop Selection ; Picasso, la joie de vivre ; Where Are We Going? A Selection from the François Pinault Collection .

A variable 'Entry capability' was created to represent the speed through which each artist accessed the Pinault collection. After calculating how many years the artist has been in the collection, this value was compared to the global presence in the rank. The average of this index was used as a benchmark. The entry capability is 'Fast' if the value is greater than the average, 'Slow' otherwise. At the end of this pre-processing 123 artists are present into the database.

The data analysis was carried out through the descriptive analysis and using the decision tree classifier. This approach was used to divide a dataset into successively smaller sets by applying a sequence of decision rules. Each successive division contained a homogeneous group with respect to a particular target variable that is usually categorical (Kass, 1980 ). For each record, the root node applies a test to determine which ‘child’ node the record will encounter next. This process was repeated until the record arrived at a ‘leaf’ node. The path is an expression of the rule used to classify the records. Classification trees usually apply to output variables that are categorical in nature. They can be easily represented in a visual way, and the corresponding decision rules are quite straightforward. Additionally, because the result is a series of logical if–then statements, there is no underlying assumption of a linear (or nonlinear) relationship between the input variables and the response variable (EMC Education Services, 2015 ). For growing algorithms, we used CHAID—Chi-squared Automatic Interaction Detection (IBM, 2012 ). A decision tree is a natural choice when the goal is to generate understandable and explainable rules (Berry & Linoff, 2004 ).

Two statistical objectives were identified. The first objective was to assess the presence and nature of Pinault’s own collecting patterns that, for instance, could allow us to understand if he belongs to the TAC or AIC collector categories. The second objective was to identify a comparative speed of access, if any, to the Pinault’s collection on the part of individual artists, based on selected variables (the artworks’ signs).

In order to define if the Pinault case shows specific collecting patterns, our hypothesis was that, as for his purchases, Pinault prefers to acquire artworks from: (a) French, (b) male, and (c) emerging or young emerged artists. This hypothesis was based on the following arguments:

firstly, in opposition to some art markets’ literature that affirms that the current market can be seen as a global one with very blurred boundaries between countries (Codignola, 2015 ; Velthuis & Baia Curioni, 2015 ), there is still a strong connection between the country of origin of the artist and the country of origin of the art purchaser. Therefore, a collector may tend to buy artworks from artists that possess his same nationality;

secondly, some studies have shown that in contemporary art, in addition to Western hegemony, male hegemony is also prevalent among artists (Merlin, 2019 ; Reilly & Nochlin, 2007 );

thirdly, by following the major art market’s trends, the high-end collector segment (LAC) is characterized by riskier attitudes and prefers to purchase emergent or young emerged artists. In doing so, such segment would also follow the behavior of the avant-garde and innovative art collectors (AIC) segment.

The next section empirically evaluates and demonstrates the above hypothesis.

5 Pinault’s collecting preferences

As shown in the theoretical background section, studies on art consumption constitute a fundamental economic approach that allows us to examine in detail the nature of art collector as art consumers. Consumers act through personal and varied motivations and preferences that firms usually take into account in order to shape efficient business strategies. Many features influence consumer preferences and choices in art. Such features can have social or cultural origins, or can be linked to personal motivations, convictions, or attitudes. Normally, it is difficult to go deep into these aspects and to understand them. Some consumers’ incentives certainly derive from the market environment (e.g., distribution, promotion), while others derive from the external environment (e.g., social, cultural, economic features, technologies, etc.). Consumers’ answers are translated into consumer behavior, preferences, and attitudes (Kotler & Armstrong, 2010 , 154–155). For their part, art collectors are influenced by features inherent in the nature of the art market and by other features deriving from the external environment.

In the case in point, this paper sheds light on art collectors’ consumption patterns and traces a profile of a specific and preeminent art collector by examining a dataset based on the majority of his possessed artworks. We used data collected from Artfacts ( 2015 – 2019 ) and we selected some variables that, from a qualitative perspective, could help structure a Pinault’s consumer profile shaped on his patterns of artworks’ selection. This exercise is made possible through the frequencies distribution analysis of several artworks’ signs which are the artist’s gender, age, country of birth and country of work. We can conduct our analysis by considering a population— the artists of the Pinault Collection–and a number of variables that must be evaluated through their trends and possible connections.

We applied a frequencies distribution analysis to the names of the 123 artists of the Pinault Collection to represent the different modalities of a feature distributed among statistical units that form the overall issue of this study (Table 1 ). When applied to Pinault’s collecting patterns, data showed a solid preference for purchasing more artworks produced by male artists (82.1%) than by female artists (17.9%).

We used an explorative approach to verify whether Pinault’s collecting patterns are more oriented towards young artists or senior/deceased artists (class 70+) with a recognized name, a solid rank, and a confirmed reputation. Data showed that Pinault predominantly prefers young and working artists. A critical side effect of this preference is that the artists’ future careers can be influenced by their inclusion in the Pinault Collection.

We realized that 40/49-year-old artists represent the main segment of the Pinault Collection. This confirms that Pinault prefers artworks made by artists at the height of their creative and artistic production—but not, for instance, in a later stage. In fact, results partly confirmed our hypothesis and showed that he prefers to buy artworks from the two contemporary art market’s segments of emerging and young emerged artists. Consequently, as such segments represent the highest trends in the contemporary art market, it can also be argued that Pinault’s own collecting patterns may appear investment-driven. Moreover, this pattern suggests that Pinault belongs to the AIC collectors’ category. Young artists are potentially more promising actors in the contemporary art market, for both their productivity and their financial potential. Concomitantly, the presence of these new talents in the famous Pinault Collection constitutes a jumping point for furthering their career.

This first step in the analysis of the Pinault Collection, along with features such as the artists’ age and gender, considered two more signs: the artists’ geography (where they were born and where they work), and the artworks’ genre .

By looking at the geography of Pinault’s collected artists, one might be led to believe that nationalism or nationalistic empathy impact on his collecting patterns (Codignola, 2015 ). This, in effect, was part of our working hypothesis. On the contrary, data supported a different argument. It seems that Pinault possesses a profound knowledge of the contemporary art market – intrinsically influenced by globalization and its evolutionary nature – and a sharp critical behavior that, coupled by his uncommon intellectual honesty, allow him to recognize profitable market trends irrespective of any nationalistic bias. Besides being an art aficionado, Pinault is also a businessman. Therefore, in his collecting patterns the artistic ratio is inextricably entwined with the economic ratio. Thus, we argue that the investment logic has a notable impact on the selection and purchase of contemporary artworks for his collection. Today the United States and China represent the two key actors in the growing economic contemporary art market on account of a favorable taxation system that encourages import and export, and of the increasing value of emergent American and Asian artists. Still, the Pinault Collection evidences a significant selection of European artists, presenting other motivations at play on top of economic ones.

In this segment of Pinault Collection’s artists are mainly European (43.9%); specifically, they were mostly born in Italy, France, and the United Kingdom. Coming just after European artists, North American artists represent a 28.5% of the overall number, followed by Asian artists (mainly from China) with 16.3% (but market trends and data indicate a quick projected growth in China’s share). In sum, the results disconfirmed our hypothesis that Pinault preferred to purchase artworks from artists of his same nationality.

Results were quite different when the country of work was examined. Such heterogeneity may depend from different factors, one of which certainly is the variety of European art tax rates. These inevitably affect markets’ competition and dynamics. Any art collector who invests must be aware of the fiscal and normative regulations of the country in which he intends to make a transaction, and of local incidental and overhead expenditures. When Pinault purchased Palazzo Grassi as the lieu of his exhibitions, he had to evaluate the implications involved in Italy’s fiscal regime. Probably, financial implications are somehow behind his selection of artists active in Europe as opposed to artists active elsewhere. The relative high percentage of North Americans might be related to the fact that, apart from federal taxes, in Canada and in the United States there are no import or export taxes. Conversely, the Asian segment might be influenced by China’s 17% VAT on imported artworks, in addition to a 12%-14% custom fees for paintings and sculptures and 7.5% for prints. An additional reason lying behind such a prevailing of purchased artworks from artists working in France is purely pragmatic. The fact that Pinault himself is essentially based in Paris, which is one of the Western art capitals that hosts some of the most important art market’ events, circuits and actors (Codignola, 2015 ), enhances the opportunities of acquaintances and connections between the collector and the artists. In this application, most of those who change countries go to the USA, France or Germany. In sum, by taking into account not the artists’ nationality but the artists’ place of work, part of the paper’s hypothesis was instead confirmed.

Yet another way to examine Pinault’s collecting patterns is through the artworks’ genre . Contemporary artists do not produce artworks exclusively through classic and traditional art forms such as prints, paintings, sculptures, etc. Instead, they create through a multitude of forms and media, such as performances, videos, installations, etc. These forms imply various participatory acts for both the artist and the public. Art market’s figures and trends show that artists are more and more integrating such different forms by experimenting and creating art shapes that overcome the prefixed classical canons of painting and sculpture. Through these current artistic multiple forms and expressions, often supported by technology, artists may approach their own themes more incisively.

In fact, Table 1 shows that the most common genre in the Pinault Collection is multimedia (60.2%), the category which includes and assembles various forms of artistic representation. Painting represents 16.3% and photography 5.7%. Results reinforce the previous assertion that identifies Pinault as an AIC collector in line with his preference for emerging or young emerged artists as these segments tend to produce more multimedia artworks. Such speculation partially confirms our hypothesis.

We attempted to observe more closely the collecting patterns of Pinault, by looking at them from an opposite perspective, that of his artists. We introduced the ‘Entry Capability’ variable, which represents the speed through which each artist accesses the Pinault collection. (‘Accession’ means a first appearance in a Pinault exhibition). This variable was added to our analysis of the data as presented so far. By using the decision trees as a classifier, we linked this ‘speed’ to the following variables related to the artists: gender, age in classes (the 70+ class includes deceased artists), continent of origin, artwork genre and the year of accession to the collection.

With regard to the Entry Capability variable, the main tree (Fig.  1 ) shows a percentage of 49.6 for Slow and of 50.4 for Fast. The year of access to the collection the first choice of the model; it shows three partitions: the first includes the years 2009, 2011, and 2012 (Slow), the second partition includes the years 2006 and 2007 (Fast), the third one includes 2013 only (Slow). The first partition differs as regards the age in classes variable. A further partition into four typologies is done. The first, second, and third partitions (40–49, 50–59, 60 +) are described as Slow. The third partition (60+), however, is linked to the artist’s gender–faster if painting, slower if multimedia, sculpture, etc. The only Fast one is the 30–39 age class, where Asia appears slower, and Africa, Europe, and North America, are faster.

Source: Calculations on Pinault Collection's data.

Decision Tree Entry capability—year of access in Pinault collection, age in class, artwoks' genre, continent (2006–2015).

By and large, the period 2006–2007 presented an acceleration and the year 2013 showed a deceleration. As for the other years, access was related to specific paths. For example, paintings were preferred as regards 60+ -artists, whereas the continent of origin seems to be crucial as regards young artists. So far, the gender factor is absent. This classification had an error margin of 91.9% according to the CHAID method.

Some significant behaviors are detectable when speed access was evaluated in conjunction with an artist’s individual features (Fig.  2 ). Although the percentages of classification accuracy are not especially high, the gender variable shows a higher speed for males. Africa, Europe and North America are the fastest continents, followed by Central and South America, while Asia and Oceania are still slow. Young artists (30–39) are faster, followed by 60–69 artists, whereas central and higher ages, together with deceased artists are slow. Multimedia, painting, photography and sculpture are quicker than other genres. The access years 2006 and 2007 are fastest.

Decision Trees Entry capability—gender, age in class, artwoks’ genre , continent (2006–2015).

6 Theoretical contributions and managerial implications

This article has studied the case of a preeminent private art collection that may function as an important signal on the art market. Since the study of private art collections and the implications of consumption in this field are a relatively recent topics, there is substantial room for making contributions to this literature.

Our article contributes to the literature on the specific segment of private art collections in several ways. Firstly, the paper’s key findings show that the Pinault Collection is shaped by collecting preferences that can be described as collecting patterns and consequently, as art consumption behaviors. In fact, in the frequency’s distribution of determined artworks’ signs represented by selected variables (e.g., artist’s gender, age, birth and chosen country of activity, or artworks’ genre ), a number of these signs appear to be recurrent. The analysis of the Pinault Collection evidences the collector’s own collecting patterns, one that is mainly characterized by a distinct preference for: male artists; artists aged forty or fifty (e.g., in the middle of their creative and productive career); artists mostly working in Europe and in North America (in particular in France); and artists that create cross-media artworks (e.g., performances, videos, installations, etc.). These results confirm our hypothesis according to which through the analysis of the Pinault Collection we would have found a predilection for Western emerging or young emerged male artists who, in particular, work in France, as the collector does. Although through publicly available interviews Pinault leaves economic discourse at bay, he selects specific artists who are not randomly chosen. Instead, they mostly belong to explicit art market trends that are formed by high-ranked young emerged artists or “recognized” (e.g., by the critics, by high-end galleries and dealers, etc.) emerging artists, who are mostly Western, or Western-naturalized, based in France, male, and produce cross-media artworks (also, the most popular trend among the above cited contemporary artists’ genre s). In sum, he undoubtedly purchases and collects artworks from artists that are fashionable and explicitly valuable in market and investment terms. Of course, the nature of the business he conducts gives him away. Suffice it to say that he owns Christie’s, one of the two leader auction houses, where the same artists he displays through his private museums and exhibitions are sold every day realizing impressive monetary performances. In fact, indicators evidenced in this study show that in Pinault’s attitude as a collector the symbolic (e.g., hedonic, artistic, aesthetic, etc.) rationale is certainly highly sustained by a functional (e.g., business) one.

Secondly, this article contributes to the research on art markets as findings show how consumption in the art market is never merely driven by profit (Velthuis, 2005 ). Artworks’ prices can in fact also be viewed as social constructions subject to interpretation across quantitative and qualitative lines. Art markets simply convert intangible values into fungible values (in monetary terms). The economic logic is not detrimental in nature and therefore does not need to be condemned, but rather to be understood as a conveyor of meaning. At the same time art collecting is strongly subjective and its understanding is conditional to the study of consumer behavior in arts.

Thirdly, and as for the possible managerial implications of this study, by applying signaling theory, we enlighten how the Pinault Collection, François Pinault, being one of the key players in the segment of LACs and AICs, represents a relevant signal in the art market. Therefore, in this sense, our research may be of some theoretical interest in order to approach the topic of consumption in art especially if we consider how the collecting preferences of a key art collector can influence the art market, for instance by affecting other art market players or an artist’s career. To be a key art collector such as Pinault implies that his collection is constructed through an aggregation of systems and actors (e.g. curators, critics, art historians, etc.) that are an implicit certifying system. His collection, then, while reducing the information asymmetry within the art market, represents in itself an institution able to establish a quality reputation, as its artworks and artists are accepted as a quality surrogate (Jahn et al., 2005 ). Artworks are too complex for consumers and many of their features are too intangible or time-costing for them to evaluate. Art consumers then, can instead rely on easy-to-examine signals such as those of a preeminent art collection that generate inferences on which artworks and artists’ attributes have superiority and value (Bloom and Reve, 1990 ).

Operating as they do at the highest levels of the art market, LACs have in fact central roles. They enhance and promote artists; act as opinion leaders and influence other collectors’ consumer choices; counsel and influence museums’ boards; act as art critics or curators when managing their collections and exhibitions; act as patrons when donating artworks or sustaining artists; contribute to the diffusion of art knowledge and culture when opening private museums to the public; and participate in the economics of the art market when selling their artworks. As the French collector can be seen as a quintessential representative of the LAC and AIC categories, he can considerably affect an artist’s success. More precisely, the fact of being present in a collector’s exhibition may affect an artist’s values and career. The special relationship between artists and collectors – often based on reciprocal trust – positively influences the artist’s career in that it allows his work to be associated with ‘quality’ parameters. The simple fact of belonging to a relevant collection such as the Pinault Collection may then allow the artist to gain higher ranking positions and to increase the number of future exhibitions. Therefore, LACs and AICs role appears to be a key one in the contemporary art market, particularly so in the personal relationship LACs and AICs establish with the artist. LACs and AICs have a strong molding influence on the artist’s reputation and profession.

Alongside with having assessed the presence and nature of Pinault’s own collecting preferences and consumption attitudes, this paper has also compared the collected artists’ speed of access to the Pinault’s collection through the ‘Entry Capability’ variable. This part of the analysis confirms our previous findings: male artists; North American, European, and African artists; and young artists of the 30–39 age class are faster. As far as African artists are concerned, this apparently new element is due to the fact that a good number of them are active either in North America or in Europe. As for the 30–39 cohort, they appear to be a younger section of what we had previously identified as a slightly older “recognized” emerging artists’ segment.

According to Jyrama and Ayvari ( 2010 ), in the art market actors are either business-oriented (e.g., dealers, consumers, etc.) or institutional (e.g., art schools, critics, museums), with markets hierarchically ordered by status and reputation. A key art collector such as Pinault, with his immense collection, which is publicly accessible, overcomes the above mentioned dichotomy. This fact also further implies that as a hybrid subject in the art market he can actively influence the art market in multiple ways. These collaborative relationships, typical of the art market, signify that the perceptions of the art product’s quality, along with the possibility for an artist to be perceived as successful, are collectively created, and directly connected to the single artist’s reputation as determined by key subjects in the art world such as Pinault (Chong, 2005 ; Martin, 2007 ).

Given the importance of Pinault’s role in the art market, a further contribution of this article to the art market literature and to the private art collections literature resides in the fact that this study has chosen to observe in depth his collecting patterns by viewing his art collection through the lens of consumption preferences, therefore by considering Pinault as an art consumer and the artworks he purchased as art products.

Consumption in the artistic field may be explained by way of the sensory, emotional, and imaginative features of the consumer’s personal experience. However, in this paper this approach has been meaningful only for the framing of the figure of Pinault as a collector, through interviews and statements where he has effectively referred to such features. In agreement to consumption theory, relevant social changes which have transformed consumption patterns in art have appeared. In this paper, we have ascertained that such changes correspond to important changes in the art market, where new patterns of collecting have been created. For instance, just as revealed by postmodern literature in consumption, art consumption represents a social experience. We have found in the figure of Pinault a dichotomic coexistence of a logic of distinction (e.g., as a preeminent art collector who possesses one of the major art collections in the world) and a logic of identification with community. The latter is exemplified by Pinault’s desire to share his collection and create social interaction (e.g., through the creation of his private museums and spaces where the collection is open to the public or through the loan of his artworks for exhibitions in other museums). However, from a managerial perspective, it is arguable that Pinault, through his collection, transmits signals to the market and to society in order to differentiate his luxury business approach, gaining at the same time, a consistent competitive advantage.

The empirical results of this study have evidenced specific patterns of consumption that can have two sorts of implications that confirm what has been mentioned above. From the one hand, they show how the collector, in his first nine years of public display of his pieces, has revealed a concentration on several specialties within the area of collecting contemporary art. As explained by Belk et al. ( 1991 ), the first motivation behind such specialization is to put forward challenges that present a reasonable chance of success (achievement and superiority over other collectors). This may allow us to identify Pinault’s role as an art collector, as functional to the enforcement of Pinault’s role as a luxury tycoon (e.g., status). From the other hand, the fact of purchasing artworks from artists that generally follow the art market trends shows that the market rationale has undoubtedly affected the symbolic one (made of emotions, etc.). After all, as Pinault is also the owner of Christie’s, such evidence is of no surprise as it entails precise business logics. The above arguments further enhance the signaling role of the Pinault Collection in the market. The value of art resides in some cases more in the function of social consensus than in the perceived needs of consumers (Shubik, 2003 ). The public and business figure of Pinault, together with his collection, has developed a renowned reputation. Such reputation alone represents a strong signal about the collection’s capability in selecting high potential art trends and artists while reducing other buyers’ risk when acquiring art. It follows that the collection’s patterns are a signal easily understandable even without any particular expertise. Moreover, the reputation of the collection and of Pinault are entwined and reinforce each other. To conclude, valuable signals can give organizations and actors a strong competitive frame even in the art market. Since some of the global art market’s trends are pointing at the enhancing of the significance of signals in the marketing attempt, art market managers should consider careful long-term planning in their effective signaling strategies. Managers from galleries, fairs, museums, private collections, auction houses, etc. should follow this direction while developing, for instance, competitive analysis and consumer research.

7 Limitations and future research

The main limitation of this study resides in the fact that only one of the global preeminent private art collections has been taken into account. A comparative analysis of the major collections would gain more representative results in their theoretical and practical implications. A further limitation refers to the limited timeframe examined: the construction of the Pinault collection is ongoing and the data examined in this study should be compared to the ones pertaining to what could be called a ‘second period’ of the collection. This would allow to detect why its collecting attitudes still follow the patterns emerged from this study. Future research, when examining a preeminent private collection, should also enlarge the selection of artworks’ signs used in this study. This would extend the observation’s spectrum while allowing a deeper understanding of the topic of art collecting and consumer behavior in art.

The history of art collecting, its actual institutional implications, and the societal roles provided by art collecting doings in today’s global economies help understand the unique relevance of art collecting in today’s consumer culture. As a consequence, to research the topic of art collecting is not only to observe the singular significance and role of art consumption but it means also to understand the patterns of the actual art collecting condition. However, various issues confronting research in the field of artistic perception of the consumer are still unresolved. In such a perspective, the theoretical framework of asymmetric information, along with the function of signals in the art market context, should be kept in mind. Finally, it is yet to be determined which are the main signals in the art field and in the market, and which of them play the most crucial role.

Availability of data and material

Data available upon request.

Code availability

Not applicable.

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Codignola, F., Mariani, P. Investigating preferences in art collecting: the case of the François Pinault Collection. Ital. J. Mark. 2022 , 107–133 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s43039-021-00040-x

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Meet 5 middle eastern collectors shaping the emirati art scene, from a presidential advisor to a retired pharmaceutical magnate.

These collectors have been quietly driving the burgeoning art scene in the Gulf.

Over the past decade, a dedicated cohort of long-time UAE residents and Emirati collectors have been driving the Gulf’s burgeoning art scene and solidifying the Middle Eastern modern and contemporary art market. These collectors—many of whom reside in the UAE away from their native countries—are committed to putting their purchasing power behind artists from their home countries of Iran, Syria, Palestine, and the UAE, and encouraging the development of the wider Middle Eastern and North African (MENA) art scene.

In recent years, the UAE’s art scene has become the hub for arts and culture in the Middle East, thanks to vast public and private initiatives to build institutions and a vibrant homegrown arts ecosystem. The UAE, like its art scene, is still young but rapidly developing thanks to a handful of players. The country will celebrate its 50th anniversary next week. 

At the 13th edition of Abu Dhabi Art, which ended on November 21, the fair announced the formation of Friends of Abu Dhabi Art. The initiative, created to “facilitate new models of public cultural philanthropy and help support the dynamic art eco-system in the UAE through Abu Dhabi Art” exemplifies the nature of the region’s community—and often—collector-driven art scene.

The movers and shakers of this regional scene are notoriously modest about their contributions and often prefer to remain behind the scenes. Below we reveal who some of the most important collectors are, what they are buying, and their passion for uplifting and expanding the Middle Eastern art scene.

Mohammed Afkhami

Mohammed Afkhami.

Nationality: British-Iranian

Occupation: Founder and managing partner of Dubai-based commodities firm MA Partners DMCC and Magenta Capital Services, and vice chairman of the real estate investment firm London Strategic Land.

What’s in the Collection: Afkhami’s collection comprises around 600 works, the majority of which (around 480 works) represent Iranian modern and contemporary art spanning the mediums of painting, works on paper, sculpture, video, neon, tapestry, and more. The remaining works constitute international contemporary art, some antiquities, and Islamic art.

His collection includes work by around 140 artists—around a dozen of which Afkhami says constitute their own their own vertical collections . These artists, all of Iranian heritage, include Parviz Tanavoli, Monir Farmanfarmaian, Shirin Neshat, YZ Kami, Shirazeh Houshiary, Hossein Zenderoudi and Farhad Moshiri.

Distinguishing Factor: Afkhami is one of the biggest collectors of modern and contemporary Iranian art. The aim of the collection is to bring Iranian art to a public and international setting. Over the past four years, works from his collection have been shown in three dedicated museum shows, including at the Agha Khan Museum in Toronto, the Museum of Fine Art in Houston, and Asia Society in New York.

Where He shops: Alserkal Avenue in Dubai, regional art fairs, including Art Dubai and Abu Dhabi Art, and international fairs such as Art Basel and Frieze.

Recent Purchases: At the recent edition of Abu Dhabi Art, he purchased three works by Emirati Farah Al Qassimi, Lebanese Tagreed Darghouth, and Franco-Algerian Zineb Sedira (who will represent France at the 2022 Venice Biennale) for prices ranging between $8,000–$30,000.

Fun Fact: Afkhami is launching a virtual museum at Art Dubai 2022 (running March 10–12) to bring his current museum show “Rebel, Jester, Mystic, Poet” to a virtual setting.

Zaki Nusseibeih

Zaki Nusseibeh.

Nationality Emirati

Occupation: Cultural advisor to the president of the UAE and the chancellor of UAE University. Nusseibeh has been active in the UAE government since its formation in 1971.

What’s in the Collection: His expansive art collection includes over 400 works of modern and contemporary art in mediums spanning prints, lithographs, major paintings, and sculpture. It includes a breadth of work from local emerging Emirati artists such as Rawdha Al Ketbi to mid-career artists like Egyptian Huda Lutfi to the pioneering late conceptual works of Emirati Hassan Sharif, as well as established Arab modernists like Syrian Louay Kayali, Lebanese Paul Guiragossian, Algerian Baya Mahieddine, and the trailblazing late Lebanese painter and poet, Etel Adnan.

Distinguishing Factor: Nusseibeh’s vision for his collection is to include work from the MENASA region ( the Middle East, North Africa, and South Asia) that both reflects the cultural histories of the region and its more contemporary movements, as well as his own personal tastes.

Where He shops: At auction, directly from galleries and artists, and at Abu Dhabi Art and Art Dubai. Nusseibeh also occasionally buys from international fairs, such as ArtInternational Istanbul in Turkey when his daughter, current fair director of Abu Dhabi Art, was its director. Frieze London is another place he sometimes shops since he also has a home in London.

Fun Fact: Nusseibeh has one of the most extensive libraries in the region, featuring thousands of books spread across three homes and in each of the seven languages he speaks fluently.

Farhad Farjam

Farhad Farjam.

Nationality: Iranian

Occupation: A businessman who worked in the pharmaceutical business for three decades where he represented several major multinational pharmaceutical companies in Iran. Another part of his group was involved in real estate development. He is now retired from both enterprises and invests in start-ups. 

What’s in the Collection: Amassed over 40 years, the collection includes over 7,000 pieces spanning antiquities, historical manuscripts, calligraphy and modern and contemporary works. Farjam regards his collecting habits as “inherent and genetic” as both his grandfathers were collectors, stating how “as a child I was interested in collecting beautiful things.”

Middle Eastern artists in his collection include Hussein Madi, Fateh Moudarres, YZ Kami, Afra Al-Dhaheri, and Farhad Moshiri, among others. International modern and contemporary artists represented include Paul Klee, Yayoi Kusama, Alberto Giacometti, Georg Baselitz, Anslem Kiefer, Tony Cragg, Sam Francis, Bharti Kher, and Auguste Rodin.

Distinguishing Factor: The Farjam Foundation, headquartered in the Dubai International Financial Center (DIFC), is the only collection in private hands worldwide that includes artworks from the beginning of Islam until now, representing art from nearly all Islamic countries as well as encompassing a section dedicated to western modern and contemporary art.

The foundation’s vision is to serve artists and art enthusiasts for the next decade and beyond through artists’ residencies, exhibitions, lectures, workshops, educational programs, and internships. In the future, Farjam envisions the foundation and his collection to become a private museum.

Where He Shops: Auctions, regional and international art fairs and galleries.

Fun Fact: Farjam opened a private museum called The Farjam Collection in 2009 in the DIFC coinciding with the third edition of Art Dubai. In 2013 it became the Farjam Foundation dedicating itself to more philanthropic and community driven projects.

HH Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan bin Khalifa Al Nahyan

His Highness Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan bin Khalifa Al Nahyan.

Nationality: Emirati,

Source of Wealth:  Grandson of HH Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyan, president of UAE.

What’s in the Collection: Sheikh Zayed’s collection is widely diverse, featuring works in various mediums, including paintings, photography, sculptures, collages, textiles and videos by artists from the UAE and the MENASA region as well as India and Iran.

He has a particular passion for emerging artists or those whom, he said, “have yet to be given their due.” Artists included in his collection are Ahmed Mater, Amir Hossein Zanjani,  Dia Al Azzawi, Etel Adnan, Kader Attia, Manal Al Dowayan, Mohammed Kazem, Moataz Nasser, and Shafic Aboud, among many others.

Distinguishing Factor: His vision is to build a personal collection of artworks from the UAE, greater Middle East and internationally that includes historical works of art until the present. In 2015 he established UAE Unlimited to support emerging artists, curators, poets, and writers in the UAE through various initiatives and exhibitions. 

Where He shops: Regional and international fairs and biennales. Abu Dhabi Art and Art Dubai are a must. He also buys from Frieze London, FIAC, and Art Basel Miami Beach. Sheikh Zayed loves visiting the Sharjah Biennial and the Venice Biennale. Galleries he buys from especially include  Beirut-based Agial, Athr in Jeddah, Galerie Continua, Dubai-based galleries Gallery Isabelle Van der Eynde, Green Art Gallery, Lawrie Shabibi, the Third Line Gallery, and 1×1 Gallery, among others in the UAE and abroad. He also buys from major auction houses, including Christie’s, Sotheby’s, Phillips, and Bonham’s. 

Fairouz Villian

Fairouz Villian and her husband, Jean Paul Villain.

Nationality: Syrian-French 

Source of Wealth: Her husband, Jean-Paul Villian, is director of the strategy and planning department at Abu Dhabi Investment Authority (ADIA), where he has worked since 1982.

What’s in the Collection: An Abu Dhabi-based collector and art patron, Villian’s collection features modern Arab art with a particular focus on important works by Syrian artists—her country of birth—including modernists Louay Kayyali and Fateh Moudarres. She and her husband, Jean Paul Villain have been collecting art for over 30 years. 

The couple began collecting in France by acquiring European artists but have since focused predominantly on Middle Eastern artists when Villain moved to the UAE to join her husband in the 1980s. In recent years they have made acquisitions of key contemporary Middle Eastern artists from the UAE, Syria, Iraq, Egypt, Lebanon and also from Turkey and Pakistan. Emirati artists in her collection include the late conceptualist Hassan Sharif, Mohammed Kazem, Najat Makki, Sheikha Al Mazrou, and Mohamed Ahmed Ibrahim (who will represent the UAE at next year’s Venice Biennale). From Lebanon, she has works by Ayman Baalbaki and Hussein Madi, among others. 

Distinguishing Factor: One of her great passions is to support Syrian artists—particularly those living in exile in France—by buying their work. She is president of Friends of the Sorbonne University Abu Dhabi Art Association, a founding member of the Louvre Abu Dhabi’s Patrons Circle, and sits on the patron committee of the Centre Pompidou in Paris. At the moment she is focused on collecting more art to build her collection with the aim of one day creating a foundation. In 2012, she was awarded the title of “Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres” by Frederic Mitterand, the French culture minister under president Nicolas Sarkozy, for her “significant contributions” to the arts.

Where They Shop: Mostly at art fairs, especially at Art Dubai and Abu Dhabi Art and also from Christie’s, Sotheby’s and Bonhams. She and her husband bought five works from this year’s Abu Dhabi Art: two sculptures by Egyptian Adam Henein, Lebanese Paris-based Chaouki Choukini, Emirati Sarah Almehairi and Lebanese Fatima El-Hajj.

Fun Fact: Villian is currently following her passion for collecting work by young Emirati artists.

Rebecca Anne Proctor

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Where Have All the Good Collectors Gone? (or, There Never Was a Lambo)

An essay about crypto art collectors.

by Maxwell Cohen

This is the first of a series of five essays written on crypto art collectorship through the Summer and Fall of 2023. These essays were based on 18 interviews conducted in April and May 2023. While not every collector interviewed appears in every essay, their collective insight heavily influenced the direction and creation of these essays. I extend utmost gratitude to them all. 

Today’s Players:

Omz : Collector since 2020. First NFT: The Protector by Trevor Jones and Jose Delbo

Pindar van Arman : Artist and collector since 2018 . First NFT: Echoes of a Dead Earth by XCOPY 

Artnome : Artist, Popularizer of NFTs. Collector since 2017. First NFT: Moxarra

Sarah Zucker : Artist. Collector since 2019. First NFT: Digital LSD — Synthesis_Batch_20190505 by FractalEncrypt

Anne Spalter : Artist. Collector since 2020. First NFT: Chromie Squiggles by Snowfro

Cozomo de’ Medici : Collector since 2021

ProteinProsecco : Collector

Sats Moon : Collector since 2020. First NFT: White Boombox by Lyle Owerko

TokenAngels : Collector since 2019. First NFT: Autoglyph #504 by LarvaLabs

Mattia Cuttini : Artist. Collector since 2018. First NFT: IlanKatin, More the Journey than the Destination

TennesseeJed : Collector since 2020. First NFT: Sean Mick

Samir Mitra: Collector since 2020

Additional thanks to: Artie Handz (Punk7635), BelleNFTs , NFTFeen , Batsoupyum , Conlan , and Coldie .

C horus: The lambo was always a lie. But since certain figures flaunted their own acquisition of a lambo, we believed the lambo was indeed something which could be acquired. But there is, of course, no lambo. As an artist, you’re not even allowed to drive a lambo. You physically cannot. You’re only ever allowed to drive a 1999 (our current year minus 24) “piece of shit, but trusty” Dodge Neon with a broken air-conditioner or a seatbelt that doesn’t lock good, and the car can never be fixed, can never be upgraded.

But we want the lambo; hell, we want the lambo more than we want to be artists. Nobility aside, being an artist is very hard and often demeaning and causes indigestion. What we want is simply to ASAP enter a kind of creative chrysalis and emerge aesthetically unrecognizable, transcended into a fully-formed apex predator of beauty, able to capture and denote and imply on instinct alone (and be compensated commensurately). All we want is to be minor deities, not with, like, huge followings or cathedrals erected in our names, but a shrine in a closet somewhere would be nice. Then, surely then, we could drive a lambo.

We know that such a transformation will require more-or-less constant heartburn and many bad days, relationships too-soonly sundered, we won’t like it very much. What we may not know, however, is that even on the good days when the long-dreamt-of genius actually comes, when the work itself is so staggering that we can no longer logically minimize the extent of the genius we ourselves can channel, we will simply admonish ourselves for our pride, understanding that the pride itself makes us unworthy of whatever accolades the work suggests we deserve.

Our destiny as artists is to deny the lambo, even as it is being rolled off the back of the truck onto our driveway. We shout to the delivery guy like, “No, no, that’s uhhhhhh not the… color! The color, yes, that’s not the color I asked for, no no no, that’s not right, you simply must take it back,” make a real stink about it until they drive away. It doesn’t matter that they’ll be back tomorrow with the order sheet we ourselves filled out, because we’ll have changed addresses by then, fled the state, social security card snipped, moved to a cavern in a state park, removed our clothes, and, cursing ourselves, get back to work. Even with the lambo in our driveway, we would deny it.

The great mistake of the crypto artist is believing herself something other than an artist. The great mistake all of us in crypto art make is believing that we can ever one day drive the lambo. But nobody can, not ever, not really.

This is an essay about how and why we believe in a lie.

Crypto Art’s so-called Golden Age, (back in the time before greed and lust — those twin black shadows — snuck in through a crack in the door to derail us all with temptation) was by all accounts a serene place of artistic experimentation and innovation. Its emphasis on family and community are well-documented and oft-referenced. It was possessed of a certain purity. But don’t just take it from me.

“When we began, there was no greed,” to use the words of Pindar van Arman, but still there was “great art everywhere” as Sats Moon said. This bygone era hardly resembles the crypto art of today, and for proof, consider this anecdote from Artnome: “I bought my first work, by Moxarra , in late 2017…I think it was like 2 or 3 dollars…and I got a tweet within like a half hour saying ‘Thanks man, I really appreciate that!’”

In these early days of crypto art, artworks flowed into collectors’ hands like spring water flowing from a glade, and there were no influencers, no pump-and-dumps, only love and support and the shared dream of a bright future. “For those of us experimenting with crypto art in the early days, there was a sense that this could really build into a potent sector of the art market,” Sarah Zucker told me.

It’s no wonder we all yearn for this Golden Age. Sales are tough to come by today. Stupider and stupider grifters abound, proffering stupider and stupider schemes. Influencer culture has remained stubbornly sticky. And since we all know that there was a time before all — *looks around* —  this , we wish, we dream, we hope maybe we can get back there.

Alas, I have bad news.

But then I have good news!

First, however, the bad news: Our conception of crypto art’s Golden Age isn’t just flawed, it’s altogether incorrect. How can I be so certain? Because I selectively clipped all the above quotes to prove a point. You’ll please excuse my deception.

Yes, there was great art everywhere back then, but as Sats Moon elaborated, “There was a lack of collectors then. There was a few collectors, there was always a few collectors…and did that affect the quality of the art or anything? Not really…there was just great art everywhere.”

As for why Pindar posited that there wasn’t any greed? Simply put, “When we began, there was no greed…because there was no money.”

I’m happy to say that Artnome did indeed receive a lovely message of gratitude from Moxarra, but he emphasized that “It’s hard for people who came later to understand that there was no system in place to assume that anyone was ever going to buy anything , so everyone was equally shocked: The collector, the artist, and the platform!”

It’s become clear that we’ve developed a selective memory as it relates to the true nature of early crypto art. It had its positives, it also had negatives, but more than that, it was a fundamentally different arena than crypto art today.

I often hear the following refrain repeated in the aftermath of some “blue chip” artist orchestrating yet another massive sale. “Where have all the collectors gone?” or more specifically, “Where have all the good collectors gone?” If I had a nickel for every time I’ve heard this, I’d have enough to buy myself an XCOPY . Not an XCOPY today, of course, because that would cost me six-figures. But in 2019, I could have gotten one for less than a grand (Pindar van Arman sold XCOPY’s SuperRare Genesis, Echoes of a Dead Earth , for a then record-high sale of 6.5 ETH, or $943). And in 2018, I could’ve bought one for the price of a Chipotle burrito!

So when I say that crypto art in 2023 bears little resemblance to its yesteryear, I mean the rules, the scope, the subtleties, all were nearly unrecognizable from what we have today.

And if we strip away the hyperbole from this “Golden Age of Crypto Art,” we’ll find a lot of nostalgia and idealism disguising the truth that, in a lot of ways, crypto art today is better than ever before.

There, that’s the good news.

I often find myself wanting to have my suspicions confirmed, that the early days of crypto art really were better . Because if that’s true, then we can place blame: Oh, it’s their fault that crypto art appears to have fallen from its once-lofty pedestal. This may sound like only a minor gift, but it effectively eradicates the more existential questions of crypto art’s existence. When we can blame influencers, VC’s, or most pressingly, collectors, we don’t have to blame A) ourselves, B) larger macro conditions that make us feel powerless, or (god forbid), C) the foundation of crypto art itself.

In truth, however, crypto art has always had foundational problems. The difference is that they weren’t always seen as problems in the first place

For example, when Pindar van Arman said enthusiastically, “The first wave of collectors I saw was people like [Colborn Bell and Pablo Rodriguez-Fraile], people that really loved collecting art, and they would come in and spend 5000 dollars on art and we all thought that was amazing, mind-blowing, couldn’t believe that much money was being spent on art,” he used a reverent tone. But $5000 — about 2.5 ETH at the time of this writing — isn’t anywhere close to a sustainable middle-class income for many artists, and sales of this size hardly move the cultural needle in 2023. Nevertheless, early crypto art was content to work on this reduced scale because the alternative was nothingness. There was no prehistoric Golden Age to look back upon quixotically. When Dmitri Cherniak 1/1s sold for four figures, when Moxarra and Artnome completed their single-digit transaction, when 542 out of 10,000 Chromie Squiggles minted on day one for .035 ETH each, all were considered revolutionary events, huge wins!, simply because digital and generative art had a market at all! To whom much is given, much is expected; crypto art to that point hadn’t been given bupkis, so it didn’t expect bupkis back.

Without any precedent, crypto art’s proposed innovations were understood to be inherently radical experiments, not divine mandates. Can’t lose what one never had. In a series of 2020 essays on “The Invisible Economy,” DADA founders Judy Mam and Beatriz Ramos revealed their long-term vision for a self-sustaining artistic ecosystem, using smart-contract encoded royalties, that would challenge the “star-system” model of artistic success (a fat-tailed distribution model) by rewarding artists for their effort instead of their output . But the royalty system they introduced in their Creeps & Weirdos collection was still publicly being fought for in 2020 , and obviously it remains under attack even now. With each new threat, the reaction became stronger and stronger.

Which underlies the fact that though the stimulus remains the same — threat to royalties, for example — it’s our relationship to that stimulus which has changed over time.

And the same is true of our collectorship myths. It’s easy to imagine that sales and collectors were once both more plentiful, but I was told many times and in many different forms that there was always a vast difference between the number of collectors and artists. Mattia Cuttini was emphatic: “There was always a lack of crypto collectors. We’ve talked about this since 2018, since the very first days.” And TennesseeJed echoed Mattia’s sentiment, saying, “There were way more artists than collectors at that time. We [collectors] were outnumbered by a massive exponent.”

As for the fact that early collectors were somehow purer than those today? I’m afraid that’s wishful thinking. Again to quote TennesseeJed, “There’s no way to talk about the crypto art movement without talking about the money side because they’re so intrinsically linked together. It’s the ugly underbelly…” The actual dollar figures were so much lower that perhaps it was more common for collectors to have highly-diversified collections, but that collectorship was always somewhat speculative. Anne Spalter recognized this, saying “In the beginning, it was pure speculation. It was that people were sort of crypto rich, and there was literally nothing to spend crypto on…But then there was this alternate store of value that was also fun because you got a picture with it instead of just a token, and all these speculators came in.”

We also know for a fact that many artists were unhappy with the regressive attitudes of influencers and collectors throughout 2019/2020 because movements like Trash Art were responding to them point-blank. Artists like Nino Arteiro and Fabiano Speziari used artworks like SHITTY ART (2020) and Message about digital garbage (2019), respectively, to publicly admonish these attitudes.

Regardless, crypto art’s true metamorphosis into modernity didn’t take place until 2021. And that metamorphosis was comprehensive.

TokenAngels is a staunch believer that, “I think crypto art, the real movement, ended in 2020,” which Omz supplemented when he said, “There’s a certain purity to the art that an artist who came early had that new artists don’t have. It’s not necessarily their fault because of the incentive, the motivation, why were they there in the first place.” It remains unclear exactly what (if anything) changed aesthetically after 2021, so it’s my conclusion that this idea of “crypto art ending” is more a reflection of the greater context than the actual work itself (which in my opinion is as magnificent as ever). But boy, that context sure did change.

The following Dune.xyz chart shows the number of artists whitelisted on SuperRare over time, which I think at least gives us a snapshot of the precipitous increase in crypto art’s actual artists from 2021 onwards (taking into account that SuperRare itself would have proportionally expanded its allowlist throughout this time). A tiny fraction of the artists minting today could have had incentives, motivations, and reasons for entering crypto art unmarried from the BOOM that was 2021.

Artnome offered an analogy for how it felt to see the NFT world expand as tenaciously as it did: “Let’s say you decided five years ago that you loved to juggle cans of SpaghettiOs. And you’re like ‘I know I’m weird, but realistically maybe five people in the next ten years will also like to juggle SpaghettiOs with me.’ And let’s say three years later, s even million people started juggling SpaghettiO. You’d be like, ‘This is really weird, am I dreaming?’”

Many of these 2021-bull-run collectors also weren’t engaged in the kind of genuine artistic appreciation we might hope for. It is Sarah Zucker’s sage opinion that “Many of the ‘collectors’ who entered the ecosystem in 2021…were not interested in the finer points of art collecting…but were simply looking to quickly exponentiate their investments.”

Their motivations aside, these collectors were buying artwork, and for significantly higher sums than crypto art had seen in the past. And they were buying almost everything . Less important was the context or content of an NFT, more important was the potential for degenerate gambling to send its price skyward. Many artists’ careers were made in this time. Many others entered crypto art at this time, attracted by the allure of securing a middle-class lifestyle from artistry alone, which was suddenly within the grasp of more artists than perhaps at any other point in world history.

Herein, I myself entered crypto art. Thus, my expectations of the movement were also forged in that entirely unrealistic and unsustainable environment, one we now know was a massive bubble. Samir Mitra, a long-time collector of both physical and crypto art, was frank in his assessment that “Unfortunately, [the crypto art] market really crashed because there was a lot of excess and bad behaviors…” On top of the crypto/NFT bubble itself, Cozomo de Medici was perceptive in noting that, “We quite often forget to take a step back and look at the markets as a whole. It’s not just crypto art that’s slowed down… the entire world has slowed down, with inflation, COVID and other macro factors at play.” Slowed down feels like an understatement. Volume on every platform has plummeted. As have active wallets. As have sales in general.

But it’s hard to shake one’s foundations after they’ve been built. That entirely abnormal 2021 situation became, for quite a lot of us, completely normalized. We seem to have mentally married the aspects of early crypto art we find most attractive — the tight-knit familial and creative elements — with the madcap economic explosion that occurred thereafter. We know now, however, that they were in fact mutually exclusive. If you found crypto art anytime from 2021 onward, your wildest expectations, all your hopes and dreams, they were formed around an anomaly. And if you were here before then? As Dwight Schrute once said, “Nostalgia is truly one of the great human weaknesses…second only to the neck.”

So where have all the good collectors gone? In earnest, I’d say that they haven’t gone anywhere. It’s not that the collectors have themselves changed; what has changed, instead, is literally everything else. The number of artists and their expectations. The amount of money in the space and where it’s being/been directed. The old-world institutions — Christie’s, Sotheby’s, etc . — now present here, and their aims, their impetus, their influence. If we want to find the good collectors, we must go find them. Just as so much incredible art is hidden behind a great wall of flash and pomp and consumables and collectibles and VC-backed garbage, so too are these collectors, many of whom aren’t spending sums large enough to excite the media machine or the wanting public, and many of whom prefer not to publicize their sales at all, even.

It’s simply incorrect to believe that the only sales happening are those which are highly publicized, but of course the ones which are highly publicized are the ones that sing a similar tune to 2021’s insanity. For example: Cozomo de’ Medici — perhaps the patron saint of huge and high-profile crypto art purchases — just recently collected a piece by the wonderful artist Earthsample for 1 ETH (~$2000). A sale of that size would have shaken the market in 2019, but today it’s hardly a blip. Did you even know it went down? It is Artnome’s view that, “When, for example, you spend ten dollars to buy an artwork from, you know, Joe Smith…it doesn’t make any news, no one retweets it 1000 times, you don’t get any influencer weighing in on it, but those kind of transactions happen all the time. You don’t hear about them, so it feels like that class of collector doesn’t exist.”

Publicity always skews towards superstars. As ProteinProsecco said, “Book and music sales, youtube view counts, dating dynamics…The superstar effect will always persist here. You can’t change it any more than you can change the force of gravity.” It’s present in traditional art dynamics as well. Consider the countless flea markets and craft shows and small-time art sales happening everyday which will never be publicized on any level anywhere, but every time another Jeff Koons balloon dog sells for multi-millions, the entire world needs to know about it. There’s a reason that the local news only ever talks about violent crimes and the weather…

And let’s keep in mind that there’s likely never going to be enough resources to satisfy every artist in crypto art, or to permanently implement DADA’s Invisible Economy on the scale we all wish for. Prosecco addressed this in his subsequent point, telling me, “I’m not sure I agree that the promise of blockchain was a thinner tailed outcome distribution (or a ‘wider middle class’). I think the real promise was the accessible nature of blockchain…It reduces barriers to entry and allows frictionless, efficient discovery. So, rather than wishing that all artists would sell for an equal price point, my hope is to see a general uptick of cultural interest in art, expanding the breadth and volume of the market (i.e. a rising tide).” Crypto art may allow many more people to dream an artistic dream, but it may not realistically be able to make all those dreams come true, no matter how many collectors there are here.

That’s a heavy assertion, and one I take no pleasure in making, so I’ll leave you instead with something heartening. As part of these interviews, I made a laundry list of reasons why collecting crypto art was a terrible idea: Crypto artworks are risky investments that can’t even really be displayed well using today’s technology, and if one seeks clout or influence, one is almost certainly better off putting their money elsewhere. The point I made to each and every collector was essentially: “Collecting crypto art makes no sense!”

And I was told, to a man, bar none, across the board: “You’re right. But I choose to collect crypto art anyways.”

So let us ask together: “Where have all the good collectors gone?”

Clink. Another nickel into my pot.

Ready for more?

The Online Art Collector Report 2019

Discover why collectors buy

What are the main reasons collectors purchase art online? It turns out they’re not so different from their motivations when buying art offline. Surveyed collectors cited aesthetics and a desire to live with art; a passion for artists and their stories; and affordability among their key motivations and considerations when buying art online.

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Key insights into who is buying art online

Of the nearly 4,000 collectors who responded to Artsy’s survey, more than 50% have been collecting for fewer than 10 years, and 32% are under 35 years of age. However, collectors aged 35–44 were the most likely to have purchased art online in the past.

Learn the key drivers behind online transactions

The surveyed art collectors identified five key drivers that have pushed them to buy online—exclusive access to artworks; convenience; access to information; more competitive pricing; and avoiding the “intimidating” art world.

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Find out what your gallery can be doing to better engage art collectors online by downloading “The Online Art Collector Report.”

Women Who Shaped History

A Smithsonian magazine special report

History | July 9, 2024

Meet Vivian Maier, the Reclusive Nanny Who Secretly Became One of the Best Street Photographers of the 20th Century

The self-taught artist is getting her first museum exhibition in New York City, where she nurtured her nascent interest in photography

Ellen Wexler

Assistant Editor, Humanities

Vivian Maier took more than 150,000 photographs as she scoured the streets of New York and Chicago. She rarely looked at them; often, she didn’t even develop the negatives. Without any formal training, she created a sprawling body of work that demonstrated a wholly original way of looking at the world. Today, she is considered one of the best street photographers of the 20th century.

Maier’s photos provide audiences with a tantalizing peek behind the curtain into a remarkable mind. But she never intended to have an audience. A nanny by trade, she rarely showed anyone her prints. In her final years, she stashed five decades of work in storage lockers, which she eventually stopped paying for. Their contents went to auction in 2007.

Many of Maier’s photos ended up with amateur historian John Maloof , who purchased 30,000 negatives for about $400. In the years that followed, he sought out other collectors who had purchased boxes from the same lockers. He didn’t learn the photographer’s identity until 2009, when he found her name scrawled on an envelope among the negatives. A quick Google search revealed that Maier had died just a few days earlier. Uncertain of how to proceed, Maloof started posting her images online.

“I guess my question is, what do I do with this stuff?” he wrote in a Flickr post . “Is this type of work worthy of exhibitions, a book? Or do bodies of work like this come up often? Any direction would be great.”

Maier quickly became a sensation. Everyone wanted to know about the recluse who had so adeptly captured 20th-century America. Her life and work have since been the subject of a best-selling book , a documentary and exhibitions around the world .

Now, the self-taught photographer is headlining her first major American retrospective. “ Vivian Maier: Unseen Work ,” which is currently on view at Fotografiska New York, features some 230 pieces from the 1950s through the 1990s, including black-and-white and color photos, vintage and modern prints, films, and sound recordings. The show is also billed as the first museum exhibition in Maier’s hometown, the city where she nurtured her nascent interest in photography.

Born in New York City in 1926, Maier grew up mostly in France, where she began experimenting with a Kodak Brownie , an affordable early camera designed for amateurs. After returning to New York in 1951, she purchased a Rolleiflex , a high-end camera held at the waist, and began developing her signature style: images of everyday life framed with a stark humor and intuitive understanding of human emotion. She started working as a governess, a role that allowed her to spend hours wandering the city, children in tow, as she snapped away.

She left New York about five years later, when she secured a job as a nanny for three boys—John, Lane and Matthew Gensburg—in the Chicago suburbs. The family was devoted to Maier, though they knew very little about her. The boys remember attending art films and picking wild strawberries as her charges, but they don’t recall her ever mentioning any family or friends. Their parents knew that Maier traveled—they would hire a replacement nanny in her absence—but they didn’t know where she went.

“You really wouldn’t ask her about it at all,” Nancy Gensburg, the boys’ mother, told Chicago magazine in 2010. “I mean, you could, but she was private. Period.”

Despite Maier’s reclusive tendencies, the Gensburgs knew about her photography. It would have been difficult to hide. After all, she lived with the family and had a private bathroom, which she used as a darkroom to develop black-and-white photos herself. The Gensburgs frequently witnessed her taking photos; on rare occasions, she even showed them her prints.

Maier stayed with the Gensburgs until the early 1970s, when the boys were too old for a nanny. She spent the next few decades working in other caretaking roles, though she doesn’t appear to have developed a similar relationship with these families, who viewed her as a competent caregiver with an eccentric personality. Most never saw her prints, though they do remember her moving into their homes with hundreds of boxes of photos in tow.

“I once saw her taking a picture inside a refuse can,” talk show host Phil Donahue, who employed Maier as a nanny for less than a year, told Chicago magazine. “I never remotely thought that what she was doing would have some special artistic value.”

Meanwhile, the Gensburgs kept in touch. As Maier grew older, they took care of her, eventually moving her to a nursing home. They never knew about the storage lockers. When she died at age 83, a short obituary appeared in the Chicago Tribune , describing her as a “second mother” to the three boys, a “free and kindred spirit,” and a “movie critic and photographer extraordinaire.”

Maier’s mysterious backstory is a large part of her present-day appeal. Fans are captivated by the photos, but they’re also intrigued by the reclusive nanny who developed her talents in secret. “Vivian Maier the mystery, the discovery and the work—those three parts together are difficult to separate,” Anne Morin, curator of the new exhibition, tells CNN .

The show is meant to focus on the work rather than the mystery. As Morin says to the Art Newspaper , she hopes to avoid “imposing an overexposed interpretation of her character.” Instead, the exhibition aims to elevate Maier’s name to the level of other famous street photographers—such as Robert Frank and Diane Arbus —and take on the daunting task of examining her large oeuvre.

“In ten years, we could do another completely different show,” Morin tells CNN. “She has more than enough material to bring to the table.”

The subjects of Maier’s street photos ran the gamut, but she often turned her lens toward “people on the margins of society who weren’t usually photographed and of whom images were rarely published,” per a statement from Fotografiska New York. The Gensburg boys recall her taking them all over the city, adamant that they witness what life was like beyond the confines of their affluent suburb.

The exhibition is organized thematically, with sections devoted to Maier’s famous street photos, her experimental abstract compositions and her stylized self-portraits. The self-portraits, which frequently incorporate mirrors and reflections, amplify her enigmatic qualities, usually showing her with a deadpan, focused expression. Her voice can be heard in numerous audio recordings, which play throughout the exhibition. As such, even as the show focuses on the work, Maier the person is still a frequent presence in it.

“The paradox of Vivian Maier is that the lifetime of anonymity that has captured the public imagination persists in the work,” writes art critic Arthur Lubow for the New York Times , adding, “An artist uses a camera as a tool of self-expression. Maier was a supremely gifted chameleon. After immersing myself in her work, other than detecting a certain wryness, I could not get much sense of her sensibility.”

The artist undoubtedly possessed a curiosity about her immediate surroundings, which she photographed with a “lack of self-consciousness,” Sophie Wright, the New York museum’s director, tells CNN. “There’s no audience in mind.” There is no evidence that Maier wondered about her viewers—or that she ever imagined having viewers in the first place. They, however, will never stop wondering about her.

“ Vivian Maier: Unseen Work ” is on view at Fotografiska New York through September 29.

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Ellen Wexler | | READ MORE

Ellen Wexler is Smithsonian magazine’s assistant digital editor, humanities.

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Fall Exhibitions Include Art from Himalayas and Otterbein’s Permanent Collection

Posted Aug 22, 2024

Otterbein’s art museum and galleries will host Himalayan art for the annual Opening Doors to the World arts series, as well as pieces from the university’s permanent collection this fall. All exhibitions are open to the public. Details are below and online at www.otterbein.edu/art/art-exhibit-schedule/ .

Gateway to Himalayan Art  

Aug. 28-Dec. 12, 2024  

Project Himalayan Art – The Rubin Museum, NY 

Elena Pakhoutova and Karl Debreczeny, Curators  

The Frank Museum of Art, 39 South Vine Street, Westerville  

Hours: Wednesday-Saturday, 11 a.m.-3 p.m. during the University’s academic year.  

Contact: 614-818-9716 or visit https://www.otterbein.edu/art/art-exhibit-schedule/

Otterbein University presents Gateway to Himalayan Art , a traveling exhibition organized by the Rubin Museum that introduces the main forms, concepts, meanings, and traditions of Himalayan art and cultures, 

Gateway to Himalayan Art is a traveling exhibition for colleges and universities, based on the Rubin Museum of Art’s cornerstone exhibition of the same name, which introduces the main forms, concepts, meanings, and traditions of Himalayan art. It is part of the Rubin’s multi-part educational initiative Project Himalayan Art: A resource that aims to support the inclusion of Tibetan, Himalayan, and Inner Asian art and cultures into undergraduate teaching on Asia. 

The exhibition features objects from the Rubin Museum’s collection as well as multimedia elements — audio, videos, essays, maps, and more — from the Rubin’s recently launched educational initiative, Project Himalayan Art , a resource designed to support the inclusion of Tibetan, Himalayan, and Inner Asian art and cultures into undergraduate teaching on Asia.  

“Project Himalayan Art is the most significant advancement in Himalayan art education in more than 30 years, and an exemplar for educational resource development in general. It is a privilege to host the Gateway to Himalayan Art exhibition for the benefit of students, educators, and community members throughout the Midwest,” said Janice Glowski, director of Otterbein’s Frank Museum of Art and galleries.  

The exhibition is part of the Otterbein & the Arts: Opening Doors to the World – Himalayas programming for the fall semester and will be incorporated in classes across the curriculum. 

Gateway to Himalayan Art invites visitors to enter into the art and cultures of the greater Himalayan region — Indian, Nepalese, Bhutanese, Tibetan — and the interrelated Mongolian and Chinese traditions. Much of Himalayan art is informed by Buddhist, Hindu, and indigenous religions, and images play a prominent role in cultural practices. 

The exhibition highlights the fundamental visual language and meanings of Himalayan art, the materials and techniques used, and the purposes for the creation of these objects, often in the context of religious and secular well-being. It also includes voices from Himalayan artists and contemporaries, along with connections to related digital content to learn more.  

Gateway features traditional scroll paintings (thangka), sculptures in various media, medical instruments, and ritual objects. Among the featured installations are in-depth displays that explain the process of Nepalese lost-wax metal casting and the stages of Tibetan thangka painting. 

Gateway to Himalayan Art is an integral component of the Rubin Museum’s Project Himalayan Art, a three-part initiative that also includes the publication Himalayan Art in 108 Objects and a digital platform, a hub for the study of Himalayan art. Together they provide introductory resources for learning about and teaching Himalayan art, with focus on cross-cultural exchange with Tibet at the center, and Buddhism as the thread that connects these diverse cultures.

Against the Current/Lain S. Bangdel: Art, National Identity, and a Modernist Critique  

Aug. 26-Nov. 8, 2024  

Janice Glowski, Curator 

Miller Gallery, Art and Communication Building, 33 Collegeview Road, Westerville  

Monday-Friday 8 a.m.-4 p.m.; Saturday-Sunday 1-4 p.m.; closed holidays.  

Contact: 614-823-1792 or visit https://www.otterbein.edu/art/art-exhibit-schedule/  

Against the Current: Art, National Identity, and a Modernist Critique features the paintings of eminent Nepali artist Lain Singh Bangdel. Born and raised on a tea plantation in Darjeeling, India, Bangdel went on to study visual art in Kolkata (Calcutta) and Paris, eventually serving in leadership positions in the Royal Nepal Academy, the Nepal Association of Fine Art, and the Nepal Art Council. A recognized polymath, Bangdel also was a novelist and art historian whose published research has played a key role in the repatriation of stolen sculptures back to Nepal. The exhibition is broadly organized around Bangdel’s historical trajectory and features twenty-five paintings not previously exhibited in the United States, as well as large-scale works that he created while teaching at Denison University as a Fulbright faculty. 

Against the Current is part of the Otterbein & the Arts: Opening Doors to the World (ODW) – Himalayas programming for the fall semester. ODW is a programming and publication series that seeks to dissolve deeply rooted patterns of “othering” and to move audiences beyond single narratives toward more nuanced understandings of peoples, cultures, and identities.

Only Abstract Will Do

Aug. 26-Dec. 6, 2024  

Audrey McCutchen, Curator 

Fisher Gallery, Roush Hall, 27 S. Grove St., Westerville  

Hours: 9 a.m.-9 p.m. daily  

The exhibition features abstract art from Otterbein’s permanent collection (1977-present) and includes work by Otterbein students and faculty, as well as visiting and global artists. The selections explore how abstraction can function as a unifying language of human experience, ideas, and emotions. Immerse yourself in the colors, forms, and atmosphere that only abstract art can elicit.

6 th Annual Juried High School Art Exhibition  

Nov. 23-Dec. 6, 2024 

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The Secret to Tom Wolfe’s Irresistible Snap, Crackle and Pop

How the author of “The Right Stuff,” “Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers” and other classics turned sociology into art.

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By David Brooks

David Brooks is an Opinion columnist for The Times. This essay is adapted from his introduction to a new edition of “Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers,” to be published by Picador this month.

There are certain writers you should never read before you yourself sit down to write, like P.G. Wodehouse and Tom Wolfe. For if you do, you will not be able to get their voices and rhythms out of your head, and you will have to confront the absolute certainty that you can’t pull off what they did. In Wolfe’s case you’ll find that you can’t quite replicate the raw energy of his prose: the fun; the snap, crackle, pop; the fuzzy effusions of new sociological categories — masters of the universe, social X-rays.

And then there’s his sheer audacity. His essay “Radical Chic” — about a cocktail party the conductor Leonard Bernstein and his wife, Felicia, threw for the Black Panthers in 1970 — begins with Bernstein waking up in the middle of the night in a state of wild alarm. He had mentioned having a bad dream in an interview somewhere, and Wolfe took that little autobiographical morsel and spun it into a grand tour through the inside of Bernstein’s brain. Any responsible journalist can report, “Bernstein had a nightmare,” but Wolfe has the guts to take a flight of fancy and describe the nightmare from the inside, with its moments of narcissistic grandiosity and its descent into degrading humiliation.

Wolfe was known for his style, but it was his worldview that made him. He read Max Weber at Yale and it all clicked : Life is a contest for status. Some people think humans are driven by money, or love, or to heal the wounds they suffered in childhood, but Wolfe put the relentless scramble up the pecking order at the center of his worldview. It gave him his brilliant eye for surfaces, for the care with which people put on their social displays. He had the ability to name the status rules that envelop us in ways we are hardly aware of. He had a knack for capturing what it feels like to be caught up in a certain sort of social dilemma.

He was drawn to times and places where the status rules were shifting. His book “The Right Stuff,” about the U.S. space program, takes place at such a moment. Before, the combat pilots were the tippy-top alpha males in the world of flight, but then along came the astronauts to knock them off their perch. In “Radical Chic,” you can catch glimpses of the old blue-blood Protestant elite — the Astors, the Whitneys, the Rockefellers. But this is 1970. A new crowd is beginning to displace them: the Bernsteins, Barbara Walters. The members of this rising elite have often made their money in culture and the media, and include the formerly unthinkables — Catholics, Jews, Black people.

The old aristocrats had it so easy, those stately bankers in the J.P. Morgan mold. They may have been frequently bewildered about why the masses didn’t like them, but their own place in the social aristocracy was secure. It was right there in their bloodlines — the generations of grandees stretching back centuries. The status rules were simple. All you had to do was live like an English earl and collect European culture by the boatload, and you could cruise through Manhattan amid the sound of others bowing and scraping.

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Essay Papers Writing Online

Exploring the art of essay writing – a collection of insights and reflections.

Essay writing is a craft that allows individuals to express their thoughts, ideas, and arguments in a structured and compelling manner. It is a form of art that requires creativity, critical thinking, and eloquence. Through the art of essay writing, writers have the power to influence and persuade their readers, sparking new perspectives and inspiring change.

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By following these secrets and incorporating them into your writing process, you can unlock the full potential of your essay writing skills and create compelling and impactful essays.

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Embarking on the journey into creativity is an exhilarating experience that opens up a world of possibilities and inspiration. As you delve into the realm of essay writing, you have the opportunity to explore your unique perspective, voice, and style.

Creativity in writing is not just about coming up with innovative ideas or flashy phrases. It’s about approaching your topic from new angles, weaving together compelling narratives, and engaging your readers in thought-provoking ways.

Throughout this journey, you may encounter challenges and roadblocks, but these obstacles can be catalysts for creativity. Embrace the process of brainstorming, drafting, revising, and refining your essays. Allow yourself to experiment with different techniques, structures, and approaches.

Remember, creativity is a journey, not a destination. Stay curious, open-minded, and willing to push the boundaries of your writing. Let your imagination roam free and see where it takes you. The journey into creativity is an ongoing and rewarding adventure that will shape you as a writer and thinker.

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In the realm of essay writing, one of the most powerful tools at your disposal is the ability to convey your thoughts and ideas with clarity and precision. By mastering the art of crafting well-structured and compelling essays, you open the door to a world of influence and impact.

Through the process of writing, you have the opportunity to delve deep into your subject matter, exploring its nuances and complexities. This journey of discovery not only enriches your own understanding but also allows you to share your insights with others, shaping their perspectives and sparking thought-provoking conversations.

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By discovering the power of essay writing, you unlock a world of creativity and expression that knows no bounds. Embrace the journey, and let your words soar.

Unleashing Your Imagination

One way to unleash your imagination is to brainstorm and jot down all your ideas, no matter how wild or unconventional they may seem at first. By embracing the unexpected, you can discover unique angles and fresh insights that will make your essay stand out.

Remember, the art of essay writing is not about following rules – it’s about letting your imagination run wild and expressing your ideas in a way that is uniquely yours. So, don’t be afraid to take risks, experiment with different writing styles, and explore the boundaries of your creativity. Unleash your imagination and watch your writing come to life!

Embracing the Craft

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[Frontispiece to An Essay on man] [art original]

Lewis Walpole Library > [Frontispiece to An Essay on man] [art original]

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