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| Shared Passions |
Aesthetic Aspirations
Josh Baer
08/02/2004
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The Spontaneous Salon
Tim Nye brings an entrepreneur’s energy to his
activities in the art world. An active collector for more than 15 years, he is
an heir to the Uris real estate fortune. He has created his own wealth in
business ventures that have often attempted to merge the worlds of art, media
and entertainment—fitting endeavors for a man whose education combines an MBA
from Columbia University with a fellowship at the Independent Curatorial Study
Program at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Nye founded the music website
SonicNet in 1994 and sold it to MTVi in 1999. More recently, he restored a
long-abandoned Yiddish vaudeville house on the Lower East Side of Manhattan and
turned it into the Landmark Sunshine Cinema, a plush art-film house complete
with Japanese rock garden.
In 1991, Nye opened Thread Waxing Space in New
York’s Soho to present art exhibitions, performance art and music in a
not-for-profit environment. He closed it 10 year later, however, finding that
the space was becoming too institutional for his tastes, and that he was
becoming too removed from the curatorial climate he loved. He chose to continue
to think in his multidimensional ways as a collector and as a board member of
venues such as the Brooklyn Academy of Music.
The art that intrigues him
“balances the relationship between idea and execution,” says Nye. “I am
interested in the artist’s hand and what is being expressed.” He served as an
early champion of artists like Leonardo Drew and Alexis Rockman, who now form
the core of his collection. Nye initially focused on abstraction, but has now
moved to more narrative and layered artists such as the late Martin
Kippenberger. “One of the things I like about Kippenberger is the subversiveness
of luring you into the seductiveness of his imagery and surface,” Nye muses,
“only to deny you the pleasure of that gesture by marring the surface with his
own home-brewed bumper stickers.”
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