TOP VIEW The days of the discreet art patron and the exclusive collection may be waning. Art has become a heady, global business, and it drives collectors today to assemble their portfolios with a view to bringing the works, eventually, into the public arena.

Our compulsion to bring our art into the public arena might involve the expensive and elaborate process of creating our own institution to display it, though many of us take a path of lesser resistance and simply lend our collections to museums. Whichever we choose, we will find the lifelong process of assembling and displaying a portfolio will leave our commitment to our favorite art, our beloved artists, even our primal sense of aesthetics challenged and, to be sure, heightened.

The experiences and insights of four leading contemporary collectors illustrate the range of motivations and strategies that may inform our decisions on what art to collect, and how to display it.

Youthful Passions
David and Danielle Ganek, both in their mid-30s, live in a stone house in Connecticut with their three children. He runs a hedge fund called Level Global, and she is a former magazine creative director now working on her first novel. They have been collecting art for nearly 20 years, having begun at truly tender ages. Art—and mostly then it was photography—was one of the things that brought the two of them together when they started dating right out of college. David has an edge as a second-generation collector; his parents were contemporary art collectors. Over the past six years, however, the younger Ganeks have become a force in the art world.

They have had their most profound effect as members of the Stieglitz Society at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. The Ganeks engineered a complex transaction with the estate of the late Diane Arbus, one of the finest photographers of the last century, to purchase 23 rare, signed vintage prints. They worked together with the museum to choose from the available prints, and, with a purchase of more than $2 million, the Ganeks will give 13 of the photographs to the Met and retain 10 for themselves. As New Yorkers, they felt it was important to place such important New York art in a local institution. The Ganeks will live with all the works for a period of time before handing over 13 to the museum. (Six of the photos are currently traveling around the country with the Arbus museum retrospective.)

The Ganeks will add the Arbus photos to what is already one of the leading collections of the 1990s, with important works by Damien Hirst, Richard Prince, Jeff Koons, Cindy Sherman and Maurizio Cattelan. Danielle describes their collecting in none-too-uncertain terms as a “52-week-a-year activity focused on the art of our time. Once it becomes part of your life, it seems to take over.”

Museums around the world have approached the Ganeks to lend parts of their collection, but they remain highly selective about where they exhibit. Their knowledge of this art milieu has begun to rival that of many curators, and they insist on knowing the context of each exhibition and the works that will be on display.

The Ganeks insist that increasing the value of their collection is not the motive behind their desire to lend their art. It does bring other benefits, however. David notes, “Being good lenders encourages dealers to sell us other works in which we are interested.”

That their motivation is more aesthetic than material becomes evident when they describe what drives their collective passion. “Our transition to being much more active speaks to how addictive the whole process is,” Danielle explains. The more one learns and sees, the more one wants to learn and see. The more a person studies one artist, they say, the more that person then looks at another artist who was influential.

Multicultural Benefactor
Marieluise (Marlies) Hessel has been collecting art for three decades, since she was in her early 20s. Long described as one of the most beautiful women in the art world, Hessel was born in Germany and has lived in both the United States and Mexico. With her husband of three years, Ed Artzt, former CEO of Procter & Gamble, Hessel now divides her time between homes in Jackson Hole, Wyo., and New York, where works by Roy Lichtenstein, Cy Twombly and Morris Louis fill their apartment.

Hessel, who says her wealth stems from investments, began, as many young collectors do, buying works of the artists of her time. Fortuitously, these turned out to be some of Europe’s most important post-World War II figures, men such as Joseph Beuys, Gerhard Richter and Sigmar Polke. Now, she admits, she has “developed a strict guideline as to what I collect and deal with—art that addresses issues of identity that deal with gender, race and nationality.”

Her other luminaries include artists such as Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Janine Antoni and Gabriel Orozco. “I have an emotional need to collect that leads to a need to connect to the work. When I felt lonely, I would go the museum and look at Rembrandts or Durer to find relief,” Hessel recalls. “While I collect many difficult works, sometimes I also like beauty.”

She has actively distinguished her collection by founding the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, N.Y. On a trip to Russia in 1987, she met Bard President Leon Botstein, who planted the idea to put her collection in a small town with a school and research center.

Today her congeries of some 1,750 pieces is on permanent loan to the center, along with archives of books and videos. Her mission is to provide both a research facility for 20th-century art and a locus for scholars to conduct comparative studies of art with literature and music. Graduate students study Hessel’s works, while she is content to buttress a foundation that preserves the collection in its wholeness.

“I was multicultural before it was politically correct, and I always saw art in a societal context,” she says. “With Bard, there will be an end point to the collection that I want to enjoy.”

Corporate Curator
Donald B. Marron, CEO and founder of the private equity investment firm Lightyear Capital in New York, began collecting art in the late 1960s at the financial firm Mitchell Hutchins, where he was president. He expanded his corporate and personal collections during his 20 years as chairman of PaineWebber and through its subsequent merger with UBS AG. A standout in any art crowd at his basketball-player height of 6 feet, 7 inches, Marron is also a longtime board member and former president of the board of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. So it was no great surprise when he turned to MoMA in 2002 to make an outright gift of 37 important works of modern and contemporary art from the corporate UBS PaineWebber Collection. While it was an enormously generous gift by the standards of the art world, it was still a minor ripple on the corporation’s bottom line. The newly renovated MoMA will display the works, featuring artists such as Willem de Kooning, Philip Guston and Susan Rothenberg, when it reopens in 2005.

MARRON COLLECTION Donald Marron in front of a Willem de Kooning painting.

Marron believes that it is vital for his employees and clients to be surrounded by fine art during the business day. “Contemporary art reflects the society it lives in,” he explains. “And being in a market-driven business, we need to be exposed to it.” He has hung art in offices around the world throughout his career and continues to do so at Lightyear. He leveraged art as a useful marketing tool at UBS PaineWebber, continuing a tradition of creating a vehicle for artists to develop audiences through corporate collections. Marron made the work available to the public through loans and exhibitions, a practice he intends to continue with the collection he is building for his new company.

Marron is busily building a new assemblage that focuses on artists whose works have captivated him for years: de Kooning, Lucien Freud, Brice Marden, Tom Friedman and Neo Rauch. He recently obtained a video work by Michal Rovner that fuses the antiquity of a tribal stone with the mechanics of digital computer technology. He will show the Rovner piece in his reception area, hoping to make a statement about the state of art today and in the future for all his button-down visitors.

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.”

NYE COLLECTION Tim Nye in front of Leonardo Drew’s Number 32N, 2003.

Recently, Nye created a performance and exhibition space called Foundation 2021. Here he collects and displays work by emerging artists, affording him the pleasure of both acquiring and supporting artists outside the traditional, commercial gallery system. “Foundation 2021 is like an independent record label versus the major label,” Nye contends. “It’s personal. It can react now to what I want to do quickly, be a spontaneous salon.”

Aesthetic R&D
Although fine art devotees such as David and Danielle Ganek say that, for them, collecting is a 52-week-a-year activity, even they cannot accomplish their goals alone. Most serious collectors employ the art world’s version of a research and development department, in the form of art advisors. The Ganeks work with Sandy Heller, a New York-based private advisor, who continues to develop the future of their collection and ferrets out the best examples from sources around the globe. Marlies Hessel boasts all the contacts a collector of her status could, yet she still engages New York’s Allan Schwartzman, one of the most sought-after independent art advisors, to fine-tune the remaining portions of her collection.

Even fine art devotees cannot accomplish their goals alone. Most serious collectors employ the art world’s version of research and development department, in the form of art advisors.

Donald B. Marron credits three people: the late Monique Beudert, his first curator; former MoMA staffer Jennifer Wells; and his present advisor, the insightful Matthew Armstrong, who became curator of Lightyear after working in the same position at UBS. They provide “another set of expert eyes, who also help with the necessary research and curatorial management of the collections,” Marron explains. Even the Whitney-trained Tim Nye consults close friends and advisors in his inner circle. With the help of skilled advisors, each of them has carved out a new definition of what it means to be a collector today.  

Josh Baer is a private art dealer who publishes The Baer Faxt, a contemporary arts newsletter.

Photography by Susan Anderson