Norah and Norman Stone, indefatigable road warriors on the global art-buying circuit, were relaxing at their home on the island of Lanai in Hawaii just after Art Basel Miami Beach in December. As always, they saw a great deal of art, picked up several new pieces, and went to parties and intimate dinners. They did not find time to see any of the 20-plus satellite art shows at this one-stop shopping fair, where dealers will hold a piece on reserve for only 10 minutes and impulse buying is rampant. “There’s a feeling that Art Basel Miami Beach is Costco for billionaires,” Norah says. Of the scene in general, she says, “There are far too many art fairs.”

Art Basel Miami Beach is perhaps the most frenzied of art events, but it has become something of a prototype for the art business, especially the business of buying and selling iconic modern and contemporary works. Like any other rapidly growing industry, this one is witnessing a proliferation of new franchises.

Being a cutting-edge collector can increasingly mean having to look for art in more and more places. New York’s Chelsea art district had 300 galleries in 2006 and more than 360 as the fall 2007 season began, according to Chelseaartgalleries.com.

When it comes to art fairs, in addition to the übercool expositions such as New York’s Armory Show, Art Basel in Switzerland and Miami, and London’s Frieze, there is a roster of smaller fairs numbering in the hundreds and growing. Art Cologne is in its 42rd year but has revamped as a contemporary fair. Art Chicago, too, is trying to revitalize. Moscow will hold its fifth World Fine Art Fair this year. ShContemporary, the brainchild of Swiss dealer Pierre Hubert and former Art Basel maestro Lorenzo Rudolf, launched last September in Shanghai with a strong European turnout. All of these fairs are inevitably filled with enough hangers-on, partygoers and speculators to make the serious buyers wonder if viewing art is of only secondary importance.

On the other hand, those who shun the crowds might miss something momentous. The art world is now so far-flung that an adventurous collector of contemporary art cannot always wait for the best works to arrive at the inner sanctum of a trusted dealer.

Worth spoke with five celebrated collectors about where their ongoing quests to find new additions to their collections take them.

Norah and Norman Stone

The Stones, whose main home is in San Francisco, buy art instead of private jets; they have counted enough frequent-flier miles to calculate that they travel approximately 60,000 miles a year in pursuit of what Norman, a psychologist and son of Chicago insurance magnate W. Clement Stone, describes as “big ideas in art.”

In spring 2007 they were in New York for the Armory Show, then Basel in June, followed by documenta in Kassel, Germany, and the Venice Biennale. In September they went to the Istanbul Biennial, then back to Venice for a second look. October found the couple at Frieze in London, where, as always, they toured the city’s galleries and had dinner with one of their favorite British artists, Keith Tyson. Then, of course, it was time for Art Basel Miami Beach. This fall they plan to add a San Francisco MOMA–sponsored trip that will take in the Shanghai Biennale.

Maddening crowds aside, the Stones enjoy going to art fairs for the territory they can cover in one concentrated setting. Otherwise, Norah says, “We’d have to travel for days and days to see all these galleries.” At the VIP preview at Art Basel Miami Beach, they carry a map. Usual stops include their favorite galleries such as Daniel Buchholz from Cologne, Paris’ Crousel and Galerie Neu from Berlin. Their long-time advisor, Thea Westreich, often accompanies them and recommends pieces that might work, but they still like to see for themselves. “We’re on the same wavelength with Thea, but not always as enthusiastic about the same things,” Norman says.

“There’s a lot of schmoozing and air-kissing,” says Norah of the Miami Beach fair. The sober, older-sister fair in Switzerland, on the other hand, affords them plenty of time to concentrate on the art. “Basel is not about parties,” she says. “It is a very serious place. The people are serious, and the art is serious. It’s not part of the culture there to open up your home.”

One of the couple’s best-known sculptures—Vito Acconci’s Adjustable Wall Bra—now resides in Stone-scape, also known as “the cave,” a 5,700-square-foot underground art space on the grounds of their home in Napa Valley. The piece was a Basel purchase, but only because they passed it up closer to home. They first saw the giant bra, made of plaster, steel, light bulbs and canvas, in the 1990s in Barbara Gladstone’s New York gallery, where they have been frequent patrons. “We knew it was a masterpiece,” Norman says. Still, they hesitated over buying it because they did not want to make an impulsive purchase. By the time they saw it again, at Gladstone’s booth at Art Basel in 2002, they knew they had to have it. By then the price had risen, fueled by market forces and ever-growing interest in Acconci, who participated in the 2002 landmark exhibition, “A New World Trade Center: Design Proposals.” Norman says, “Originally we could have bought it for one-tenth the price, but we ended up buying it from a New York dealer showing in Switzerland and transporting it back to California.”

David Raymond

David Raymond, a media entrepreneur and independent film producer, shuns the oversized and commercialized art fairs. “It’s an unbridled orgy,” says Raymond of the Miami event and its partying, art-buying hordes. “How is it possible to go and look at art in a comprehensive and cohesive way? You need to spend time with art.” Art Basel Miami Beach, he adds for emphasis, “is like the Hamptons.”

Raymond, who lives across the street from MoMA in New York, began collecting about a decade ago, accumulating works by pioneering 20th-century photographers including Man Ray, Henri Cartier-Bresson and Brassaï. Last year he sold 171 of his most important surrealist pieces to the Cleveland Museum of Art and donated another nine.

When it comes to traveling, his taste runs toward the specialized fairs where he can slowly browse and rub elbows with fellow enthusiasts. Paris Photo, an annual event that focuses on photography, is an important stop. “Everyone in the photography field converges there,” Raymond says about the show, which featured more than 100 galleries in 2007. “It’s like a big photo love fest.”

He does not necessarily come home with a trove of new work, however. Last year the offerings left him largely unmoved except for a video by the contemporary Japanese artist Noriko Yamaguchi. Raymond had seen the work—a stop-motion video called Peppermint Mother, featuring sticks of chewing gum covering the artist’s body—earlier in the year at the Asian Contemporary Art Fair in New York. At Paris Photo he ran into the artist’s dealer, MEM Gallery of Osaka, and found out there was a copy available; he bought the video for around $1,000.

For Raymond, chance encounters—and the hunt for the art he wants—are part of the excitement of collecting. He once bought a drawing for $100 at a now-defunct auction house in San Francisco, and after some sleuthing he confirmed that the work was by John Constable.

In 2004, Raymond saw the work of Chinese artist Sheng Qi at an Asia Society show in New York. So far he has not gone to China to buy, nor was he interested in China’s much-hyped new art when it first burst upon the West, but he says the artist’s work haunted him. A few years later, Raymond tracked down the artist’s gallery, Red Gate in Beijing, and after an email exchange agreed to buy two photographs, which the gallery shipped to him. The photos depict a hand with the pinky chopped off; a picture of Mao is cupped in the palm of one.

More recently, Raymond has commissioned work directly from Vietnamese artist Trong Nguyen, who lives in New York. The two met when Raymond frequented the Zabriskie Gallery in New York, where Nguyen worked. Nguyen came up with the idea of taking words from Raymond’s favorite books and writing them on rice kernels. “I said to Trong, ‘Would you do it for me?’” Raymond recalls. The kernels, with minute writing from the I Ching, Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha and Goethe’s Faust, are encased in small plastic bags that hang on the wall of Raymond’s dining room. For Raymond, the collaborative experience was so gratifying that he is considering commissioning additional works from Nguyen, and perhaps other artists. “It’s great when a collector can initiate a creative process,” Raymond says.

Marieluise Hessel

Anyone who wants to see a representative sampling from Marieluise Hessel’s collection can drive up along the Hudson River to Annandale, N.Y., where Bard College has been the beneficiary of the museum and curatorial studies program that Hessel created with the second of her three husbands, Richard Black, in the 1990s. More recently she donated $8 million to build the 17,000-square-foot Hessel Museum of Art, which opened on the Bard campus in November 2006. The New York Times called the opening exhibition “one of the most meticulously groomed collections of contemporary art in private hands,” while the New Criterion review took the opportunity to slam subversive art as having become the status quo and Hessel as having “simply issued a rubber stamp endorsing the dominant clichés of today’s academic art world.”

“My collection does not fit into their concept or guidelines of what art is supposed to look like,” Hessel says of the New Criterion. She asserts that her collection crosses cultural and geographic boundaries and addresses identity from “nationality to gender and sexuality.”

When she began collecting in the 1960s with her first husband, Egon Hessel, who ran a bicycle manufacturing business in their native Germany, one of her first acquisitions was a nude by the then little-known painter Gerhard Richter, for which she paid about $500 (a large Richter oil can now fetch millions). Hessel discovered Richter at Munich’s Heiner Friedrich gallery. “I was in my 20s, and not an expert with any special knowledge,” Hessel says. “But I was guided by the gallery, and this was where I also bought some of my earliest work by Baselitz and Polke. They have remained some of my favorite works because they remind me of my beginnings.” Over the years, she roamed the world, picking up a Cy Twombly at the Turin Art Fair, a Jannis Kounellis at Anthony d’Offay’s gallery in London, and a Kara Walker, who hadn’t yet gained fame when Hessel bought it.

“Whenever and wherever I travel, I go to galleries and museum exhibitions in every city and in every country,” Hessel says, listing New York, Berlin, Munich, Cologne, London and Paris as among the best spots for art. “This is what I do, and how I live.” She divides her time between homes in Wyoming, Florida and New York. In the spring and fall she spends about four days a week going to galleries, continually visiting between 50 and 70, including such favorites as Lombard-Freid and Luhring Augustine.

Hessel tries to go to both Art Basel events, Frieze and the Armory Show every year. She looks around a lot, preferring to take notes on artists who have captured her attention and then later searching for them in galleries. She is wary of the pressure to spend money at art fairs. “I am concerned about being seduced into buying something I shouldn’t,” she says. “I connect to a lot of works, but I must stay focused and disciplined. You should not buy emotionally.”

At the 2007 Venice Biennale, Hessel saw an installation titled Save Manhattan 03 by the young Moroccan artist Mounir Fatmi, consisting of speakers arranged to mimic the Manhattan skyline, including the World Trade Center towers. She instantly wanted it, but stayed true to her disciplined approach. She saw the same installation at Lombard-Freid a few months later and bought one of three versions. It is now on permanent loan to the museum at Bard.

In spring 2007 she bought several works by the Iranian-born artist Tala Madani at Lombard-Freid. Hessel was captivated by the artist’s painterly explorations of life in the Islamic world, and when she learned that the gallery was planning to show Madani at Art Basel Miami Beach, she decided to buy before the fair started and the prices rose. “Her work was already being avidly sought after,” Hessel says.

Rajiv Chaudhri

As the founder and president of Digital Century Capital, a high-tech hedge fund, Rajiv Chaudhri has his business interests planted firmly on Wall Street. But his passion for art is rooted in the culture of his native India. The art world knows him as the founder of the Indocenter of Art and Culture in Manhattan’s trendy Chelsea neighborhood, as well as the man who set the crowd at Christie’s New York on its ear in late 2005 when he paid $1.6 million for Mahishasura by Tyeb Mehta, the first time a contemporary Indian painting crossed the million-dollar threshold. Chaudhri is also a champion of Subodh Gupta, whose use of everyday village objects such as cow dung has earned him a reputation as the Damien Hirst of New Delhi.

Chaudhri has been fascinated by art all of his life. He recalls when he first came to the U.S. in the early 1980s at age 20 and saw his first Vincent van Gogh, whose work he had seen only in books. “It was a joy,” he says. But when he started to collect about 15 years ago, he gravitated to modern and contemporary Indian artists, as well as antiquities from the region. “I discovered a rich cultural heritage,” he says.

In the beginning, he had the field largely to himself. He would often buy at auctions, which he says were “a more trusted avenue than dealers, especially for antiquities, which might have provenance issues.” But as new buyers—including financially successful Indians—have discovered Indian art, prices have escalated to the point where Chaudhri now favors a network of galleries and dealers he knows.

Chaudhri does not have to go far from his Manhattan home to buy Indian art. On a gallery run to Chelsea he will take in the handful of Indian-art outposts, including Aicon, Bose Pacia and Bodhi Art, which all specialize in modern and contemporary Indian art. About four times a year he goes to India and, while there, hunts for pieces. His favorite gallery in New Delhi is Vadehra; in Mumbai he goes to Sakshi. He stays in contact with these galleries the rest of the year. “If there is a new work they think I would like, they email and say, ‘I have something,’” Chaudhri says. On rare occasions, he will buy a work sight unseen. His last such acquisition was in 2002, when he bought an abstract by V.S. Gaitonde for less than $50,000. The work, he says, had been seen by others he trusts, so he felt confident to go ahead with the purchase.

He attends both Art Basel events, as well as the Venice Biennale, and he went to documenta last year. A few Indian art galleries show at the fairs, but in general, he says, “The idea is, we want to enjoy art even if we are not buying there, to educate ourselves about trends and to look at Indian art within a global context.”

He goes to auctions, too, and is willing to bid aggressively—to a point. In 2006 he bought a 1954 oil painting by Francis Newton Souza for $1.36 million at Christie’s in New York. Chaudhri does not always win the prize, though. Last year, at another Christie’s auction, he was outbid on a work he dearly wanted: a 15th-century bronze of the goddess Parvati. He kept bidding until it got out of hand. “I did go up a fair amount, but I try to have limits and not violate them,” he says. Estimated at up to $600,000, the bronze eventually sold for $3.5 million. Chaudhri believes the anonymous buyer was one of the many newcomers betting that Indian art will be the next boom category. “It’s one thing to compete with collectors,” he says. “But when the business is purely about speculation, there is an irrational element. They don’t necessarily know what they are buying.”   

Ernest Beck is a writer based in New York.