FADE TO BLACK Even the most cautious collector cannot guard against every possible scenario—and there are some problems that even those collectors with the deepest pockets can’t avoid. Take the world of color photography, for example: Experts estimate that no color photograph—including the large-scale works by Andreas Gursky now commanding prices of $2 million and up at auction—will last longer than 200 years, because the complex organic chemicals used to produce them decompose, unlike those used in oil paintings or black-and-white photography. Digital prints will fade even faster.

For Joan and Michael Salke, doyens of the art scene in Boston and Miami, going to great lengths would be an understatement. In the late 1990s, the Salkes acquired a massive painting by Philip Taaffe called Tsuba Forest. After the purchase, they quickly realized they could not get it into any of their homes. "Whatever we did, there was no way we were going to make it fit," says Joan Salke of the work, which is 111.5 inches high and 134 inches wide. While the couple had always promised themselves not to accumulate works that languished in storage, they had no choice this time. For four years, the Boston Museum of Fine Art got lucky and was able to display the work in its galleries until the Salkes went shopping for a new, larger condominium in Florida, where they spend about half of each year. Finally, they found their new home—an apartment in a new building where the ceiling heights were, fortuitously, exactly 111.5 inches high. "That was the clincher," Salke says.

But even then, they were faced with more than just the task of bringing in the artwork and hanging it on the wall. "Turned out that the height wasn’t precisely 111.5 inches at each point along the wall," Salke recalls. A team of laborers went to work sanding the ceiling and cement floor in a few places identified by a specialist as being a fraction of an inch too small. Then, worried by the possibility of some kind of adverse reaction between the painting’s canvas and the cement floor base, the Salkes oversaw the installation of a kind of drain pan along the cement floor—the same kind of underflooring used with shower tile. At last, it was time to hang the painting. "It took a day and a half to install," Salke remembers.

GARRY BOEHLERT spent $22,000 on lighting to properly display Max-Carlos Martinez’s Twilight.

Finally, the new flooring, marble, could be installed. First, however, they screened off the painting in a kind of clean room, so that construction dust would not damage it. And, of course, the flooring could not stretch all the way to the wall because the painting occupied the full space. "So we now have a floor that ends just before the wall, with lovely beveled edges," Salke says. Whether or not the condominium’s next buyer will be so enthusiastic about such unusual features remains to be seen, but the Salkes realize that, as long as they own the work, they are likely to cling to their new apartment. "Face it, we don’t want to have to move," she says.

Care and Feeding
Even after a collector navigates the display maze, the costs of maintaining the collection continue to climb. Fortunately, many crises can be solved if an individual has enough cash to throw at the problem. Hedge fund impresario Steve Cohen made headlines when he paid a reported $12 million to acquire a work by Damien Hirst—a 14-foot tiger shark preserved in a tank full of formaldehyde. Unfortunately, the shark was in less-than-pristine condition after several years immersed in chemicals: Bits of the big fish were flaking off into the surrounding liquid, turning the tank into a murky mess. Cohen eventually convinced Hirst to replace the shark. Still, the art world is buzzing with the tale that Hirst will do the work for free, but Cohen will bear the cost of acquiring the new shark. (Cohen has repeatedly declined to discuss the shark debacle publicly.)

JOAN AND Michael Salke had trouble finding space in their home for Tsuba Forest.

"Condition really affects the value of a work, so it’s important that collectors be prepared to spend what is required to preserve it," Westreich says. "It’s not a game for the unsophisticated, those who aren’t well advised or the uninitiated, just because they have deep pockets."

In the eyes of some collectors, the real hidden costs may be more intangible than writing checks to cover itemized costs like this. "It’s not the cost of framing, it’s the fact that the framer takes six weeks to finish the job rather than four weeks, and you planned a party in five weeks to show off your new purchase to hundreds of your dearest friends," says Bill Brady, owner and director of the ATM Gallery in Manhattan. "It’s the cost of a collector jetting off to an art fair in Florida or London or Venice or Miami. It’s the cost of having someone on call to walk into galleries with you and help you understand what you’re looking at. But then, when people get as caught up in the frenzy as they are right now, all that tends to just slip right out of their heads."