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| Feature |
The Inner Circles
Suzanne McGee
11/01/2004
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The tacit quid pro quo is clear. In exchange
for dues, substantial cash gifts and donations of art, museums give us crucial
access to curators’ offices when we need advice, and to the genius of top
dealers who keep multiyear waiting lists for works by hot young artists. These
connections are particularly urgent in the volatile and frenetic contemporary
art scene, where knowing the right people is vital to finding and successfully
obtaining works by the best young artists.
For example, those seeking to buy
a work by Japanese artist Takashi Murakami cannot simply walk into the Marianne
Boesky Gallery in New York’s Chelsea district and purchase one, though his work
is often on view there. Membership in a collectors circle provides access to a
curator who can help us decide what kind of Murakami to buy, and who can later
provide a reference to dealers such as Boesky.
| In exchange for dues, substantial cash gifts and donations of art, museums give
us crucial access to curators’ offices when we need advice, and to the genius of
top dealers who keep multiyear waiting lists for works by hot young artists. |
“There’s no question that if
you are introduced to me by a curator as a member of one of their groups or
acquisition committees, you’re far ahead of someone who comes in off the street
without a reference, regardless of the size of the checkbook,” Boesky says.
“That alliance tells me you are serious about art, serious about this work.”
Another benefit of membership is that it increases the chance that our
assembly will end up in a museum collection one day. That, of course, is the
Holy Grail for dealers, and why so many like to do business with those in a
collectors’ circle. Acceptance into the permanent collection of a respected
institution such as the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in New York confirms that
the emerging artist is contributing to art history and is less likely to be
among the hordes of struggling artists who vanish each year. It confers a seal
of approval on the artist’s worth, and means the dealer can charge more for his
or her works in the future.
In some cases, Stone says, the covenant with a
museum can mean the difference between successfully acquiring an artwork and
losing it to another aficionado. In the 1990s, she and her husband wanted to buy
a work by German sculptor Joseph Beuys from a London dealer. “It was a condition
that it would have to go to a museum, and we specified that SFMOMA would receive
it,” she says. “We have since made a fractional gift of that piece.”
Igor da
Costa, 33, a private equity investor who has accelerated his purchases of
cutting-edge contemporary works in recent years, has been able to leverage his
membership of various Guggenheim committees in a number of unexpected ways. On
one occasion, he contemplated buying a work of art made of fabric, but was
puzzled about how he would go about conserving it. Information gleaned during a
flurry of email exchanges with the Guggenheim curator and a conservation expert
she procured prompted da Costa to pass on the opportunity. Another time, in a
conversation with another curator, he mentioned his interest in a certain young
artist, and the curator instantly replied, “Oh, I know him! Let’s go to his
studio.”
Vanguard Vantage
Curator-led visits to artists’ studios in Brooklyn’s
Williamsburg, the locus of a vibrant, emerging art world in New York, are a
standard part of the $500-a-year package in Guggenheim’s Young Collectors
Circle. “It’s in the YCC that we can begin to sense who is becoming more
interested in very serious collecting, who is developing a real rapport with the
curators and who is beginning to make a real commitment to the organization,”
says Cecilia Wolfson, manager of individual giving at the Guggenheim. As a first
sign of commitment, a YCC member—most of whom are between 21 and 35 years old
and whose ranks include children of major art-world donors as well as
up-and-coming financiers—may choose to double their financial pledge and join
the YCC’s acquisition committee, which votes on which works their dues will buy
for the museum’s collection.
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