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| Shared Passions |
Artful Beginnings
Aline Sullivan
08/02/2004
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Overpaying for art is not uncommon;
ardor can overwhelm even our most careful investment strategy. Nevertheless,
these incidents should amount to lessons learned—albeit expensive ones—for the
perceptive collector. “We might pay illogical prices at times,” says Bruce Taub,
a collector of Latin American and Spanish art, who is also chairman of Fernwood
Art Investments in Boston, a firm that focuses on the art economy. “But over
time we do not overpay in the majority of cases, because we grow to understand
the field and what is reasonable to pay.” Many collectors hold on to past
purchases they have grown to see as mistakes because either they paid too much
or the quality was not quite up to standards. They keep them out of the public
eye, but visit them now and then, like delinquent children, or, as Hiscox likes
to call his, “old friends.”
Taub was working as sales director for the
international private client group of Merrill Lynch in Phoenix when he began to
dabble in collecting. A broker in his division, who happened to be president of
an organization called Friends of Mexican Art, introduced him to a dealer who
had a 6-foot by 5-foot painting that Taub decided he had to own. Since then, he
has found that by collecting the best works of artists in his category, he can
add potential value to his holdings by seeking opportunities to show them. This
past spring, the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris showed three of his Claudio
Bravo paintings of Morocco; one even appeared on the cover of the exhibition
catalog. Taub continues to collect with an eye toward passing his passion to his
family. He does not promise his children any specific dollar figures vis-à-vis
his collection, but he says, “An exhibition does contribute to the pedigree and
prestige.”
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