LONDON — Why do people buy contemporary art?
This is not such an obvious question to ask as the art world pauses for breath between the frenzy of the Frieze fair in London and the FIAC in Paris, which both recently closed, and New York’s auctions this month.
The world’s wealthiest individuals are spending increasing amounts of money on art. The French database Artprice said in a report published on Sept. 24 that auctions from July 2013 to the beginning of July 2014 had been “the best in the history of contemporary art in terms of auction turnover, price rises and record bids.” London’s Frieze Week sales in October were the highest-grossing yet, with Christie’s, Sotheby’s and Phillips pulling in a combined 216.7 million pounds, or about $349 million, including fees.
These days, it’s difficult to disentangle how much of this money is being spent by investors, speculators and status-seekers or by what dealers still like to call “true” collectors — buyers driven by a personal, connoisseurial passion for art.
An installation at the October Frieze Masters fair in Regent’s Park by the London dealer Helly Nahmad evoked that “true” collecting spirit. Set in 1968, the installation created the interior of a Paris apartment of a fictional Italian intellectual named Corrado N. It portrayed modest rooms in which original works by Pablo Picasso, Alberto Giacometti, Jean Dubuffet, Joan Miró and other modernist masters jostled for space with books, exhibition catalogs, piles of “Paris Match” and a black-and-white TV.
“That installation touched so many nerves in people,” said Michael Short, an art adviser based in Berlin. “You were looking at art in a living environment. Was that really a Giacometti next to the bed? It was the classic collector who bought art to keep, not to sell it three years later.”
The aim of the project was to “question the true meaning of collecting art,” Mr. Nahmad wrote in the catalog. But the installation was also meant as a vehicle for selling art. About 30 of the original works embedded in the installation were for sale, at prices that now would have been far beyond Mr. N’s reach. Since Frieze Masters closed on Oct. 19, Mr. Nahmad, who is part of a Monaco-based art dealing dynasty that keeps the majority of its works in the Geneva Freeport, declined to discuss sales.
The question of art collecting’s meaning could have also been the theme of “One Man’s Trash (Is Another Man’s Treasure),” an exhibition of selected contemporary works owned by the London-based Nigerian collector Theo Danjuma, 28, which were displayed in a rented Georgian house in Fitzroy Square, near Regent’s Park, throughout Frieze Week.
Mr. Danjuma is the son of a former Nigerian defense minister who is also the chairman of the oil and gas company South Atlantic Petroleum. The show, whose collection was compiled with the advice of Joost Bosland, a director at the Stevenson gallery in South Africa, was an elegantly curated, of-the-moment mix of African contemporary artists and younger international names who make art out of everyday found materials. Matias Faldbakken’s concrete-filled “Untitled (Golf Bags)” from 2011 was a standout.
This kind of rapidly amassed collection, shown off to the public in a way that sometimes resembles the contents of an art fair shopping cart, is typical of how wealthy people can quickly make names for themselves in the art world.
But does anyone still buy contemporary pieces in a more personal way — one that conforms to the nostalgic notion of “true” collecting?
“They do still exist,” said Ivor Braka, a private dealer and art collector based in London. “They’re not herd animals. They’re prepared to buy according to their own standards and tastes. They have inner confidence and don’t take the advice of others over much. Their taste can be bad as well as good, but they’re prepared to be maverick.”
Belgium has always had a reputation for producing this kind of collector. On Oct. 10, the Tripostal arts space in Lille, France, opened an exhibition that provides a rare insight into the tastes of the discreet group of contemporary art enthusiasts who live in the well-to-do Kortrijk area of West Flanders, which was home to the legendary Belgian collector Tony Herbert (1902-1959). “Secret Passions,” which runs through Jan. 4, features more than 140 works from 18 anonymous collectors as well as blown-up photographs of the works in their homes.
A number of works stop you in your tracks, such as an unsettling 1974 hyper-realistic sculpture of a young girl tying a sandal by Jacques Verduyn — Belgium’s Duane Hanson — or Elmgreen & Dragset’s 2004 slashed “Damien Hirst” spot painting revealing a safe, or Ruben Bellinkx’s 2010 video “The Trophy,” showing a live stag’s head “mounted” on a wall.
“We’re now into the third generation of collectors in the area,” said André Gordts, a Belgian collector and adviser who helped organize the exhibition. Mr. Gordts has been buying contemporary art for 30 years and all of his works are kept in his own home. “It’s an extraordinary climate now. There are a lot more buyers worldwide,” he said. “The upper crust collects for prestige and we don’t have that kind of money. But we buy artists early from small galleries and we still get offered things.”
Mr. Gordts is, for example, the owner of one of four “We the People (detail)” sculptures by the Vietnam-born artist Danh Vo included in the Lille show. Mr. Vo’s ongoing project, which currently comprises about 250 unique monumental copper fragments replicating different sections from the Statue of Liberty, has become one of the most critically admired — and commercially desirable — sculptural series of recent years.
Mr. Gordts is keeping his sculpture. But another 2011 piece from the Statue of Liberty series by Mr. Vo sold for £170,000 (£206,500 with fees) at Phillips’s contemporary sale in London on Oct. 15. That Vo sculpture had been acquired from Mr. Vo’s dealer in Paris, Galerie Chantal Crousel, for an unknown price. But the gallery sold another piece from the series for 65,000 euros, or $82,700 (£51,000), at the Art Basel fair in June 2013, suggesting that the seller at Phillips in London had tripled the investment.
Commenting on this “flip,” one of the many that now routinely takes place every auction season, Philippe Manzone, a director at Galerie Chantal Crousel, said in an email: “We agree that various motivations incite more and more people to buy art, besides the love for art itself.”
Corrado N. will be turning in his imaginary grave.