The collector and the womaniser

Gemma Tipton looks at some patterns of art-collecting, in an article based on her recent talk at the To Have and to Hold Symposium at the Irish Museum of Modern Art.

There are a lot of mythologies surrounding collecting, and I think that a symposium about collecting should also question some of those mythologies, should question collecting itself. So for the final presentation of the day, my short talk is about love, about art, and about collecting.

Buy what you love.  Leaving aside ideas of investment, that's probably the piece of advice most often given to those wondering how to go about starting to collect contemporary art.  And most private collections do begin with that simple (seeming) act of falling in love.  Or more properly, an act of desire - and don't most love affairs start with desire?  With wanting?  The need to have, the seductive idea of possession, of exclusive possession...  So anyway, you see this work of art and you want it, and then there is the emotional response to getting it.  Triumph and gratified desire - the feeling is like a first kiss.  But the feeling passes and you can't prolong it, so you look to repeat it.  Again and again.  You move from being buyer to collector.  You say you love art, but what you love is collecting art.   

What do I mean by that?  Are they not one and the same thing?

No - the person with a love of art who occasionally buys a work is driven by different desires than the collector. The individual pieces owned are obtained as discrete transactions, and do not relate to one another, save perhaps by coincidence of taste, nor does their owner require them to.

So when does buying become collecting and what happens when it does? What happens to art when it is collected?  What do we do to art when we collect it?  What is that difference between a buyer and a collector?  Well, at risk of being crass, it may be the difference between a lover of women who loves the woman he is with, and one who has moved over into the realm of the bedpost-notch-carving womaniser.

Is that fair?  Can you both love art and collect it?

I would suggest that potentially it is possible, but that by taking five different examples, I will also demonstrate that there are significant pitfalls in the way we tend to regard the process.

These five are:

Cover of John Fowle's book, The Collector; image held here.

In John Fowles' book, the Collector, Frederick is a butterfly collector who develops an obsession with art student, Miranda.  Winning the pools enables him to ‘collect' her and to keep her in the basement of his new house in Surrey (bought for the purpose).  Frederick describes the chloroforming of Miranda as being no different from netting one of his butterflies, and hopes that in her new context - the isolation of his basement - the barriers between them (taste, class, creativity) will be broken down and she will come to love him back.  Miranda tries to understand him, but can come up with only contempt.  She sees his collecting - of butterflies as well as of her -   as being anti-life. 

In the novel Miranda as Art Student equals life and creativity, and Frederick as Collector equals death of life and smothering of potential, of creativity. 

In collecting Miranda, Frederick kills her, and the novel ends with him setting his sights on a new specimen.  As a collector, Frederick is not in love with Miranda as an individual, but with her (and her successor) as objects in his collection.

Kerry Stewart: Twins, bought by Charles Saatchi; image held here.

Credited with injecting a vital shot of adrenaline in the arm of the British art world, the media hype surrounding Charles Saatchi's role in the YBA phenomenon sometimes makes it seem as if he painted all the pictures and made all the sculptures himself.  But then nothing that appears in the media about Saatchi should surprise us, for he is the quintessential ad-man.  In its new home at the former GLC building in London, the Saatchi collection (with a few notable exceptions) does start to look like a brightly coloured collection of slogans or one-liners. 

As a collector, Saatchi made careers, and he also broke them too.  Sandro Chia was a victim, Damien Hirst an obvious success (he has just made 15 million from the opening night of his new show in London). Nonetheless, one gets the impression that Saatchi's role as patron and Svengali, is more important to him than the individual objects he has purchased. 

Actually, it's more than an impression:

The Sensation show in London's Royal Academy in 1997 was hyped beyond any exhibition had been (perhaps since the Impressionist's first outing) when a tabloid uproar erupted around Marcus Harvey's portrait of Moors murderer, Myra Hindley.  The painting, made up of children's handprints was vandalised.  There was a police guard, demonstrations.  Calls were made to close the show.  It was even on the nine o'clock news.  The queues went around the block.

Myra watched unobtrusively from a wall of the Brooklyn Museum in 1999 when Sensation opened in New York.  This time the outrage was all aimed at Chris Ofili's painting The Holy Virgin Mary, an African Madonna accessorized by a clump of elephant dung, and pictures cut from porn magazines.  The demonstrators were there, the guard was in place, the show made the news, the newspapers. Guiliani threatened to pull funding from the BMA on grounds of giving religious offence.  And, of course, the queues were there too.

Marcus Harvey: Myra ; image held here.

In each case it was impossible to view either work on their own terms - as interesting, thought provoking, and in Myra's case, poignant, works of art.

In the GLC building, one of the strengths of Saatchi's collection is the series of delicate inks and watercolours by Ofili.  Myra is still there, but without the media hype, not shocking at all. 

In retrospect it's hardly surprising that an ad-man's collection created headlines wherever it went.  His PR department could well have been fired if it hadn't.  Nonetheless, Myra in London in 97, and the Virgin Mary in New York in 99 were affected (to their detriment) by their use as marketing ploys within the exhibition of that collection.  And don't try to tell me that that comes from an individual's (in this case Saatchi's) love affair with each work he has purchased.  The Saatchi collection is about hype, money, and marketing, and works that aren't are twisted to fit.

Chris Ofili: The Holy Virgin Mary; image held here.

If Saatchi lies (or lay) at the heart of shaping YBA taste, how can we view  that other creator of cultural taste (albeit the culture of the West End Musical) Andrew Lloyd Webber, and his collection of Pre Raphaelites, currently on show (again) at the Royal Academy?  Is there anything to discover from his assortment of, sometimes gritty, but always pretty chocolate box and tea towel imagery?

The relative importance of Lloyd Webber's collection is actually as much at the mercy of the vagaries of public taste as Saatchi's will be.  What is naff now (although actually I rather like Millais and Holman Hunt) is probably edging closer to the top of the list for scholarly re-discovery, reappraisal and artworld-chic resuscitation. 

What is interesting for the purposes of this talk however is Lloyd Webber's inclusion of a Picasso in his collection.  Picasso's Blue Period portrait of Angel de Soto was purchased by Lloyd Webber to illustrate a thesis he has been developing - that in the draperies and hems of some of his lounging, fashionably consumptive, yet still semi-naked pre-Raphaelite ladies, lies the inspriation for, and the roots of cubism.

Western art is valued for its uniqueness, yet the art collection looks at volume: a number of unique objects, that as a group are about commonalities - of value, taste, period, narrative. Once a work of art has been brought into a collection, it is swept up into a world of economics, of value, significance, taxonomies.  It is now open (as is potentially the rest of that artist's work) to speculation, trade; it is legitimised, and will be used to legitimise other works of art.  It is in the system, but it's no longer about the object itself.

Like the Sultan's harem needing a blonde, Lloyd Webber has purchased an original, unique work of art to add a layer of potential interest and art historical legitimacy to his collection of beloved Victoriana.

Hotel Bellagio, Las Vegas

Steve Wynn owns the Bellagio hotel in Las Vegas, as well as the MGM and others.  He also collects and commissions art.  The Bellagio sports a massive Rauschenburg - made for the foyer, and also has a restaurant called Picassos.  Picasso seems to be suffering in this talk, for the restaurant is so named for the Picasso works on paper which adorn its walls.  Nothing wrong in that perhaps - although a look at what is going on over in the MGM throws a little more light on the issue. Renoir's in the MGM is a fake French bistro nestling between the jungle-like entrance, where Siegfried and Roy's white tigers play behind protective glass, and the slot machines.  On the walls hang some of Wynn's Renoirs.  They are genuine.  You can even buy them (should you win enough at the tables).  In Paris, the bistro would be genuine, and the Renoirs fake.  Here it's the opposite.  Renoirs is a restaurant where MGM hospitality staff take high rollers and big winners for meals, in the hopes of plying them with alcohol and sending them back to the tables with fortunes reversed. The paintings are there to add a sense of limitless money, generosity of spirit and taste, and to create a spurious (and confusing) authenticity in an environment designed solely to relieve the patron of their loot.

Wynn is a man using his collection.

Another thing about Steve Wynn, is that I was told that he is going blind.  He has degenerating tunnel vision apparently, and as his eyesight fails he is buying more and more art.  I'm not quite sure why that is interesting, but it's one of those things that seems to be saying something about something.  Perhaps it's got to do with another branch of collecting theory that puts the anal back into anal-ysis by suggesting that the collector collects to make up for what he (or she) cannot bear to let go.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti : Blanzifiore (Snowdrops), 1873; © Collection Lord Lloyd-Webber; image held here.

And so to MoMA.  Last year, I went on a tour of the Museum of Modern Art in New York's new premises in Long Island City.  Presently operating as exhibition halls, with storage below, the building will revert entirely to storage when the Yoshio Tanuguchi building project is completed on 53^rd Street.  In the climate-controlled basement, racks upon racks of works are stored under the best possible conditions, kept secure behind cages.  It's like seeing the vaults of the Bank of England, the gold reserves that underwrite the currency.  At MoMA you're looking at the canon of contemporary art, the works that guarantee the legitimacy, the authenticity of taste and worth, of whatever is being exhibited above.

Gertrude Stein is credited with saying that one can either be modern or a museum, but not both simultaneously.  When MoMA was founded in 1929, its 28-year-old director, Alfred Barr sought to address this dilemma by announcing that the museum's collection would be a torpedo, its nose "the ever advancing present, its tail the ever receding past.”  MoMA would be unique in that it would regularly deaccession works, and the trustees even discussed establishing a rule that works would be deaccessioned within fifty years of an artist's death.  Needless to say, that never happened, and the tail of the torpedo became wider and ever more heavy.

Once you start to collect it's hard to stop, and harder still to give up your trophies.

As a winner-picker, MoMA collects works which it believes make up the contemporary canon.  It buys the ‘must-haves', where it can afford them, and it collects ‘on spec'.  The majority of the works in MoMA's basement are, however, Mirandas, destined in all probability never to see the light of day again.  And were I an artist, I would be (while naturally delighted to be part of their torpedo), also nagged with disquiet at the thought of my work languishing unlooked at and unloved in their vaults. 

So if collections are so terrible, why do we encourage our children to collect?  Are we fostering little murderers of little art works? 

What collecting teaches children is things like order, constructing narratives, hierarchies, histories and value systems - but certainly not things about the primacy of the individual object.  Collecting is about acquisition and the mission for completion. And shortly after acquisition, the dynamics of collecting is focussed on the next thing, it is the serial seducer in pursuit of the rush that the next conquest will bring. 

Its subject may be art, but it's no longer about love.

If I've mainly been talking about private collections, it's also worth remembering that most public collections have a bequest / or series of bequests at the heart of them - and if you ever wanted proof that the collection is about itself and not about the objects in it, those who stipulate that their collections are displayed intact by the receiving organisation should provide it.

All that said, the individual object is often more than able to hold its own - at least some of them are.  And as for collecting - one thing is for sure - the histories and narratives of our contemporary canon of western art couldn't exist without it.

Gemma Tipton is a writer based in Dublin.

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Responses so far
Comment 1	Great article, you are speaking my mind about the subject. I'm glad that this magazine publishes articles that stand against the current of pleasing the standards and values of parameters that have nothing to do with art, such as marketing, markets, advertising, thus it addresses an issue that is a key point in the "art world" this days. I am from Buenos Aires, Argentina, and here we deal with the exact situations you are detailing. Collecting, Curators, Museums, Patronage, Retrospective shows... Things that have nothing, -and everything- to do with art this days, and I might say, ever since back in the 1400's. But a critical, or analytical viewpoint hardly ever stands out amidst the overwhelming force of complacent discourse towards encouraging more money (and less love) fall over upon the realms of Art.
Comment 2	Interesting article. I often feel collectors who buy 'big names' are merely ticking the boxes on the their wants lists,as in by-the-numbers collecting. Here's a crazy idea! Invest in less well established artists