Every two years, the Whiteny Museum in New York works by the most promising-and coming artists in the US in a highly promoted exhibition. Being selected for whitney biennial can change the life of an artist. It brings new people to the attention of the major galleries interested for adding fresh faces to their roster and eager to stay equal to the competition for emerging talent.
However, if you look at the catalog of biennial since a decade ago, you will find that most of the artists now manipulated ambiguity. Some have important dealers in some; Less still has a strong and consistent auction market for his work. Sothabi and Christie’s auction through catalogs a decade ago, the catalog of contemporary art, and the story is very similar. The world of art is a fashion culture in large parts, in frequent flows.
Therefore, it should not be surprising that it is difficult to invest in art, says, buy stocks, and almost always less attractive. Most contemporary tasks auctioned a decade ago will not be worth selling at a price today that can cover the original hammer price, as well as twenty -five percent commission auction houses usually charge, as well as nine percent sales tax of a New York resident will have to be paid … It will not have to be mentioned what all these money can be earned between a period in a specific stock market portfolio. There will definitely be notable exceptions, and those who are in the headlines. The best can be said that if you can take the risk of buying the best work by the most prominent artists, and you have the first rate professional advice, then you have a proper chance to make a decent comeback. Otherwise, investors should be careful. Owned art is one of the great attractions of wealth, but you should never make a mistake for a great investment.
Then why is buying art is a great idea? Only because art work is your reward. You may experience art in museums, but it will not increase your life almost as much as it is with it every day. Nor will you need a focus that should be part of an artist’s decision to exchange money earned for the work. As a collector, you will be part of a community that includes artists, curators, gallerists and other collectors with shared interests. Equally important, can be a catalyst for learning everything you purchased. He is also going to increase life.
As soon as I could take the risk of buying art, I started collecting modern Chinese ink paintings. My Guru in the region was a British scholar/dealer named Huga Moss, which I got through my Shanghainse Mitra, Jimmy King. Hugs divided their time between the Old Surrey Hall, a huge pile in Surrey with Elizabethon anticadents, and withdrew a scholar on a low -populated hill in Hong Kong. He styled himself a modern Western rebirth of a Chinese literature. Historically, there was a section of litterateur scholars/officers who played a major role in Chinese culture and often served in high government positions. He collected simple designs, brush utensils, ancient z artifacts, smelling boxes and carefully prepared furniture of “scholarly rocks” – was thought to embrace the mysterious forces of nature.
The literary tradition of landscape painting remained even after Communist Revolution and Mao’s great jump. It was a modern expression of the tradition that I focused on. There was a lot that took me into style. I was fascinated that the artists had classical training and technical skills, while their increasing risk for Western influences was encouraging them to experiment with a scale, with color and abstraction.
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I liked the hanging-scroll format of these tasks, as it easily replaces me the pictures that I displayed and experience them with fresh eyes. (Chinese will not show the same painting all the time, as much as we will play the same music repeatedly.) In my career, in that early stage, the prices were modest for me, yet the style was so at the same time that I could be one of a handful of serious collectors and can get access to the best material from leading dealers.
I was not expecting these ink paintings that they should be good investments, nor were they proved. But I stayed with them, over fifty accumulated during a decade. When I was finally ready to move forward, I donated a bulk of collection to Harvard University Art Museum, whose senior curator, Robert Mawri, probably making the best institutional collections in the US. By the 1990s, my interest in art moved to the ancient traditions of China – my then museum, now wife Alexandra Munro said a step “ahead in the past”.
Huga Moss again played an important role. He alerted me for the availability of a magnificent Tang dynasty horse, which he considered one of the best items seen in the market over the years. Huga introduced me to Giusepp Eskanzi, a prominent London dealer, who was showing work in New York. Eskanaji was surprised that he had never heard of an early collector that he would buy such an item. The price was hardly modest, but this time I felt that it would be a good investment, as China was becoming increasingly rich, and I expected collectors eventually spent heavy for excellent examples of their cultural heritage.
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Since I bought it in 1995, The Tang Horse has proud of the place in my Manhattan apartment: it is standing in a secluded splendor on an art deco console in the living room and is the first thing to catch his eye.
Starting with such a great object was set for the rest of the collection, which developed with focus on Buddhist sculpture. Wayne Fong, the head of the Asian Art in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, was generous with his advice, and I made Met my standard. When a dealer or an auction house had an object in the house that I found complicated, I would go to the mate and see if he had a better example. If they had done, I would have passed. As a result, I bought only a handful of items each year.
This motion made me well. While I enjoyed living with these tasks, which often combined physical beauty and spiritual power, they were also a challenge. Fakes were not uncommon, and even top dealers could sometimes be fooled. I needed to know why and how they were made and what they indicated, lessons that often took time to absorb.
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A part of the reason I responded to Buddhist art was a part of Buddhist and Stoic philosophical systems. Both encourage the cultivation of virtue, although one approach focuses on spirituality, the other on rationalism. Both emphasized mindfulness, which Buddhism wants through meditation; Stoicism through concentration, focus and elimination of distraction. The rigorous concept of imperialism and change echoes the Buddhist idea of the troop.
Neither philosophy is inconsistent with worldly splendor, provided that it is a medium part of someone’s mental place. Seneca was one of the wealthiest men in Rome and Stoic was the most influential of philosophers. Buddha was a prince who abandoned worldly goods for an ascetic life and was always painted in ordinary clothes. Their panthaians have bodhisattva, which are usually painted in the princely, elegant with wide ornaments. My favorite Bodhisattva is Vimalakirti .. (He) lived in grandeur and was fond of debate. When other followers of Buddha criticized the lifestyle of Vimalakirti, they argued that they were only looking at the surface of things and echoing the traditional understanding of wealth and poverty. On the contrary, he believed in “non -dust” – the idea that anyone can be fully connected in the world, can enjoy material property without connecting with them, and find true wealth in spiritual insight, compassion and knowledge.
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My hope about China’s economic growth, and this demand would stop for the country’s cultural symbol, it proved to be correct. The value of my collection has probably increased five times. Five times seems like fine returns, but it is much less than the stock market returned in the same period. Since I have no intention of selling, it does not matter to me a lot; What was the matter that great objects were no longer “out” of China, and the window of the opportunity to add to my collection was closed.
I optimized quite originally, inspired by seeing some extraordinary private collections of time-based media, video art and intersection of art and technology. My focus has moved from the past to the past, from objects to experiences, and with proper investment possibilities to a slightly financial reverse with a category from a category. This hit me that the video was the natural language of young people, an entire generation that receives most of its information from the screen, and communicates on most of its devices. Some artists were doing very innovative work, which were capable in part by rapidly changing technology from cameras that make a thousand images a second, facial recognition for software, for artificial intelligence, up to virtual reality. Other artists were baseing their work on video games, often incarnation with an irony of aggression and gender stereotypes.
While I enjoyed learning history, now I enjoyed knowing the artists. I found that I had a good synergy with many of them, which I met and have become a lot of real friends. Doug Atcon has been described as the best dinner company produced by the art world. He has surfer dood good looks, boyish curiosity about almost any subject you introduce, and the attraction and skill of a skilled racenteur. He opposes the boundaries of the museum and is eager to project his art to unexpected places. For unexpected, this penchant is central for a task in my collection, migration, reminiscent of B-Movies is set in a series of cheap motal rooms. Motal is in desolate industrial settings in a scenario devoid of most people.
In each motal room, he introduces a different species of wild animals. A horse stares nervous in a TV set, a beaver frolix in a bathtub, a hill lion attacks a pillow as it is a victim of it, a buffalo overturns a lamp and crashes a telephone on the floor. The results are sometimes poignant, sometimes cheerful -and a metaphor for the struggles of human migrants a metaphor to find your feet for the unfamiliar environment.
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Because I was relatively less collectors, I got an opportunity to be among the leaders in the region. The small universe of potential buyers kept the prices appropriate, which meant that the artists were doing their work, which were doing with the pure objectives.
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Video Art is also a challenging field for museums. Some museums have large collections, excellent curators and strong technical staff. However, visitors to museums usually expect to enter a gallery with a dozen or more paintings or sculptures and spend less than a minute with each. They do not expect to connect with a single work of art for ten minutes or more. It is not that the attention of visitors is less; They go to opera, ballet, concerts, movies and theater. But those activities are done sitting in the evening, not standing during the day.
I have long felt that if the video art aims to offer what kind of immersive experiences of the artists, a new type of cultural institution is required – a hybrid between a museum and a performance art site. As an enterprise philanthropist, I am excited to help creating such an institution. I have taken a huge step by obtaining a 40,000 square foot site in the lower east side of Manhattan, which we are calling Canian. This will include the latest technology, and it will demonstrate both established owner and exciting new talent. I hope it will become a “see” destination for lovers of contemporary art. It will be open to attract new, small, and more diverse audiences in the evening, which is designed by the dramatic, experienced nature of its exhibitions.
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