PRIVATE VIEW

Art advisors; the power behind the thrones
by Ben Lewis

One of the effects of the explosion of demand in the art market today has been the rise of a new kind of power – we would say secretive, they would say discrete - distinct from gallerists, dealers, auction houses, curators and museum directors. Power in the contemporary art world now resides more and more in a new class of art advisors, who mediate between the scene’s other players.

There have, of course, always been art advisors. Charles I used them when he acquired his collection in the seventeenth century. But now in this era of unprecendented growth in wealth, the UHNWIs (ultra high net worth income individuals) are forming a new class of monarchs and dukes across the world, businessmen all keen to establish their own ‘courts’, for which an art collection is the sine qua non. We are in a replay of the Renaissance. Then as now there was a surge in wealth built on trade and political stability; warlords and barons were persuaded by Humanists to turn their castles into centres of learning and the arts. The Rubells are the new Gonzagas; Francois Pinault is the new Francis I, whose art buying laid the foundations for the Louvre; Charles Saatchi could double as Cosimo Medici…. and he needs his Marsilio Ficinos, a handful of the Florentine intellectual who founded neoplatonism and collaborated closely with artists like Boticelli, whom the Medicis collected.

You may wonder how the herds of new art collectors decide what to buy. Wealth does not confer an instant knowledge of art history or supply you with a familiarity with the thousands of names on the globalised art market. It certainly does not mean - in a world where waiting lists for the best artists today are longer than those for NHS operations in the eighties - that you can buy what you want. The collectors are unlikely to have the time or patience to trawl the six or seven big annual fairs (Frieze, Basel, Miami, Cologne, the Armory etc) let alone the three or four satellite fairs with smaller galleries which are attached to each big one. As a consequence, almost every new collector has an art advisor.

The art advisors come in all shapes and sizes, from multi-million dollar deal-makers to young art history graduates – often from Sotheby’s MA courses - who are keen to earn a living from their favourite past-time, looking at art. I met one of these Sima Familant, elegant and educated, at an after-party for a New York opening. She had brought along two thirty-something suits, by which I mean smartly dressed Wall Street financiers. One was already collecting works – he had ten, he told me – the other, judging by the way he was grooving on the dancefloor with a young female artist, was likely to start soon. “we work with people who don’t know anything about contemporary art and want to buy some,” she told me,”It’s difficult to make good choices. Collectors don’t understand why one thing is $10,000 and something else is $20,000.”

I met Mark Fletcher, a young but established advisor, in his ravishing new flat on the 66^th floor of the new Time Warner skyscrapers on the edge of Central Park. His real estate was an embodiment of the art boom: he’d gone up in the world since I last met him in a small uptown flat, situated only on the sixth floor. Now, the sun was setting across enormous views stretching one way out to the harbour and the other downtown. The walls of the living room were themselves a work of art – a vast camp technicolour mural by the trendy young Brazilian artist who calls himself Assume Vivid Astro Focus – and on them was hung, among other things a large screenprint of a handgun by Warhol “You can rupture a work by Assume Vivid Astro Focus,” Mark told me, “That’s what so great about him.” But Mark was not prepared to tell me whom he advised, or what he had been advising them to buy. He did confirm that art advisors typically take a fee of 10% of the value of the work purchased (a fee taken from the buyer, not the seller) but that sometimes they are kept on retainer by the collector. Judging by what was on the walls of his flat, Fletcher had been encouraging his clients not to flinch at the hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollar price-tags on Richard Prince, John Currin, Matthew Barney and Warhol.

Art advisors are now slowly but surely becoming the most powerful force in the art market, although they are naturally far too discrete to admit it. Thus Philippe Ségalot would be far to diplomatic to say that he made the buying decisions, as advisor to Francois Pinault for the latter’s vast art collection now on show at Palazzo Grassi in Venice. And Sandy Heller, art advisor of choice of the new billionaire hedge fund managers, is too modest to claim that he persuaded Steve Cohen to pay £7M for Damien Hirst’s shark, though he did tell me his workload had tripled every year since 2002. The rise in prices for modern and contemporary art have now outstripped what public institutions can afford, the museums rely on gifts and loans from the collectors, and what collectors own is decided by their advisors. According to my logic that means that it is art advisors who are writing art history today. Although of course they are too discrete to admit it. “If you get it half-right,” Mark Fletcher said to me, alluding to the spread-betting principle behind the advisor’s job of buying work that will go down in the history books,”You’re a genius. If you get it a third right you’re in the hall of fame.”

But the art advisors are not only arbiters of taste, they are a vital component of the manipulations of the art market. Without them the collector would not know what to buy, but also the gallerist wouldn’t know who to sell to. The number one rule of every gallerist is to sell to collectors who will keep the works they acquire and loan or donate them to museums. What they want to avoid at all costs is the speculative collector who buys only to sell the work at auction. Too many works on the block can lead to a crash in value for an artist; but even a high price at auction for a young artist can create pressures to push up prices for his work unsustainably. In today’s art market with a flood of new entrants, unknown to the gallerist, many motivated by the proven investment value of works of art, the gallerist needs an intermediary to guarantee the good faith of the collector. Hence the art advisor. “I visit galleries and artists studios abroad on behalf of collectors. If you want to persuade a gallery or artist to sell you a work, you have get to know them. A lot of it is face time,” art advisor Lisa Schiff told me.

But the art advisor has his cake and eats it: s/he is also essential to the auction market. The rocketing of prices of works of art are driven by auction houses - often the auction value of an artist’s work can be four times the price you can buy one of his works for from his gallery… if they will sell it to you. An art advisor is useful for collectors who want to acquire works at auction … discretely. Few of them want people to know what they are buying and for how much. This is not simply a way of protecting one’s privacy as a buyer. It’s a fundamental way of manipulating the market. A collector who owns five to ten works by one artist, has a vested interest in seeing the value of works by that artist rise at auction, so he or she may send in a proxy to ‘bid up’ works by that artist when they come on the market. Alternately, if you are selling a work of art, and you know there is one wealthy buyer, you may wish to send someone in to bid up that potential buyer. My friends in the world of art advising say they have see this going on in the auction rooms all the time, though they are far too discrete to name names or wish to be quoted.

Thus the art advisor has become another structural support in the pyramid scheme of the art market – with the same vested interest in seeing the prices of art go up, rather than reach a far market value, as collectors, auctioneers, and gallerists. “We don’t know what’s going to happen. We’ve never been at this level before,” Lisa Schiff told me in a moment of indiscretion, “It’s like global warming. We’ve let out so much CO2 we don’t know what the future’s going to look like.”

POST SCRIPT

Not every collector uses art advisors. The famous Miami Collectors the Rubells don’t. Their collection is renowned not just for the artists they collect, but for the quality of works they chose from those artists. And they fly economy and they schlep their own bags, Mark Fletcher told me admiringly. So sometimes the love of art can still win through.