What Top Collectors are Collecting

The Wall Street Journal has an interesting article on collecting, specifically, what top collectors are currently buying and why. The article starts our with a general discussion of collecting and the various art markets, and then looks at what 7 top collectors are currently adding to their collections.  The collectors range from Lily Safra to Tom Pritzker to Eli Borad.  The article asks each collector what they are buying now, where are bargains, and what is over priced.  The group gives an interesting perspective to collecting, different approaches and sectors at the top end of the market.

The Wall Street Journal reports

Collectors who have been refining their playbooks for decades say there are a few rules to buy by. If Boston collector Scott Black likes an Impressionist or modern painting, he checks the year it was made, because huge fluctuations in value can hinge on whether the piece dates to an artist's best-loved period or amounts to a fluky offshoot. In the case of Fauve painter Kees van Dongen, Mr. Black said any portraits made between 1905 and 1908 are "more historically significant" and easier to resell than anything Van Dongen painted from 1909 afterward.

Rather than compete with his peers for trendy new art, hedge-fund manager Michael Steinhardt and his wife, Judy, are building several collections around comparatively obscure niches like ancient Peruvian feather ponchos, Cycladic stone figures and 15th-century rugs. He doesn't ignore global taste shifts, though; as soon as newly wealthy Chinese buyers began paying record sums for collectible wine, he packed off his cases of Château Lafite Rothschild Bordeaux to auction houses in Hong Kong and sold them for a "fantastic" profit, he said.

Some collectors say they stay ahead of the market by becoming scholars of the field they collect, so that they're not as dependent on the advice of vested auctioneers or dealers. To better understand the imagery and history of Tibetan art, Mr. Pritzker and his wife, Margot, have hiked the Himalayas; he's now an adjunct professor at China's Sichuan University and writes academic papers parsing the merits of art made during South Asia's first-century Kushan dynasty. (That's how Mr. Pritzker knows Kushan-era art can be overpriced compared with subsequent, lesser-known dynasties.)

Most longtime collectors say they would rather walk away than overpay for art. Patricia Phelps de Cisneros, a collector based in New York, hews closely to her collection's focus—Latin American art—and rarely blows her budget. She said it's possible to get brand-new Latin American artworks for under $5,000 and older, marquee pieces for under $100,000. Last week in Slovenia, she said, she was tempted to stray when she stumbled across some "wonderful" artworks made by local artists. "I forced myself to walk away," she said.

Emotions sometimes win out, however. Twenty years ago, Mr. Broad lost out on an auction bid to win a geometric steel "Cubi" sculpture by David Smith. Over time, his loss became the collecting equivalent of the fish that got away, so he pounced when another "Cubi" came up for sale six years ago. To win it, he had to pay $23.8 million—then the highest-ever price paid for a work of contemporary art. He doesn't regret the splurge, but he said, "We normally are not proud of paying a record price for anything."

To read the WSJ article, click HERE.