A Collector’s Real Challenge

Most people's response to the modern is grudging, there is a widespreadmistrust of the unfamiliar and a preference for art sanctified by t...

Most people’s response to the modern is grudging, there is a widespreadmistrust of the unfamiliar and a preference for art sanctified by time.Collecting art of the past is easy, a collector’s real challenge is incollecting art of the time in which it is being made when it exists withoutany historical pedigree. "New", "current", "fashionable" and "present day"raise all kinds of issues for a collector. How should one respond to theedgy spirit of the times? Should one give the very latest as muchconsideration as is given to the established? Should a collection be only arepository of proven masterworks or should a collector be the patron of thenew, or both?

The artworld of today is a tangle of diversity and contradictions. In thepast post-modern world, anything and everything goes, making it difficult torespond consistently to the vast range of new talent. What art should becollected and what discarded? Of the artists working today, whom should onebe taking seriously, those who are avant garde or those who are mainstream?Should one be just respectful or two steps behind what is absolutely brandnew? Should there be a certain distance in order to provide some insight ororder to the contemporary field? For the collector who is single-minded inpursuing the current, a lot of the decisions require energy and optimism.After all, even the best of collectors have remnants and remains of what wasthought to be good.

What further compounds decision-making is that young talent is always anunstable world of change, transformation and provisional status. Some of theart created lands up having lasting influence which is not immediatelyseeable, other art which looks good initially lands up having no lastingimpact. A common aspiration for all collectors is to be markedly ahead ofthe time in one’s choices and to identify artists often at the beginning oftheir careers and reputations. How do you buy that defining, iconic workwith staying power written all over it off the easel?

Story continues below this ad

Of course, the most interesting dream is to resist the inculcated norms andto create taste instead of merely promulgating it. But this requires bothintellectual independence and an independent aesthetic sense, and a greatleap of courage.

The success of collectors is most often attributed to their taste and totheir unerring eye. But I am of the belief that it actually is a differentset of attitudes which make those pioneering collections. Apart from thepassion for collecting, one needs to break all the rules and be a law untooneself have a different approach, not reckless, but steeped in thetradition of enquiry and excellence. One has to be thrilled about beinginvolved with the here and the now, the `as yet untested by time’. One hasto feel excited by the adventurous. There has to be the desire to take theexperimental areas of art into the mainstream and to be not only acollector, but also a patron and a catalyst.

It is important for a collector to genuinely support up and coming artists,to respect them and to respect whatever they are trying to do, by conveyingthat it does not matter if they become major figures of the future or not.After all, it takes nerves as it does taste to be a true collector. Theultimate challenge is to give up the security of the past and to embrace theunpredictability and complexity of the present with one’s personalconviction, to purchase the artists one admires with determined consistencyand to leave issues like worth, value and historical importance for thefuture to decide.