Rich People Are Doing It Wrong

Adventures in late-stage art speculation (and re-imagining what collecting can be)

I’m standing alone on a sprawling stone patio overlooking an enormous lake, surrounded by the Pelotoned physiques of Ashleys and Christophers in their crisp designer cocktail attire. I'm wearing combat boots and thrift-store finds, an outsider granted temporary access to a club to which I will never belong. Across the lake looms a structure so massive—a hotel? a country club? a waterfront resort?—that I spend a considerable amount of time trying to ascertain its function.

I was brought here by a sweet man—a social butterfly moving gracefully between the worlds of sports, art, and philanthropy—who thought that I would find the event interesting. He was right, though I’m not sure I find it interesting in the way he hoped I might.

A woman, perhaps thirty years my senior and kitted out in head-to-toe Chanel, approaches with a warm smile, relieving me of my solitude. She introduces herself, enquires about how I found myself there this evening, and I ask her the same. She and her husband live in a home nearby, she tells me, gesturing casually to the hotel/country club/waterfront resort across the way. I completely miss what she says next because I'm counting glass rectangles, trying to calculate how much she and her husband have spent on window treatments. The math is rushed, and it's only an estimate, but the total comes to considerably more than I will earn in five years.

Shortly thereafter, we are called to attention by our young host in khaki clinking a fork to his glass, inviting us to take a tour of the art in his home. The president of a nearby museum will act as docent, leading us through the collection. I don’t have much occasion to spend time in the homes of the stratospherically wealthy, so this is both a treat—in so far as I get to see the work of artists I love—and a disturbing awakening.

The museum president talks to us about the Anish Kapoor in the living room, the Antony Gormley in the TV room. On the way to the next floor, everyone walks past a Tracey Emin neon that hangs in the hallway as though it were a Happy Birthday banner left up from a party two months earlier that no one notices anymore. Over the course of the tour and the rest of that evening, I come to understand a few things that have helped shape my views about the art world and late-stage capitalism.

Trust Yourself (2012) by Tracey Emin (This is not the neon from the house tour, just a reference for those who aren’t familiar with her work.)

Trajectory Field I (2002) by Antony Gormley 107” x 67” x 52 “ (This is not the sculpture I saw at the house, just a reference for people who aren’t familiar with his work.)

This is a group of trophy hunters, people who collect art for sport, who see it as a commodity and a calling card. I learn that these people have paid tens of thousands of dollars to the museum to be members of an exclusive buying club. Like bottle service for art, they spend money for the privilege of spending more money. Membership gives them entrée to art-buying trips all over the world during which they are advised on which works to buy and are vouched for by members of a prestigious art institution.

What many people don't know about the world of high-end speculative art collecting¹ is that it's not enough to be able to afford the art. In the art world there are certain artists whose work has become so desirable that a regular person off the street cannot buy it, even if that person has ten million dollars in their pocket. Dealers want to ensure that the work of the artists they represent will continue to appreciate over time. One way to do that is to hold tight the reigns of provenance.

Provenance is, in part, the history of ownership of a particular work. For example, a piece of art that has been in the collection of an established collector and loaned to a prominent museum for a period of time is more valuable on appraisal than the exact same work found in someone’s attic. It’s not unlike the mechanism by which a person can improve their social standing by dating a celebrity (see: Julia Fox). Speculators want their art to be associated with wealth and power and good taste, always seeking proximity to social capital. To ensure continuous and prestigious provenance, some dealers only sell certain artists’ work to people who have certain types of collections, which means that a self-made unknown entrepreneur who came from nothing and is just starting her art collection will have a harder time acquiring the exact same piece than will the slothful entitled heir to, say, a TV-dinner fortune who grew up with Matisses in the dining room and hasn’t worked a day in his life.

The Trophy Hunters Club buys you instant credibility and makes sure that you can acquire the “correct" artists, which will enable you to expand your collection further in a "correct" way so that the pieces you have will continue to appreciate just by virtue of being in the company of other pieces in your collection, which will allow you to collect the work of even more desirable artists and so on forever. Like the serpent eating its tail.

What strikes me most as we are being shepherded through this otherwise unremarkable home is how flatly incurious everyone is about the art. They aren't interested in Tracey Emin or the impact that she and her fellow YBAs had on the cultural landscape. Let me be clear, I don’t believe that one must be knowledgeable about art or the art world to enjoy, collect, or have an opinion about it. It’s not their lack of knowledge that bothers me. It's their lack of appreciation and enthusiasm. They are not awestruck standing in front of an Anish Kapoor or an Antony Gormley. The people in the trophy hunting club don't love these pieces with all of their heart. They don’t see them as gateways into the soul of another human being or as windows into their own humanity. These are just shiny things to them, objects to fill up their houses and their portfolios.

This is of course not true of every speculative art collector in the world: #notallartcollectors. Some care deeply about art and have a bottomless curiosity about artists’ work and practices. This conversation is about the nature of the speculative art market and about what it would look like if we approached art collecting in a different way.

First, any collector with enough resources to join a trophy hunting club has the ability to make a significant material difference in many artists’ lives. But if the collector is purchasing the type of work that requires them to be vouched for, they’re buying from artists who no longer need that money to live. Jeff Koons doesn’t need anyone’s ten million dollars. Ditto Hirst, Murakami, and Hockney. And because the art world is built around white supremacy, colonialism, and patriarchy, the artists deemed worthy of being sold at this level are overwhelmingly and disproportionately white and men. So what you have is a system that functions to consolidate wealth and power and which enthusiastically perpetuates the status quo.

The speculative art market is built around the belief that art is a commodity and that its value belongs to the person who owns it as opposed to the person whose labor created it.² In the religion of speculation, art appreciates for the benefit of the collector. In my religion, it is the collector who appreciates the art for the benefit of the artist.

The good news is that because the current system is built around a belief, and not around an essential or immutable truth about the nature of art, we can make a collective decision to believe in something else.

What if our decision was to prioritize the lives of artists over our ability to make money off of their work? What if collectors chose to invest in artists who have been closed out of the system and whose lives would be radically transformed by their support? What if, instead of acquiring work by artists that the establishment has pre-approved, collectors used their art budgets (or even a portion of their art budgets) to take chances on artists who were relative unknowns? What if instead of collecting art as a way to grow our bank accounts we thought of it as a way to grow our emotional, aesthetic, and spiritual lives?

The first thing that would have to happen is that a whole lot of people would have to become a whole lot braver. The irony that is deeply embedded in the upper echelons of art collecting—but which no one talks about because it picks at the entire foundation of status—is that it is rooted in cowardice. The reason the establishment exists is to make the collectors’ experience as safe as possible and to keep their risk level as low as possible. We’ll tell you which artists are “good” and which works is “valuable” and all you have to do is hang it over your couch and wait for it to make you money. And then these collectors turn around to use their collections as a form of cache, when, in fact, they are reflections of an astonishing lack of confidence.³

I can’t get out of my mind a roundtable of fashion stylists that I watched recently, which included Law Roach who has styled Zendaya since the beginning of her career. He said that when she was first coming up, none of the fashion houses would loan her clothing. Not one. Many of the other stylists in the room said that they’d had similar issues with clients and had dealt with it by calling fashion houses every week to beg for clothes—sometimes for years—until they finally agreed to dress them. Law and Zendaya decided that they didn’t want to be part of a system that didn’t want them. They created a new model by approaching Black and brown emerging designers that no one had ever heard of. The designers all said that they would be delighted to dress her. In the process, Zendaya brought massive amounts of attention to these unknown creatives—some of whose careers launched as a result—and she became a fashion icon.

It is possible to collect art this way. In fact, it’s meaningful to collect art this way. I’m speaking now to everyone, not just wealthy speculators. In my mind, a true collector is someone who has the confidence to support the talent of an artist without a gatekeeper’s assurance that it’s a safe bet. A true collector is someone who recognizes what lights a fire in their heart and takes a risk on it. And that risk could look like $50 or $50,000 depending on your finances and your risk tolerance. It’s much more about the approach than it is about the money. It's a shift away from a model structured around greed, hording, the concentration of power, and the superficial appearance of things. It’s a way of surrounding yourself with objects that give your life meaning while helping artists to earn a well-deserved living.

And here’s the interesting thing: this model doesn’t preclude the possibility that some of the artists that you choose to support will go on to have wildly successful art careers. The difference is that this is not the driving force behind collecting their work. I have one piece in my collection, which I bought directly from an artist, that is now worth ten times what I paid for it. Another, which I bought from an artist’s studio, was recently featured on the cover of a periodical. It doesn’t matter much to me, though—other than being ridiculously excited for these artists’ successes—because I don’t collect art to sell it. I collect art because I want what little disposable income I have to go to artists. I collect art because it makes my life better. It makes my home a more beautiful place. It inspires the most fascinating conversations with people who come to visit.

This model of collecting art won’t magically fix the systemic problems of the art world, which conspire to make artists’ lives a constant struggle. But it’s something that we as individuals can do regardless of our budgets. We can supports artists directly by betting on their talent every time.

Exciting news!

After only nine months since its launch, OUT OF THE BOX has been chosen as a Substack Featured Publication!

Thank you to everyone who has been a subscriber from the early days, to everyone who has spread the word on social media, who emailed the newsletter to a friend you thought might love it, who sent me a sweet message or an encouraging comment. Thanks to the incredible artists who have allowed me into their lives and their studios so that I could write about them and their work. And thank you to all who have joined us along the way. Please keep sharing so that we can continue to grow this amazing community and I can keep doing this work that I love.

For those of you who are new subscribers, welcome!

We are a community of artists, arts workers, and art enthusiasts who are interested in the richness that art brings to the human experience. You won’t find any snobbery here, and you don’t have to be knowledgeable about art to join the conversation. The newsletter goes out on Tuesdays, but the content and form is different every week. Some weeks you’ll find an exhibition review or an artist profile waiting for you in your inbox, and other weeks it might be a short essay or a long-form reported piece. Every once in a while, I'll even write you a letter.

This is a place to take shelter from the ravages of the world, to find solace in beauty, and to seek out meaning. Though I’m a professional arts writer, you’ll see that I don’t position myself as someone whose opinion is more important than anyone else’s. Sometimes I simply gush about an artist or a show I love. Other times I ask questions or offer perspectives that spark conversations around a wide range of ideas in the art world. When it comes to tackling systemic issues, we need all the brainpower we can get.

We have wonderful discussions and all are welcome to comment. We enjoy a healthy level of disagreement—because art stirs up passions of all kinds—but we always engage in respectful and thoughtful debate.⁴

One last thing: if you’re interested in collecting art on a budget, follow me on Instagram. I post information about artists’ studio sales in my stories because the art sometimes goes so quickly that I don’t have a chance to include them in the next newsletter. I make a point to highlight artists whose works are affordable to new collectors (between $100-$1000) and who offer payment plans as low as $50/mo.

1. Speculative art collecting is the practice of buying art with the intention of selling it for a profit in the future.

2. Once a collector gets their hands on the elusive painting or sculpture that they’ve been hunting, they alone reap the benefit of its appreciation, generating more wealth for themselves and nothing for the artist.

3. Again, #notallartcollectors. There are plenty of people of means who have challenging, interesting, and surprising collections by well-known and lesser-known artists.

4. Comments that are abusive, bullying, or which claim subjective opinion as objective fact will be removed. This almost never happens, though, because most OOTB readers are here to explore the nuance and the grey of life and to chew on things that are difficult or wonderous.