collecting strategies and media

Borna Sammak. Hoagie Nose, heat applied t-shirt graphics on canvas, 2015.

The shock of the new

Art evolves, often quickly, sometimes radically. Tastes do too.

The age of “-isms”—ranging from Impressionism and Surrealism to Abstract Expressionism and Pop—has been supplanted by a sometimes confounding mix of traditional media and new technologies. Most recently, identity-focused art has triggered new markets and trends, many of them short-lived. The superabundance of works for sale at art fairs and exhbited at national and international exhibitions is confounding. To borrow from Michel Majerus, the late Luxembourgish artist, "what looks good today may not look good tomorrow.” In fact, engaging with art requires an “observational switch” away from traditional, often conventional, art historical -isms and an openness to new ideas and things.

Collecting strategies

There are two conventional collecting strategies:

  • A "broad," often “eclectic,” approach that combines diverse works from several artists

  • An "in-depth" approach that focuses on a select number or group of artists, whose work is collected in significant depth over an extended period of time. 

Americans, in particular, often take a broader approach to collection building, acquiring one or two pieces by several artists. Demand fuels supply, often resulting in a familiar sameness of artist brands and dealer relationships. Focused collections are often associated with a more European tradition, where the emphasis is on developing a cohesive collection with an aesthetic or intellectual foundation.

Ultimately, the most critical attributes in collection building are the collector's passion for and commitment to the ideas reflected in the art. An advantage of working methodically with an advisor is leveraging their knowledge, expertise, and relationships to identify artists and select individual works, avoiding impulsive decisions and purchases.

Media focus

In relation to art, the term medium has two principal overlapping, even slightly confusing meanings. Painting, sculpture, drawing, printmaking, and photography are all art media as well as a type of art. They are well-known, if in exact, collecting categories. But the term can also refer to the materials a work is made from, even ephemeral ones like air or an internet address.

Some examples (images follow):

  • A is for air. In 1919, Marcel Duchamp purchased an "empty" ampoule from a pharmacist in Paris as a souvenir for his friend and patron, Walter C. Arensberg. The Philadelphia Museum of Art described the work—Air de Paris—“From a molecular point of view, air is not considered nothing, but when displayed so carefully in an art museum it seems to be less than one might expect. Its precise meaning was rendered even more unstable in 1949, when the ampoule was accidentally broken and repaired, thus begging the question: Is the air even from Paris anymore?”

  • C is for chocolate. Dieter Roth made chocolate multiples in the late 1960s. The title—P.O.TH.A.A.VFB (Portrait of the Artist as a Vogelfutterbüste [Birdseed Bust]—was a reference to James Joyce’s 1916 novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. But the work is a cast portrait of Roth as an old man, made from a mixture of chocolate and birdseed. It was intended to be mounted on a post outside and consumed by birds until nothing remained. Unlike a traditional marble portrait bust that might be intended to endure through the ages, P.O.TH.A.A.VFB is a testament to Roth’s belief in impermanence and the inevitability of aging and bodily decay.

  • P is for potato. Jason Rhoades, who grew up in rural, inland, conservative California, often worked his childhood experiences into his art: rodeos, garages, gardens, guns. A.B.S Gun with Pom Fritz Choke and Aquanet (1994) is a bazooka-like object made from plastic pipes, cable tie, wire and tape. It uses hairspray as a propellant to shoot potatoes, turning them into French fries. Blasted into the air, with a powerful boom, the fries disintegrate, dematerialize.

  • U is for URL. A URL (A uniform resource locator) is known colloquially web address in the Internet. It is a reference to a resource that specifies its location on a computer network and a mechanism for retrieving it. Boredom is Deep and Mysterious (2019) is a web application by Damon Zucconi. The piece was featured in Zucconi’s in asolo exhibition, but its physical presence in the gallery was somewhat immaterial. Zucconi’s work is often conceived and born online to exist and function in the infinity of the Internet. With web access you can visit his work anytime. This may be the closest thing to having any certainty about an afterlife or one that might have been conceived for The Twilight Zone.