Institutional Investor's Alpha Magazine - November 2007 - (Page 45)

Investing in Art collection under a public spotlight that judges every purchase they make. The media glare only intensiﬁed last year after the couple donated $19 million to the Art Institute of Chicago, where there is now an Anne D. and Kenneth C. Grifﬁn Great Court. The art world has always had an uneasy relationship with money. At the same time that the auction houses will send out press releases trumpeting their sales totals, many people in the art market shy away from talking about money — it’s considered in bad taste and a corrupting inﬂuence. The art is supposed to be the focus, with the emphasis for collectors on acquiring pieces that speak to them in some way and ﬁt into their collections. But like any business based on buying nipulate the art market,” says Lindemann, author of Collecting Contemporary, a book of interviews with industry professionals and collectors that presents an insider’s view on the market. “The art market has always been manipulated; they didn’t invent manipulation.” A long-term collector and a businessman — he worked on the arbitrage desk at Oppenheimer, has run his own hedge fund and is married to gallery owner Amalya Dayan — Lindemann keeps some of his own collection in his Chelsea loftstyle ofﬁce, rotating works periodically. They include two new, prized George Condos, an assortment of works by young German artists and a Hirst — a ﬂayed steer’s head in a rectangular tank of formaldehyde entitled James the Greater. BALDESSARI: PHOTO: CHRISTIE’S IMAGES, COURTESY OF THE ARTIST AND MARIAN GOODMAN GALLERY, N.Y.; JOHNS: PHOTO: ERICH LESSING/ART RESOURCE, N.Y.; ART © JASPER JOHNS/LICENSED BY VAGA Artist: John Baldessari Title: Quality Material- - Another artist with a sense of humor, California-based conceptualist Baldessari borrows sign-writing techniques and style for a series of text pieces, including this early work — which he had professional sign painters paint for him. David and Danielle Ganek paid $4.4 million for the piece at a Christie’s auction in May. Artist: Jasper Johns Title: False Start Kenneth and Anne Dias Grifﬁn bought this 1959 painting in 2006 from media mogul David Geffen for $80 million, the most ever paid for a work by a living artist. Geffen had purchased the painting 14 years earlier from publisher S.I. Newhouse Jr. and selling, the art market is dependent on a ﬂow of capital from which auction houses, consultants, dealers and lawyers all get their percentage. “The art market has never been driven by anything else but people with money, going back to the beginning of collecting,” says Westreich. “This is nothing new.” Adam Lindemann, a youthful 46-year-old who peppers his conversation with the phrase “very cool,” says hedge fund managers have been unfairly blamed for inﬂating art prices. “The negative view is that they are market manipulators, they manipulate stocks and now they’re going to ma- Lindemann says trading — buying works with the sole purpose of selling them later for a proﬁt — is viewed very negatively in the art world. There are dealers who won’t sell to buyers if they are known to have sold a piece soon after purchase, which can harm both an artist’s career and a dealer’s reputation. There’s an unwritten rule that collectors who want to sell should return to the dealer who helped them buy a piece in the ﬁrst place, rather than immediately go to auction, where they may be able to get a higher price. “The galleries must protect an artist’s career in addition NOVEMBER 2007 • INSTITUTIONAL INVESTOR’S ALPHA • 45

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Institutional Investor's Alpha Magazine - November 2007

Institutional Investor's Alpha Magazine - November 2007 Contents Letter from the Editor Longs & Shorts Pension Corner: Patriot State The Good Guys: College Connection Interview: Currency of Change Cover Story: Comeback Kid Strategies: Masters of Art Research Center: Alpha Awards: Top Technology Providers Top Analysts Alpha Bytes: Critical Choice Unhedged: Commentary: Banking on a Bubble

Institutional Investor's Alpha Magazine - November 2007

For optimal viewing of this digital publication, please enable JavaScript and then refresh the page. If you would like to try to load the digital publication without using Flash Player detection, please click here.