Collecting Contemporary
by Adam Lindemann
from Taschen
Words from the wise: insiders? tips on how to navigate the art market like a pro Art is about life, the art market is about money. ?Damien Hirst Whether you?re an art fan, aficionado, or collector, this completely unique book should be on your required reading list. Like a textbook for a class given by all of the world's leading experts, Collecting Contemporary is the one and only book to teach you everything you ever wanted to know about the contemporary art market. The introduction explains the ABCs of buying art on the primary and secondary markets, at auction, and at art fairs and gives an overview of the world art scene and its social circles. The main body of the book brings together tell-all interviews with the biggest players in the global art market: the Critic (Rimanelli), the Dealer (Boesky, Brunnet/Hackert, Coles, Deitch, Fortes, Gagosian, Gladstone, Glimcher, Hetzler, Lybke, Perrotin, Rosen, Shave, Wirth), the Consultant (Cortez, Fletcher, Heller, Segalot, Westreich), the Collector (Brant, Broad, Habsburg, Joannou, Lambert, Lehmann, Lopez, Paz, Pinault, Rothschild Foundation, Saatchi), the Auction House Expert (Cappellazzo, de Pury, Meyer), and the Museum Curator/Director (Dennison, Eccles, Heiss, Lowry, Peyton-Jones). Rounding up the book are chapters on the year in art collecting?giving a timeline of the most important annual auctions, exhibitions, fairs, etc. around the world?as well as a glossary of terms every art savvy player should know. The text is illustrated by the work of the hottest artists in today's market, including Matthew Barney, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Damien Hirst, Mike Kelley, Martin Kippenberger, Jeff Koons, Takashi Murakami, Richard Serra, Cindy Sherman, Andy Warhol, Lisa Yuskavage, and many more. All in all, these elements add up to the equivalent of an invaluable and privileged real-world collector's education?all between the covers of one book. The author: Adam Lindemann started collecting tribal art as well as works of artists of the 80s before turning to contemporary art, which has been his passion for the past several years. This book was conceived as a short handbook of information and advice for new collectors, but Lindemann's research eventually led him to an international tour of the art world and personal interviews with some of its leading figures. The results are shared with the reader on these pages?along with images of over a hundred art works which help define the contemporary art market today.
Instant Expert: Collecting Watches (Instant Expert)
by Cooksey Shugart
from House of Collectibles
Learn to think, talk, buy and sell like an expert!
• Learn what to collect, how to recognize a fake and how to evaluate the price of a watch.
• All the information you need to understand the differences among watch brands, the different parts of a watch, and how a watch works.
• Indispensable resource guide lists major auction houses, organizations and clubs, and how and where to buy and sell.
The Intrepid Art Collector: The Beginner's Guide to Finding, Buying, and Appreciating Art on a Budget
by Lisa Hunter
from Three Rivers Press
Ready to upgrade your artwork from framed Monet posters but intimidated by what you see in galleries?
In The Intrepid Art Collector, Lisa Hunter shows you how to start a fine art collection without spending a fortune. This accessible, jargon-free resource contains up-to-date information on the most popular original art—everything from photography and posters to African art and animation—including where to find it and how to buy it at a fair price. Easy-to-use checklists help you evaluate original art and steer clear of clever fakes. In addition, Hunter has interviewed top dealers, curators, arts lawyers, and appraisers to bring you the best advice on:
• Advantages to buying real art instead of reproductions
• Determining if a piece of art is fairly priced
• Predicting if an artist’s work will go up in value
• Techniques for negotiating a price with a dealer
• Developing your artistic taste, so you’ll know if you’ll still love your purchase ten years down the road
• How to preserve art in your home
• Resources, websites, and magazines that will help you learn more about the market and where to find different types of art
Collections of Nothing
by William Davies King
from University Of Chicago Press
Part memoir, part reflection on the mania of acquisition, Collections of Nothing begins with the stamp collection that King was given as a boy. Philatelism’s long-standing rules governing the care and display of collections soon proved an oppressive burden in the midst of the family chaos generated by his sister’s growing mental illness; choosing to ignore the rules, King began to handle and display his collection according to his own desires—the first step in his search for an unexplored, individual meaning in collecting. In the following years, rather than rarity or pedigree, he found himself searching out the lowly and the lost, the cast-off and the undesired: objects that, merely by gathering and retaining them, he could imbue with meaning, even value.
As he relates the story of his burgeoning collections, King also offers a fascinating meditation on the human urge to collect. Whether it’s nondescript loops of wire and old food labels or more commonly prized objects like first editions or baseball cards, our collections define us at least as much as we define them. This wry, funny, even touching appreciation and dissection of the collector’s art as seen through the life of a most unusual specimen will appeal to anyone who has ever felt the unappeasable power of that acquisitive fever.
The Art of Buying Art: An Insider's Guide to Collecting Contemporary Art
by Paige West
from Collins Design
A contemporary art expert demystifies the process of finding, appreciating, and collecting contemporary art on any budget.
Contemporary art is often misunderstood as intentionally controversial, obnoxiously self–indulgent, or painfully obscure. In this book, contemporary art expert and gallery owner Paige West guides readers toward the understanding that contemporary art can be just as original, tasteful, and breathtaking as traditional paintings. West draws from her experience as a professional art dealer to break all these misconceptions and allow readers to begin developing and enjoying a private collection.
Beautiful full–colour illustrations and smart layout accompany the humor with which this book explores the current art scene. Dealing with everything from the outrage surrounding Chris Ofili's Sensation, to Salvador Dali's rampage through a department store, this book will appeal to the artistically minded individual as well as the potential art buyer.
Beginning with what constitutes original art, the book moves on to discuss how to start collecting, where to find modern art, and what are reasonable prices. With gorgeous photographs of representative pieces used as examples, the book is as much a fashionable tool for home decorating as it is an open door into the world of contemporary art. This book educates readers to take those gilded–frame, poster–size wedding photos off their living room walls, or those college poster art sale finds, and put up interesting pieces from limited editions by current artists – without breaking the bank.
Confessions Of an Art Addict
by Peggy Guggenheim
from Ecco
A patron of art since the 1930s, Peggy Guggenheim, in a candid self-portrait, provides an insider's view of the early days of modern art, with revealing accounts of her eccentric wealthy family, her personal and professional relationships, and often surprising portrayals of the artists themselves. Here is a book that captures a valuable chapter in the history of modern art, as well as the spirit of one of its greatest advocates. 13 photos.
Great Collectors of our Time: Art Collecting Since 1945
by James Stourton
from Scala Publishers
Great Collectors of Our Time is the first major survey of contemporary collecting and collectors since Douglas Cooper's Great Private Collections, published in 1963. It examines many of the greatest collectors of our time in Europe, North America and the Far East, and follows their tastes - whether in the Old Masters or the avant garde - from the 20th century into the 21st. In 1945, Paris was still the cultural capital of the world, but its culture was being increasingly challenged by America. American collecting was soon to pull up its European anchor and move across the Atlantic, in growing acceptance of America's own art, the decline in the domination of three European schools of art - Italian Renaissance, English 18th century and French 19th century Impressionism - and the rise of the New York School and contemporary art. Prior to 1939, collecting was a private pleasure, sometimes intellectual and scholarly, but more often about enhancing surroundings - 'la douceur de vivre'. Today, colle
Tales from the Art Crypt: The painters, the museums, the curators, the collectors, the auctions, the art
by Richard Feigen
from Knopf
In Tales from the Art Crypt, Richard Feigen, a veteran of nearly 50 years as an art dealer, offers not a conventional memoir but rather a series of highly polished anecdotes adding up to an illuminating dissection of art-world practice and politics. The opening chapter, aptly titled "Detective Stories," makes attributing an old master painting or unearthing a forgotten portrait of Thomas Jefferson as exciting as a murder mystery. Feigen's acid comments on the provincialism of his hometown, Chicago, explain his relocation to New York in the mid-1960s. His depictions of fellow dealers like Leo Castelli and Sam Salz are amusingly candid without seeming mean-spirited; affectionate portrayals of collectors such as Morton and Rose Neumann are equally vivid. Also memorable is a juicy account of his stint on the board of the Barnes Foundation, whose decision to deaccession works and permit a traveling exhibit of fragile paintings he deplores. Feigen, who has studied and sold everything from surrealist works and pop art to 17th-century Italian paintings, displays an infectious zest for art as both aesthetic pursuit and business. His comments on the conflicts between museum directors and their newly revenue-conscious boards of trustees explain much about the increasing commercialization of once scholarly institutions. His delightful book fulfills the mission museums once took for granted: to entertain and educate. --Wendy Smith
From one of today's most influential art collectors and dealers: a lively, revealing, sometimes blasphemous, always knowing look into the world of art.
Richard Feigen's fifty years in the art world have given him a unique perspective on its inhabitants and habits. He writes about the painters he has known and represented (among them James Rosenquist, Jasper Johns, Jean Dubuffet, and Joseph Cornell), and about others whose work he has collected. He writes about his galleries in Chicago and New York City, and about his fellow dealers, including Julien Levy and Leo Castelli.
He talks about the "eye" that allows a dealer to recognize a fine painting. He discusses the great art-owning families, art historians, scholars, and conservators. He recounts the story of the debacle at the Barnes Foundation that resulted in the undoing of Albert Barnes's vision for his museum, and reveals the fate of the artworks that belonged to Gertrude Stein. He dissects the art boom of the 1980s and its effects, and takes on the commercialism plaguing American museums today: blockbuster exhibitions and the replacement of great directors with "professional administrators."
Feigen has given us an intimate, engrossing portrait of the great art game as it has been played in the twentieth century.
In Flagrante Collecto (Caught in the Act of Collecting)
by Marilynn Gelfman Karp
from "Harry N. Abrams, Inc."
According to author Marilynn Gelfman Karp, collecting is a calling; and those who are driven to collect unloved objects are the purest collectors of all. In this literary and sophisticated celebration of humble objects, Karp shares her passionate insights on what she calls the "rapture of the capture."
In Flagrante Collecto is a vividly illustrated book that is equal parts cultural history, personal memoir, and coffee table objet d'art. The 1000 color photographs that fill this book tell stories of lost and found objects. Ignored by many, these figural matchbooks, buttons, erasers, cigar rings, pictorial seed packets, and other items are hunted and gathered with Ahab-like tenacity at flea markets, antique shops, and collectible shows worldwide.
This lovingly assembled volume is a fascinating compendium of material culture as told by an incredible array of objects.
To Have and To Hold
by Philipp Blom
from Overlook TP
From amassing sacred relics to collecting celebrity memorabilia, the impulse to hoard has gripped humankind throughout the centuries. But what is it that drives people to possess objects that have no conceivable use? To Have and To Hold is a captivating tour of collectors and their treasures from medieval times to the present, from a cabinet containing unicorn horns and a Tsar's collection of teeth to the macabre art of embalmer Dr. Frederick Ruysch, the fabled castle of William Randolph Hearst, and the truly preoccupied men who stockpile food wrappers and plastic cups. Blom's gripping narration and bizarre cast of eccentrics, visionaries, and fanatics provide a fascinating glimpse into how a pastime becomes an all consuming passion and an engrossing story of the collector as bridegroom, deliriously, obsessively happy, wed to his possessions, till death do us part.
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