Peeping in the minds of art’s megabuyers

As money piles up in the BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India, and China), their oligarchs are buying into the wealthy Western mainstream by forking out for its art. Eli Broad, a billionaire himself, says that for these new buyers “it seems money is no object.”

It has come to the point where such ‘artigarchs’ are pricing the normally rich out of the game. Trying to analyze the phenomenon, Blake Gopnik of The Newsweek and The Daily Beast spoke to several collectors and market players.

Art-pricing expert Velthuis says that collectors speak of their purchases as a kind of gift to the artist, or even as a sacrifice they’ve made for the sake of the higher values of art. And there can be close to a taboo on undoing that sacrifice by selling what you’ve bought: Gund, a collector famous for her rectitude, insisted that she will only put works on the market to raise funds for her charities. One veteran collector says that he used to be able to buy a Gerhard Richter painting for “six figures, or in the low sevens.”

But now, with so much new money pouring into that market (the Russians are crazy for Richter), you’d be lucky to pay 10 times such amounts. “I’m finding that the art that I love I can no longer afford, and the art I can afford I don’t know if I love.” One colleague of his from New York explains that to get a new work by a popular artist such as Jeff Koons even most billionaires have to wait in line and jump through dealers’ hoops.

Anyone out of time or out of favor—or just new to the whole system—will have to head to the auctions and spend whatever it takes. “Eli Broad wants to get it ahead of (François) Pinault who wants to get it ahead of (Bernard) Arnault,” he says, rattling off the names of some of art’s megabuyers. Like those American Indian potlatchers trying to use up as much wealth as possible, rich collectors have all kinds of incentives to ‘translate’ as much spare cash as they can into culture.