What and why are world’s top art collectors buying?

Just as investors closely monitor Warren Buffett’ moves for clues about the stock market direction, art buyers seeking an insight try to track the buying and selling patterns of a handful of top collectors. The Wall Street Journal writer Kelly Crow recently interviewed these taste makers to get an inside look at their strategies to navigate the fluctuating market. This is what they divulged:

• Patricia Phelps de Cisneros, a collector based in New York, hews closely to her collection's focus—Latin American art—and rarely blows her budget. She said it's possible to get brand-new Latin American artworks for under $5,000 and older, marquee pieces for under $100,000. The New York collector and her media-mogul husband, Gustave, have amassed a renowned group of Orinoco artifacts, including this feather adornment, from the dozen indigenous groups living in southern Venezuela.
  


• Chicago hotelier Tom Pritzker is buying up 700-year-old Tibetan paintings but says he ‘can't compete’ with Chinese buyers for gilt-bronze Buddhas. To better understand the imagery and history of Tibetan art, Mr. Pritzker and his wife, Margot, have hiked the Himalayas.
  


• Los Angeles billionaire Eli Broad is passing on Damien Hirst these days but chasing after abstract paintings by rising star Mark Bradford. Emotions sometimes win out, however. Twenty years ago, Mr. Broad lost out on an auction bid to win a geometric steel "Cubi" sculpture by David Smith.
  
  Over time, his loss became the collecting equivalent of the fish that got away, so he pounced when another "Cubi" came up for sale six years ago. To win it, he had to pay $23.8 million—then the highest-ever price paid for a work of contemporary art. He doesn't regret the splurge, but he said, "We normally are not proud of paying a record price for anything."
  


• J. Tomilson Hill, Blackstone Group's vice chairman, is going after works by Ferdinando Tacca, a Renaissance sculptor of bronze gods. (The Medicis loved Tacca, too.)
  


• Rather than compete with his peers for trendy new art, hedge-fund manager Michael Steinhardt and his wife, Judy, are building several collections around comparatively obscure niches like ancient Peruvian feather ponchos, Cycladic stone figures and 15th-century rugs. Buying artists like Zhang Xiaoganag (above, his 'Bloodline Big Family No. 1') means spending heavily to outbid wealthy Chinese collectors. Collector Michael Steinhardt prefers less trendy niches.