Invest in Art. Yes, Artists, I Mean You.

Roberta Smith's review of The Phillips Collection's current exhibition (The Société Anonyme: Modernism for America) reminded me of something I had wanted to blog about when I saw this exhibition at the Hammer last summer, before a truly brutal heat wave evaporated it from my brain. Now that the show's on the East Coast (don't miss it!), and my memory's been jogged, I'll try to reconstruct it.

The exhibition is taken from the phenomenal collection built by artists Dreier and Duchamp. "Who?" you ask. Roberta explains:

As dynamic artist duos go, the pairing of Katherine S. Dreier and Marcel Duchamp does not have the familiar ring of Picasso and Braque, or Johns and Rauschenberg. But it should, and “The Société Anonyme: Modernism for America” at the Phillips Collection here may begin to make it so.

The show presents about 150 objects, all from the amazing 1,000-work art collection that Dreier assembled with DuchampÂ’s help and gave to the Yale University Art Gallery in 1941. It was organized by Yale and had its premiere at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles in a larger version. Rife with unfamiliar names, this exhibition is both a WhoÂ’s Who and a WhoÂ’s That? of modernism that can change the way you see it and history in general.

As impressive as this collection is for its historical and aesthetic value, it is also impressive for what it represents in terms of self-confidence and, ultimately, self-promotion. As Modern artists of reasonable but nowhere near astronomical means, Dreier and Duchamp's investment in the art they believed in stands as an example of putting one's money where one's mouth is and having that pay off big time.

I'm not just talking about financial pay off here, although there are precedents dating back to Alexander the Great's time (when the emperor's official portrait artist, Appelles, who convinced the felloProtegenes'tegenes's townfolk to cough up a good deal more money for a painting by offering to steal it away for a price that stunned them, set the since oft-repeated trend of increasing the value the public placed on art by treating a huge price as if it were a bargain). There's a conservation pay off as well, in that even the most skeptical of authorities must look to any collection of this scope as at least potentially important and worthy of protecting. There are also karma, promotional, and enjoyment pay-offs to collecting the work you believe in as an artist. Most folks who pay attention to such matters understand well that artists see and recognize important work long before the rest of us do, and I always look toward what artists cogauge to guage their sense of things.

"But I can't amass a collection like that," you're saying. "I hardly have room in my studio and home for my own art and barely make my rent." I don't doubt that, but if art is important enough to make the sacrifices that put you in that financially challenging situation, isn't it important enough to save up for or, better yet, trade for? Nothing will convey to the rest of the world how serious you are about your own art more than how serious you are about the art of your time.

But speaking of your own art, don't forget to collect that too. Many artists who are beginning to have success and manage to (finally) get a waiting list often learn too late that they must keep some of their own work. As a dealer, I can tell you there is enormous pressure by collectors to secure a piece by certain artists, and that translates into pressure by dealers on artists to cough up anything available at all, but I tell our artists to resist that pressure and keep back something from each series for themselves. Something good. Why this is important becomes clear when (God willing) the work is shattering auction records, but it's also important before that happens. Artists should be their own best conservators and historians (believe me, your biographer will thank you).