That sounds lofty.
I'm a collector, so it might be tempting to put the title down to ego. But hear me out. Firstly, I come at the question of art collection from two angles. There's who I am as an art collector, but I'm also an artist. While I'm painting, I often daydream about who my collectors will be. Career women kicking off their heels at day's end? Parents, fresh from locking down the house, now shepherding kids off the road from the bus? I paint and I think: Will they be anything like me?
And in one sense, I truly hope they are. Because I know what art collection means.
Actually, let's get into that.
A theft that changed the world... for the better
We should talk about Emily Fisher Landau, a private citizen who really liked her diamonds. Mind you, she lived on the Upper East Side of New York City -- Park Avenue, which looks like this:
It's a very swanky place, and this is going to be a very top-down example as stories go. But understand that there is true revolution when change pushes from the bottom, up, so, don't get thrown by what I'm about to say next.
This diamond-loving woman was cruising along, accruing wealth, as one does, I guess, right up till the moment when a gang of armed bandits burst into her apartment, yanked her bedroom safe right out of her closet, and disappeared into the night with every red cent. Sorry to rip the bandage off like that, but the diamonds aren't really the point. Besides, the stones were insured by Lloyd's of London, like you do. I guess.
Anyway, after the theft, Emily Fisher Landau was left with the jewels on her back and... a massive insurance pay out. Her real estate mogul husband told her to do with it what she'd always wanted to.
And she did.
Over the next four decades, she built one of the world’s most significant private collections of contemporary art, amassing around 1,200 pieces. Her focus also included works by women artists. She woke up to Georgia O'Keeffe. She pledged over 300 works to the Whitney Museum of American Art. Including her favorite Picasso.
She was known for championing new artists.
Rise of the Champions
Emily Fisher Landau's contribution to the planet is writ large in some of the grandest names on the global art scene, but the lesson to take away from this doesn't care about wealth.
When an art buyer begins to collect art, they are contributing not only to the passionate artists they patronize, they champion the message of artists speaking in a mode of expression that's not only being left behind in schools -- most of which no longer teach art -- but is critically endangered across the world.
When I say that collectors change the world it is because I have experience in what this looks like for artists, and their rises in the wider consciousness. Many people rave about artistic luminaries like oceanic advocate Caia Koopman for example, as well they should do, but her platform is simply not something she could have achieved alone. Standing right behind her in the hush are hundreds of steely-eyed collectors who are, like Caia Koopman, also friends of wolves, also caretakers of clean oceans.
Caia is your artist. You are the Champions.
Stand Your Ground, Raise Your Flags
When Emily Fisher Landau lost all those rocks -- now scattered across the world, as anonymous as gum wrappers -- the story didn't end with a simple payout. It just began there. This calamity results in a moment of recognition that goes something like this: Jewels go in a safe. Art goes up on walls. One of these things is intensely private -- a lonely Smaug atop hordes of riches. While the other is meant to be seen, shared, and discussed.
Artists know their art finds its greatest meaning in someone else's hands. It records the condition of humanity at a moment in history. But its messages are wireless transmissions sent across a vast ocean, and art stays silent like that till it enters someone else's life.
Collectors breathe life into art. By doing that, they bring its messages, like dignity, clarity, and hope, to their private world.
Over time, the messages that people collect become a fundamental part of them, woven into the fabric of their identity. They become banners flying on the battlements of a person's soul. When others reflect those messages a quiet, profound transformation begins in them too.
These are the first ripples of a larger change, a shared light that grows brighter as it bounces around inside the paint and emerges into people's lives. These messages grow. They spread out and take up space in the hearts and minds of others.
That is how you change the world.
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