Obsessed with the fine art of collecting : Showcase : Naples Daily News

Accumulating art takes a checkbook. Collecting art takes a plan.“Naples Collects,” on view this month at the Naples Art Association’s von Liebig Art Center, reflects both the deep pockets and current taste of the Naples art collecting community. The tension between the financial capacity and the aesthetic ability to collect works of art plays itself out on the gallery walls in interesting ways.Thirteen collectors have been assembled by Joel Kessler, executive director of the von Liebig Art Center, and its curator, Jack O’Brien. Each collector has three or four pieces on display, hand-picked by the two men after visits to each collector’s home. “We want to show the community, and especially other art collectors, what our friends, neighbors and business associates are collecting,” said Kessler.The art ranges from the work of barely recognizable contemporary artists to local Naples art stars, from incidental to major pieces by well-regarded modernist masters like Pablo Picasso, Alex Katz, Robert Rauschenberg and Romare Bearden. A few pieces seem to be almost typical tourists mementos.The show reflects the range of things that reside in our community behind the gated walls and within the glistening towers that overlook the Gulf, as well as from the more modest domiciles of those who love art more than an address.It will also provide viewers with a bit of a guessing game. While the contributors to the exhibition are named and the artworks themselves are labeled with maker and title, who precisely owns what will be concealed as a nod toward the security of the work when it returns home.From the brilliant tropic light in the painting of Robert C. Gruppe’s “Goodland Canal” to the dark, miniature, mixed-media piece, “The Mask Maker’s Studio,” by Nicario Jimenez, the exhibition promises a broad spectrum art indicating what matters to art collectors in Naples.And just as some artists are more interesting than others, some collectors make more compelling choices than others. There are works in the show that can engage and stretch viewers’ understanding of art, regardless of where they come from and where they have been.Each artwork reflects an artist’s personal circumstances, his or her creative ideas and mastery of craft. Norman Kennedy’s “Untitled (study in round shapes),” Alexander Calder’s “Bone Forms (1942)” and Alberto Giacometti’s “Untitled” help us remember that only half of an artist’s output is better than average.Each artwork in the show has a story to tell about its particular place in its maker’s own artistic life. Collectors’ accomplishments, on the other hand, begin with the need to own the container in which the artist has placed something special.Collectors survey what has happened throughout the history of art and choose what strikes their eye. Their choices are limited only by their awareness of the possible, access to specific objects and the thickness of their wallets. On the surface, each item that enters the collector’s grasp is merely a purchase, a transaction that exchanges a sum of money for a slice of the maker’s life.Most of the collectors in “Naples Collects” appreciate that viewing art can be a way of connecting, a way of understanding a gesture, an impulse, a memory. You don’t have to own art to get what it gives away. At its best, art provides the viewer with an experience that is not available by any other means.As collector and art dealer Alan Brown expressed it: “My collecting is spiritual. It is an emotional involvement; it is aesthetics; it is happiness and it is sadness. Some of it is historical; some of it is magical. Collecting fulfills a specific need in my life.”Collecting can be a competitive sport. Upping the ante, keeping up with the Joneses, making sure that one has the right wristwatch, car or trophy-of-the night. Art as a means of declaring one’s personal style is a common usage for high rollers.Across the Florida peninsula in Miami, three great collectors — Martin Z. Margulies, and Ella Fontanals-Cisneros and the Rubell family — have constructed remarkable accumulations of contemporary art. Driven by pride and love, the founders of each collection have strived to create a massive legacy of what the best art of our time looked liked to them.But art of this fashion is fickle, and this year’s model either becomes a classic or it becomes pathetic. Not much room in between if your circle is paying attention to the nuances of the zeitgeist. What distinguishes the great from the not-so-good collectors is the ability to find and hold onto the classic pieces way more often.Picking your acquisitions carefully has another advantage. It can allow you to have your collection self-fund itself through selective sales. Buying early and selling right is the goal. No one wants to hold their winners into the glut of availability when a once-fashionable art star declines in reputation.Assembling a collection that is ambitious, personal and rejuvenating is a remarkable feat. One either starts a collection with a focus or one needs to develop one over time. No one, not J. Paul Getty nor Napoleon Bonaparte, can acquire the best of everything. A collector without a focus is just a buyer of art, welcomed everywhere money is taken.Guidance is generally recommended when assembling a collection, but picking the right guide requires you to replicate the search of Diogenes, who was said to walk the streets in daylight with a lit lamp looking for someone who was honest. Diogenes was disappointed more often than not. Many collectors, such as John and Judy Hushon of Naples, simply elect to go it alone.Beyond finding that honest guide in the art-world haystack, becoming a collector requires educating yourself about individual artists, styles and movements, social contexts, cultural history and geography, market values, condition reports, provenance (history of ownership) and art-world politics.“I look for information everywhere about the art that interests me,” said Alan Brown. “I subscribe to a ton of art magazines. I am constantly looking at Web sites, reading books, speaking with other collectors and reading articles in the press.”At their most noble, collectors take possession of things that they desire in order to renew their experience of art. The collector gets to encounter their possessions morning, noon and night. William Meek, director of the Harmon Meek Gallery and half responsible for the William and Barbara Meek art collection, says simply: “You collect because you want to surround yourself with things that you like to live with.“The collector’s ultimate job is to hold and preserve the objects so that others later can experience them. Even the most-beloved objects will change hands eventually. Sometimes a collection will move in mass to an institution, such as the Havemeyer Collection, which went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Or an institution will be built around a collection, such as the Barnes Collection in Merion, Pa. Often, though, the collections of one generation are sold at auction houses, estate sales and galleries (or, most ignobly, garage sales).“About a third of what we have would likely be of interest to a small museum,” said William Meek. “The rest is likely to go to our daughters or back to the marketplace.”The hardest part of collecting is knowing in your heart-of-hearts what matters to you. Understanding what you care about, what moves and delights you, is more difficult and rare than our culture lets on. And really knowing what you think should be a prerequisite for launching a collection. Luckily for art dealers everywhere, however, a letter from a therapist, a philosopher, an art professor or a cleric is not needed to buy their wares.Seeing what moves some of our local art collectors can be both exhilarating and disappointing. A number of A-list collectors who ought to be in “Naples Collect” show are not, art world politics and circumstances being what they are. Nevertheless, celebrating art that lives in Naples is never a bad thing. You should go see what your neighbors are up to. It might help you form a plan.---Morgan T. Paine is a painter who has lived in Naples since 1997. He is the founding Art faculty member and Art Program Leader at Florida Gulf Coast University.

Obsessed with the fine art of collecting : Showcase : Naples Daily News