Krens. (Patrick McMullan)

Last fall it was reported that the great Tom Krens was off the Guggenheim’s Abu Dhabi project, which seemed like big news because Mr. Krens was the creative mind and promoter of the project, but what’s even more strange is that we haven’t heard boo from the art world’s consummate museum showman since.

The Whitney Museum of American Art will soon abandon its architectural landmark on Park Avenue (it will be rented out to the Metropolitan Museum) because the Whitney is creating a new building downtown. The Dia Foundation just completed an $11.5 million purchase of a new building site in Chelsea (it will be the site of an all-new N.Y.C. Dia). All this construction makes me think of Tom Krens, the man who changed the Guggenheim forever, and influenced the world of museum construction in our town and around the world. Tom Krens has gone M.I.A., so it’s time to wind back the clock and think about his tremendous fall from grace, and what it might teach us about these other initiatives.

Back in ’97 Mr. Krens, the Guggenheim’s towering, N.F.L.-linebacker-size director, was at the top of his game. He had just launched the hugely successful Frank Gehry-designed Guggenheim Bilbao and in so doing had changed the art world forever. Quite an achievement for a guy from modest beginnings. After all, the young Mr. Krens was running only a little museum at Williams College in the late ’70s when he completed his M.B.A. at Yale: he cleverly leveraged it into a consultancy at the Guggenheim, eventually succeeding in getting himself hired as director.

He didn’t have a strong art historical background (he was originally an artist, not an art historian), and, thinking back, I can only wonder how desperate the Guggenheim board must have been in 1988 when they fired their exhausted director Thomas Messer and brought in a virtual neophyte to reposition the institution and fill its empty coffers. Fill them he did, by raising the endowment from $20 million to over a $100 million.

In the end, his arrogant manner and John Wayne swagger pissed off his major donor, Peter Lewis, who lasted 11 years as chairman of the board and gave over $70 million. Mr. Lewis felt the museum should focus on housekeeping at its base in New York rather than opening more Guggenheim branches around the world, and in a showdown befitting a true Western movie he threatened the board with an ultimatum: either Mr. Krens goes or he would.

In a shocker, the board stuck with Mr. Krens, though with their main patron gone—Mr. Lewis left the board in 2005—the Guggenheim’s budget was dealt a serious blow. Blockbuster shows were one way to get financing, and Mr. Krens did them in a big way, with motorcycle shows sponsored by BMW and a fashion show sponsored by Armani, as well as shows from Brazil, China and India. He found sponsors for a branch in Berlin (care of Deutsche Bank), and another branch housed and paid for by a Las Vegas casino (now closed) and he never stopped hunting for financing to open everywhere and anywhere he could.

Though Mr. Lewis rightly anticipated that Mr. Krens’s vision would eventually crash, a global vision is what made Mr. Krens special, and it’s what he’ll always be remembered for. With Bilbao Mr. Krens rewrote the recipe for a successful museum, taking his cue from the Frank Lloyd Wright masterpiece in New York that is the Guggenheim’s historic home and talisman. In a nod to Wright’s genius, Mr. Krens put architectural spectacle first, by hiring Mr. Gehry and giving him free rein. He then put fund-raising second, by getting a local government to foot the entire bill, and he put brand building third, by creating a Spanish flagship that he could use to showcase his vision and pitch governments, corporations and anyone else who might pony up for future Guggenheim branches around the world.

What of art, I hear you say? Well, museum building at the end of the 20th century was in need of a makeover, and, right or wrong, the funding sources dictated that art alone wasn’t enough. Mr. Krens anticipated the need to boost attendance and create a tourist destination as well as an identity and a global brand. Let’s not forget that Bilbao is a crummy postindustrial dump in the center of Spain (almost as bad as Flint, Mich.)—the kind of place you wouldn’t go even on a paid vacation. But the Bilbao museum became the monumental success that changed the museum world forever, and it still boasts attendance of over a million people a year. I had the pleasure of touring the place in the fall of ’99 as a guest of Diane von Furstenberg and Barry Diller. We got the full celebrity tour from Mr. Gehry, including lighting up the flame throwers that spurt out of the water fountains. This was followed up by a little motorcycle spin with Mr. Krens and celebrity guests Jeremy Irons, Lawrence Fishburne and Lauren Hutton, all sponsored, of course, by BMW.

None of it had anything to do with “art.” It was about marketing, fund-raising and architecture as spectacle. I can barely remember the Warhol exhibit inside the museum, perhaps because it was dwarfed by the eccentric spaces that Mr. Gehry’s titanium-skin “baked Alaska” structure provided. Who cared, since no one was there to see the art. We were there to see the new “wonder of the world,” and to party. I wasn’t just overcome; I was overwhelmed by the ambition, the imagination and the chutzpah of this new godless cathedral.

In the years that followed, Mr. Krens tried to create new satellite Guggenheims around the world, including a huge one in lower Manhattan that never got off the ground. But despite the roadblocks, Frank Gehry became the most lauded and famous architect of our time. Sadly, I find much of his recent work grossly overrated, and though it was a great formula for Bilbao, it’s not a recipe that will work as well anywhere else. The fact that other museums have sought to hire Mr. Gehry over and over again to create their own “Bilbao monument” is a guaranteed recipe for failure, because what made Mr. Gehry’s building great was its newness, its originality, so by definition to copy the formula is to miss the point.

For these reasons and many more, the Abu Dhabi Gehry-Guggenheim museum will be at best a facsimile, and the two new proposed French Gehry museums, one in Arles and another in Paris (for Louis Vuitton’s Bernard Arnault), will also flop, if they ever see the light of day. It’s actually quite sad because there are so many great architects working today (think Herzog and de Meuron, Peter Zumthor, Thomas Mayne … ), it’s the perfect time to let some others have a go.

But there’s more to Mr. Krens’s formula than just a flashy building. First and foremost he understood the value of his own New York building’s identity. He restored and elevated the profile of the amazing Frank Lloyd Wright masterpiece on Fifth Avenue, a building that never even pretended to be a great museum but succeeds 150 percent as architectural monument. Reliable sources tell me that, thanks to Mr. Krens’s branding strategy, 80 percent of the museum’s current New York visitors are foreign, and they flock in every year irrespective of what’s on view.

Compare this to the poor job done by the Whitney Museum of American Art. It is the owner of a fantastic brutalist Marcel Breuer masterpiece, a building that sadly has less than half the attendance of the Guggenheim, and 80 percent of its visitors are mere New Yorkers. To add insult to injury, the museum is abandoning its flagship on Park Avenue and renting it out to the Metropolitan Museum, because the Whitney is pouring all its resources into a newer, bigger, downtown Whitney designed by Renzo Piano, the volume of which will allow the Whitney to show more of its vast collection.

If bigger doesn’t result in better, the Whitney will have done New York a terrible disservice, one that could have been easily avoided if only it had raised funds by selling a few artworks out of its vast holdings. Isn’t the Breuer building a work of art, one that is more meaningful to the museum’s identity than any painting could ever be? Imagine if it had the vision to leave the “uptown Whitney” as a true museum of American Art, the only one in New York, where the museum’s amazing collection of Ash Can artists like Edward Hopper, Charles Sheeler and George Bellows would be on permanent display. Would I care if the downtown museum were cut in half? Absolutely not. There is plenty of museum quality free art to see downtown in all the Chelsea galleries; who needs to pay good money to see any more of it?

But “de-accessioning”—the selling of artworks from the collection—is a no-no in the museum world. It’s also another rule that Mr. Krens broke early in his tenure. Back in 1990 he raised $47 million by selling off a Kandinsky, a Chagall and a Modigliani (the museum had several other works by these artists) and he acquired the fantastic Count Panza collection of minimalist art, thus making a quantum leap for the Guggenheim’s collection. Sadly, though, his programming overall veered so far from the museum’s original mission of showing “non-objective painting” (think Kandinsky) that it was hard to tell what to expect from him, other than the promise of a spectacle.

The other pieces to Mr. Krens’s museum formula include making space for plenty of restaurants and nice, big gift shops, and putting lots of emphasis on logos and advertising. And, of course, putting on mega blockbuster shows complete with celebrities, politicians and corporate sponsors. This very same formula worked like a charm for another art world giant, the dealer Larry Gagosian. He opened satellite galleries around the world and brought show business glamour to the stodgy and conservative gallery system, thus swallowing up many of the best artists in the world and providing collectors with a one-stop destination for almost all their art needs.

But money is what a gallery thrives on, whereas in the American museum world, fund-raising is a semi-secret part of every director’s job. Our museums run on private donations, so finding collectors or socially motivated patrons to pay the tab is a large part of every director’s responsibility, as it is in the world of private education and cultural institutions of all kinds. That’s in large part why our cultural institutions suffer outside of large cities like New York and Los Angeles. In bureaucratic old Europe this conflict doesn’t exist because museums are funded by the government and museum directors work for the state, so they are free to focus on the art, not on fund-raising. But in the U.S., with little state or federal support of the arts, museum folks are condemned to a life of panhandling wealthy patrons, to sell them a seat on their the board or to get them to host benefit dinners, cocktail parties and anything else that’ll bring in the tax-deductible bucks.

I’m not saying that the European system is always better—state-run institutions tend to become bureaucratic and didactic—but it is not fraught with the types of conflicts of interest that took down Tom Krens. Mr. Krens was guilty of finding every possible way to shortcut the fund-raising conundrum, and though he never was able to replace mega donor Peter Lewis, he did secure corporate and government sponsorship from Deutsche Bank, BMW, Hugo Boss and Armani, as well as municipalities like Bilbao and even whole countries like Brazil and China.

Sadly for everyone he eventually dead-ended, and the board finally pushed him out, by giving him a highly paid consultancy on a massive Guggenheim Abu Dhabi project. But his consulting contract was eventually dropped when hubris once again got the better of him, a sad ending to what has to be one of the most exciting and inspiring museum director sagas of the past 50 years.

Tom Krens succeeded in changing the art world forever, and, since his tenure at the Guggenheim, numerous new museums have been built as architectural monuments—Zaha Hadid’s Maxxi in Rome and Sanaa’s New Museum in New York, to name just two. These new cathedrals of architecture where some art will hang are inevitably focused on attendance, tourist traffic and boosting the local economy. The “bigger is better” mentality prevails to this day, even though many of the new buildings are oversize and over budget and end up looking like misguided monuments of excess.

Was this change for the good? The question matters not: change is inevitable because the museum system in this country was and is still in need of some shake up. Until a part of our state and federal tax money goes toward supporting the arts, it’s impossible to avoid conflicts of interest. Mayor Bloomberg understands this, and he’s quietly been New York’s number one patron, but that’s not enough. In the end Mr. Krens’s legacy will remain, and the status and respect he deserves as a museum visionary will one day prevail. I can only hope he finds a way to rise again and show the stodgy museum world a new twist on the very formula he created. Does “art” suffer when the attendance and the spectacle take center stage? Of course it does, but one way or another, the show must go on.

editorial@observer.com

Sculpture by Japanese artist Takashi Murakami. Photo via PIERRE VERDY/AFP/Getty Images

Back in early June I wrote a piece for the Art Newspaper in which I predicted that bad news would drive the price of gold, then at $1,500 an ounce, substantially higher.

Well, the bad news came, with the Standard & Poor’s rating agency’s downgrading our U.S. government debt, precipitating massive fear of a double-dip recession, which in turn has led to the overall perception that the current Obama administration is bungling things. This has driven the stock market into a highly unusual summer spasm, as it reels down 500 points in a day only to bounce up and sink again—the dreaded “dead cat” bounce. The government claims interest rates will stay at close to zero for the foreseeable future—not good news for you cash mavens—so gold skipped to a new record high of $1,740 an ounce.

Given how right I was, did I buy any? No, because I’m against gold, and everything gold stands for. Instead, I continue to buy art, and I won’t be convinced otherwise.

I’ve never been a “gold bug.” In fact, I hate bugs of all types, and so I’d never buy into gold like investment gurus John Paulson and Tom Kaplan did. They were smart: it’s rallied 440% in only six years, which of course makes me dislike it even more. I’ve never bought an ounce of the stuff in my life and I hope I never do. The price of gold is a barometer for our collective anxiety and irrational neuroses. I’m referring to global financial meltdown, famine, nuclear meltdown, tsunami, anarchy in the Middle East and eventually hyperinflation.

But I was already scared, and buying gold will only confirm my innermost “end of the world” fears, which is the very thing I’m trying to suppress. So it makes sense that I don’t like the cold profiteers who buy gold; they’re calculating opportunists who profit from any bad news that hits my TV screen, and there’s been no shortage of it.

What of art you say? Hasn’t it appreciated too? Well, it’s been solid, and no one is letting great works sell at a discount. But art is an investment in culture, whereas gold is an investment in fear.

Now, I’m sure some of those gold bugs have art too, probably the kind of blue-chip treasures that were well researched, well bought and now well hung. The thought of it makes me jealous. They have a nice Picasso, a Twombly, a Matisse and a Fontana, but I can’t imagine their ever taking emotional leaps and making risky bets on emerging or oversize works: gold investors always play it smart and safe.

Collecting contemporary art requires both knowledge and some feel. No matter how many dealers and consultants show you the way, to be good at it requires faith in your own eyes, something gold bugs will never have. They don’t need an eye. When they want to value their cache, all they have to do is weigh it. It trades every minute of every day so there’s no need to bother with an appraisal or an auction estimate. Gold is shiny, mindless and cold, and because every ounce is minted to an identical weight and shape, it has a perfection that art can never equal.

Art has no tangible value. Its only value is cultural, and so it fluctuates wildly with fashion and the art historical mood of the moment. But is gold’s value any more real? As far as I can tell the metal is totally useless, and only a small portion of the world’s production serves a purpose: in the form of jewelry. Though in the past gold was the back-up for paper money currencies, it hasn’t been for decades.

To make matters worse, consider two disturbing facts: as the price per ounce rises the mines start digging up more and more of the stuff, creating horrible pollution (huge quantities of cyanide are used to leach gold ore). Then, most of the gold that has ever been produced is still extant—meaning there are endless amounts of the stuff stored in savings banks everywhere.

Good art, on the other hand, can be hard to find and sometimes hard to get. The bonus is that, when trying to acquire it, you meet lots of interesting people: curators, dealers, collectors, socialites and even a movie star or two. Art also has a real purpose. Though some would claim it is mainly decorative, in fact it is of broad cultural value. It has purpose in the same way that Beethoven’s music, Balanchine’s choreography or Bergman’s films have purpose: they satisfy the mind and the soul, and isn’t that what we’re here for?

Despite their apparent differences, art and gold do share a common thread: they are both pure luxury. Artists throughout history have picked up on this and that’s why Andy Warhol did gold “Jackies,” Damien Hirst did gold pill cabinets and Takashi Murakami made a huge gold Buddha for Versailles. In fact, Marcel Broodthaers once minted gold bars to finance an imaginary museum, and Yves Klein sold checks for an imaginary “zone of immaterial pictorial sensibility” that could be bought only for pieces of gold, half of which he threw into the Seine! (I suppose he pocketed the rest … )

Despite all the talk of art as investment, and the fact that a lot of art has appreciated, I think you would still be much better off with gold. Contrary to popular thinking, selling your art for its theoretical “value” is not as easy as it seems. Quite often nobody wants what you have, or nobody wants to pay you what you think it’s worth. Dealers work hard in trying to sell what’s hanging in their galleries, and auction houses fail to sell a substantial percentage of their lots despite the fact that they select their pieces carefully and invest money and manpower in their catalogs, previews and auctions.

Gold bugs don’t suffer these uncertainties—every ounce is 100% predictable, they go up and down in unison, and you can sell out in a split second any day and anywhere. Another big benefit is that there’s no dealer to hassle you about it and you won’t be insulting any artist’s feelings. Win or lose, your gold won’t talk back, so it’s 100% headache-free.

Larry Gagosian once said to me: “An art investment can also be a bad investment.” I know he’s right, so I buy the art, not the investment. One day, if you have the “great” art that others covet, you’ll make money and win double.

Now I’m hearing the disturbing rumors that gold is on its way to $2,000 an ounce, but still I’m committed to never being a gold bug, because I don’t like to bet on bad news. I’ll stick to art, though maybe this time it won’t be such a great investment. Still, I’m hoping for a better total return.

editorial@observer.com

Alexander Calder’s Vertical Foliage (1941).

I spent almost a decade chasing the new new art but for the past year or two I’ve felt that there is less and less there there. What do I mean? I’d always sought to collect artists who were “emerging” or on the cusp of international renown, but in the postcrash, recessionary environment I’ve changed my outlook.

My serious art collecting started a little more than a decade ago, when as a newish collector I made my way over to the Warhol Foundation, following Warhol muse Baby Jane Holzer, to buy a few “leftover” pictures from the estate. In those days I was still very tight with my art wad, so I bought only two 1964 Jackies for $65,000 each. Today those very same Jackies sell for up to $850,000 each, though I sold them for half as much to pay for other things, and though in retrospect Warhol, Basquiat and Bacon were the best blue-chip buys of the past decade, I quickly moved to what was new, emerging and exciting.

Art for me was more than an investment. I craved the excitement and sex appeal of taking chances on newer talent and betting on my own eyes, not on those of more prudent dealers or auction experts. In 2002, Paris’s most charismatic dealer, Emmanuel Perrotin, reluctantly sold me a 20-foot masterpiece by Takashi Murakami titled Tan Tan Bo Puking, thinking I should buy a more domestic-size work. He was right, but I went for it anyway, and by the peak of the last cycle the same painting was worth a hundred times my investment, an inconceivable value for what had become a major contemporary masterpiece.

In those days the standard asking price for artists in their first show was only $10,000 to $15,000, and while that never felt cheap, in retrospect it was a great deal for those collectors willing to take chances and believe in emerging talent. Think about how many of those once “young” artists like Peter Doig, Glenn Brown and John Currin sell in the millions, while several others like Elizabeth Peyton or Urs Fischer make only half a million.

The appetite for buying the new is part art lust, and part speculation, and I was one of those who loved both the former and the latter. I was late to the game but I jumped in with both feet, and the timing was still good because there had never been a period in all of art history where art prices have escalated so fast and by so much. Today the ranks of “young art” addicts have multiplied and I’m sure more people than ever before buy far more art than they can hang, because they believe it’s a good financial bet, not just a good picture. Some like to shake their “old school” heads in disapproval, but it’s been great for art, though not always for art collectors, because higher prices for young artists means diminishing returns.

Will these success stories happen again? Some shooting stars still break through, like a Jacob Kassay that was $10,000 two years ago at Eleven Rivington, a little-known gallery, and that sold last May at auction for $290,500, but with few exceptions I see this phenomenon happening less and less.

In a postcrash art world I have less faith in market momentum and my instincts have driven me to buy historic older artists and works that are out of favor. So far this strategy hasn’t impressed anyone I’ve spoken to—in fact, art-savvy architect David Adjaye said he couldn’t believe that’s what I’m “up to.” Though it may not be sexy or make me popular, at least it makes sense, and it opens a whole new range of options for the contemporary art junkie. I don’t care if I disappoint those who ask “ … and what did you buy at Basel … ?!” when I name a work that sounds drier than a prune—it’s actually kind of fun. It feels good to collect outside of the buzz and the hype, and to take a contrarian view that is all your own.

I started with a Calder obsession, then I got caught up in John Chamberlain’s great work, though I flirted with the work of Larry Rivers, Haim Steinbach and an early Ashley Bickerton. But you can’t have it all, and most recently I’ve caught a Minimalist obsession that I just can’t shake. It started with a sudden desire to buy early Frank Stella paintings, particularly those shaped metallic canvasses from the 1960s, because they’re so cold and monumental. What of Donald Judd, I heard you say? Of all the undervalued Minimalists, he is the one who has received the most attention, and his work changes hands for much more than does that of his peers, but while I value Judd, his huge ego, his ambition and the fact that he left us Marfa, I’m drawn to Carl Andre.

Mr. Andre, one of Minimalism’s central figures, hasn’t had a retrospective in over 30 years, not because he isn’t fascinating and complex, but because a personal tragedy made him a political taboo for curators (I will not retell the all-too-often repeated story). But I’m drawn in by the dark myth of the man, and whereas I hate artists who are one-trick ponies (and who repeat themselves ad nauseum), in the case of Mr. Andre, monotony is part of the message, so I love the fact that he’s never changed his output. New Yorker art critic Peter Schjeldahl once aptly wrote in 1970 that Mr. Andre’s works look “as if each were...the last work of art in the world.” Mr. Andre’s stripped his expression down to the bare minimum with a purity of concept that makes him tougher and more rigorous than almost anyone else. He doesn’t have a studio, he doesn’t have assistants and he doesn’t mass produce or mass market. If you can’t afford the work, he won’t be tempting you to buy a print, or a poster or a pin. Fortunately, for most the work is still very affordable. The highest price ever paid at auction for an Andre from the ’60s is 25% of the price of the top Judd lot, and Mr. Andre still makes the same great work today that he did then. The work from the ’60s is rare and sells at a premium, and though admittedly I’d love to have an early work, I’m happy to buy a very recent work, because they are all part of the same original and unblemished concept.

Will things change? I’m confident they will, because there’s a new Andre monograph out from the publisher Phaidon and a sure-to-be-good retrospective scheduled at the Dia Foundation in 2013. But even if the market doesn’t wake up, the worst that can happen is that I’ll own a great work of art.

Everything Mr. Andre has done is well worth considering, but it’s the metal-plate floor pieces that demand my respect and fascination. Back in the late ’30s another innovator, Alexander Calder, changed art forever when he took organic metal shapes and hung them from the ceiling by thread, thus creating the mobile.

Mr. Andre made a similar quantum leap for art in creating sculpture that lies flat on the floor and can be walked on. These floor pieces take up no wall space, and they don’t fill up a single square foot of any room. They sit soberly and somberly on the floor, defying the logic of all art that came before. The material is plain metal, and whether it’s copper, zinc or “hot rolled steel,” the works are bereft of design, engraving or embellishment of any kind. With Mr. Andre there’s no image or color to make art easy by tickling the eyes. The works are only a quarter of an inch thick and offer no hooks for possible interpretation other than their dimension and the number of plates they comprise.

Am I preaching that collectors bring in the old and throw out the new? I’m too afraid that as time marches on I’ll be left behind, so I still follow the young ones and I try to be part of what’s happening. But living rooms that are full of contemporary hits like Wade Guyton, Kelley Walker and Dan Colen, or more seasoned ones like Christopher Wool, Richard Prince, Damien Hirst and Maurizio Cattelan, would be well served to consider some masters from the past. I think you’ll find they can still challenge the generations that came after them, because much of the new-old art is better than the same old new art.

editorial@observer.com

Mao (1973) by Andy Warhol.

Charles Saatchi is the most influential collector of the past 25 years, and one of the most controversial. Notorious for never appearing at his own openings and for not granting interviews, the British former advertising magnate remains a mysterious figure who wields his influence through his Saatchi Gallery shows and the subsequent sale of the artworks in them; to this day he continues to influence the market for contemporary art in his Gatsbyesque style. I’ve met him only once, at a London restaurant with our mutual friend Jean Pigozzi; Mr. Saatchi picked up the tab, which was generous of him since he was on a diet and ate almost nothing.

A new edition of The History of the Saatchi Gallery (Booth-Clibborn, 1,008 pages, $85.00) has just been released. It’s a reprint of the same title done in a monster-size “OPUS” edition in 2009. Now that it’s available in a manageable size, it’s time to buy it and study it. I scored my signed copy at Sotheby’s in London during last month’s auction previews. This tome is essential for serious art collectors because it shows us the amazing breadth of what Mr. Saatchi has bought, exhibited and sold between 1985 and 2009, following a collecting model I’ve dubbed the “show and sell.” There are many questions surrounding the underlying meaning of his collecting activity, and the morality of his method; just about everything about Mr. Saatchi interests me, in fact, because there’s a lot of Saatchi-ness in today’s art market.

What motivated Mr. Saatchi to produce the oversize book two years ago and to republish it today in a smaller but still jumbo size is no doubt both his ongoing need for recognition and his desire to donate his gallery with its sundry art leftovers to the British government, presumably so that he won’t have to continue underwriting it himself. He tried to get out from under it last July (see my article from Nov. 3, 2010) but that deal fell apart over the gallery’s plan to fund itself through future purchases and sales, a practice that violates museum bylaws in Britain and everywhere else. But buying and selling is what Mr. Saatchi has done for years, and it has worked amazingly well for him it seems, at least until fairly recently.

Flipping through the book, I couldn’t help but marvel at the amazing Warhols he owned, the Judds and the Mardens, the Freuds and the Serras, though sadly for him he owned no Lichtensteins, Bacons or Basquiats. I couldn’t stop myself from adding up what these artworks would be worth today, forgetting Mr. Saatchi’s recent shows and sticking only to the really good stuff he had up until the end of the mid-’90s: I easily came up with $1.5 billion. Even this past decade he proved he still had the eye when he bought, exhibited and then sold great painters like Marlene Dumas, John Currin and Peter Doig and even a few emerging artists, like the then-up-and-coming Mark Grotjahn, who have since garnered blue-chip status. He also had great sculptors like Charlie Ray and Thomas Schutte, but over time his hit ratio has been going down, the proof of this being the book’s inclusion of some horrid and unforgivable chazerai—junk food—that you couldn’t pay me to hang in my house.

Making things more difficult for Mr. Saatchi today is the fact that the art market has become more efficient, and he’s often priced out of it. Rising art prices have forced him to eschew the four-man shows of famous artists he used to do in favor of broader and broader shows with catchy adman titles like “Painting Today” or “Sculpture Tomorrow,” probably because his buy-show-sell strategy has become riskier and less lucrative; art today is fully valued and looks like it will remain so.

When those drift-net shows dead-ended, he went ethnic, with Indian art, then Chinese art, and I’ve already forgotten what else. It’s all worth studying because he has successfully invented a new way to collect art, though sadly now the overall quality of the work keeps forcibly trending down.

Part of me feels Mr. Saatchi never should have moved beyond the original show of 1985, “Judd, Marden, Twombly, Warhol.” It was so good it could have stayed up permanently. As crazy as this sounds, and though it wouldn’t cause any “sensation,” the quality was outstanding, and it would be worth a helluva lot more money than whatever is left in his collection today. In fact, the number of never-ever-to-be-seen-again-on-the-market works that he has shown and sold over the years is downright depressing.

So what conclusions, if any, am I to draw from all this? I asked a wise veteran, art dealer Arne Glimcher, founder of the Pace Gallery, who has dealt with Mr. Saatchi over the years; his answer: “Charles was always a dealer.”

Many would concur, but I don’t; if you’ve owned all that, even if most of it is long gone, then you are what they call a collector-dealer. And, yes, Mr. Saatchi is the original collector who deals. The very reason why Mr. Saatchi, who should instead be lauded for what he’s done for art, is more often maligned by the “art world” is that he regularly sells anything he can. The art world to this day loves to adhere to its hypocritical views that dealers are permitted to sell for profit but “collectors” should not do the same.

I’ve had to deal with this disingenuous hypocrisy for over a decade, but as archaic and absurd as this may sound, most of the art world still buys into the charade. Though I can’t compare myself to Mr. Saatchi, I too have sold art to buy more art, and I refuse to bow to any false moral judgments that others may cast upon me; nor will I behave like a rich, vacuum-cleaner-style collector. I’ll let others play that role.

It’s a well-known fact that in 2007 I sold a fabulous sculpture by Jeff Koons at auction and it achieved the highest price ever paid for an artwork by a living artist. It was a great work by a great artist and it made a great price, so why should I feel badly about a sale that was good for the market, good for the gallery (prices jumped for new works) and a good market confirmation of the artist’s enormous stature? Instead, I received several dirty looks and was accused of being a profiteer: all sour grapes, I’m afraid.

This brings us to the tired old story of how Charles Saatchi ruined Italian painter Sandro Chia’s market when he dumped a suite of Mr. Chia’s paintings at auction years ago—what rubbish that all is. Mr. Chia is a minor figure today; his paintings just aren’t that interesting. Mr. Saatchi didn’t sell just his Chias; he’s dumped everything for years, including his John Currins and his Peter Doigs, but those works have gone straight up into the millions of dollars. As a matter of fact, a Doig painting made $10 million in London last month and collector demand for work by John Currin has never been stronger.

It’s not the selling of art that hurts the market, it’s the timing of the sale, but no matter, good art finds its level so I don’t believe any collector can singlehandedly “plunge” the market of a good artist. That’s why I take offense at the double standard many dealers apply to collectors: on one side are the great patrons who get lots of respect and on the other are those who are derided as speculators and traders, those eponymous collector-dealers. But I’ve seen many of the so-called golden patrons sell paintings in the market, including respected names like Aggie Gund and Dakis Joannou, so these pseudomoralistic views are absurd. They are quite simply the self-serving attitude of dealers who want their “model clients” to buy and never, ever sell.

I also hate those ridiculous resale agreements some dealers have concocted. Though I graduated from law school a while ago, I don’t think they are legally binding, and, anyway, I prefer the old-fashioned handshake deal.

I’m not saying anything goes. If you buy a great piece fresh from the studio through a gallery you know, and you promise to “have and to hold,” then you should cherish it. If you subsequently sell at auction, thus breaking your vow, well, you’ve lost your relationship with the gallery and the artist, and you deserve to because you didn’t play by the rules.

Mr. Saatchi has never played by the rules; he invented his own, and thus changed collecting forever. He must be happy with the result because he’s done it for decades, and the entire contemporary art world owes him a lot for the awareness he’s created, the artists whose works he’s shown and promoted, and the public excitement and enthusiasm he’s created. I don’t think we’ll ever see another like him, not only because he was visionary but also because the market has changed.

Studying The History of the Saatchi Gallery made me wonder: Is it the experience of collecting that counts or is it the physical possession of powerful art? Is it fulfilling to have once owned masterpieces, or does it count only when “death do us part”?

I need it both ways, meaning that I need the excitement of owning work that can be published and shown, but I’m not willing to part with it all, even at exorbitant prices. When I come home I want to be surrounded by a collection that represents my personal history with art, works that were important to my life experience. Given the chance to be a Saatchi I’d like to think I would have kept much of his great stuff and not have succumbed to the temptation to always cash in and seek out the newest new thing.

There was a time when chasing the art world’s next sensation was a great strategy, and Charles Saatchi was the master pioneer of the “show and sell” technique. Several private contemporary art foundations followed in his footsteps, including Dakis Joannou’s Deste Foundation in Athens, François Pinault’s Palazzo Grassi and Punta della Dogana in Venice, the Rubell Family Collection in Miami and Peter Brant’s Brant Foundation in Greenwich, Conn. Mr. Saatchi invented the model over 25 years ago and has been the leader in finding tomorrow’s art market stars and cashing in on them, but those days are mostly over, because the days of “easy pickings” and low-hanging fruit are gone for good. Today, the mission of seeking out the hottest new thing has become painfully tedious, because really going forward in art often requires reaching backward: too often the old is better than the new. Flipping through Mr. Saatchi’s book, a memorial to masterpieces come and gone, I can’t help but feel that today I’d rather see a major Saatchi Collection retrospective than anything he’s liable to cook up next.

editorial@observer.com

Leviathan (2011) by Anish Kapoor.

The annual summer art tour is finally over. It was bookended by the Venice Biennale and the mega-fair Art Basel and included a few stops in between. Basel was packed with collectors and dealers and was very successful, with art changing hands at the fastest pace we’ve seen since ’07. If the art market isn’t 90 percent back to the good old days it’s damn close.

But I don’t obsess over art fairs; instead I go to museums where there’s nothing to buy but plenty to learn.

In Basel, the Beyeler Foundation is always my first stop. Director Sam Keller followed up last year’s Basquiat blockbuster show with a tag team extravaganza: “Constantin Brancusi-Richard Serra.” The show included so many rarely seen works that it wowed everyone … everyone except me.

Brancusi defined the abstraction of form that announced the beginning of modern sculpture, and the show presented multiple versions of signature works like Bird in Space and The Kiss. My favorite was the five-foot-high wood sculpture Adam and Eve, in which two abstracted gaping mouths over a phallic form sit on top of a zigzag pedestal that combines Coptic architecture with influences from African Lega sculpture. Unlike some classic works that are overexposed, Brancusi’s sculptures never look kitsch, not because they defined history, but because their sober reduction of form gives them a powerful religious aura. Mr. Serra, too, is an artist I grudgingly love. Although his work is somewhat repetitive, it succeeds in being at once heavy and light even though his scale is monumental: he makes you feel like his art is designed to last forever, and it probably will—the beautiful Corten steel it’s made of weighs tons.

Despite being shoved into the Beyeler’s low-ceilinged galleries, the amazing Serra works looked good, but the pairing of these two great artists didn’t work for me. I see the benefit of refreshing century-old works by mixing them with those of a living master, but with these two I don’t understand what was achieved. I asked several dealers this question and read the exhibition catalogue but the only affinities I could find were the medium—sculpture—and the fact that both artists’ sculptures involve precarious balance: Brancusi’s Bird in Space looks like it’s just on the verge of tipping over and Mr. Serra’s huge, twisting, steel slabs appear like they are just about to topple over, like giant dominos.

On the whole, the pairing reminded me of last year’s failed blockbuster The Tourist, a film starring Angelina Jolie and Johnny Depp in Venice: both stars were hot, but they had no chemistry. If a fresh dialogue was the point of the show, I think a Brancusi-Carl Andre match would have worked better. Mr. Andre’s still the dark and unsung hero of American minimalism. He was tried and acquitted of murdering his artist wife, Ana Mendieta, in 1988 and most museums won’t touch him, but his works are sober and powerful, the wooden railroad ties he uses are no doubt directly inspired by Brancusi, and his metal floor pieces wouldn’t tower over Brancusi’s more delicate scale. Apparently Mr. Andre even knew Brancusi in the 1950’s. Mr. Andre’s moment in the spotlight will have to wait until 2013, when the Dia Foundation gives the 76-year-old his first American retrospective in 40 years.

Paris is my favorite city, so everything there looks better to me. This was sadly not the case with “l’Art de l’Automobile” at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, an exhibition dubbed “masterpieces from the Ralph Lauren car collection.” I’m a vintage car lover and I’ve owned some pretty nice Italian and French pre- and postwar rust boxes, though nothing as good as what Mr. Lauren has. I drive mine every weekend, and his look like they haven’t been started in a decade: the collection is probably the most overrestored and underdriven group of blue-chip collector status symbols in the world.
Unlike their European counterparts, American collectors are known to buy only perfect examples of just about everything. They won’t buy an African sculpture with a broken arm or a Khmer torso if it’s headless. They don’t want imperfections or aging in their Art Deco, or a Mondrian painting with its original cracks and patina. And so, when selling to the Americans, dealers restore the arms and fill in the paint on the Mondrians. Like them, Mr. Lauren has overrestored his cars, with chrome shinier and leather more supple than any car offered in the past century, including those of the great Ettore Bugatti. The fact that American collectors have favored the overrestored stuff for decades says something about our American culture: we refuse to accept things, as the French say, “dans son jus”; instead we clean them up and present them devoid of aging and wrinkles (think face lift).

We want the old stuff to look shiny and new, even if it’s a lie.

Ralph Lauren clothes, which are so successful you can find them from Europe to Asia, have a similar point of view: they are smart and beautifully made selections of other people’s design. Whether British or American classics, they are always high-quality copies. But copies and overrestoration are not for me; I like cars and paintings with patina. When something is old but doesn’t show its age, I’m suspicious. Sources tell me that Mr. Lauren’s fabulous Ferrari 250 GTO is actually a rebodied car with period chassis and motor, and that his fabulous Bugatti Atlantic is reupholstered in leathers that are not period options, meaning the chrome and paint job are not what Bugatti offered back in the day. I was also disappointed not to see a fabulous Ferrari Spyder California, or a Jaguar C-type, or some eccentric choices in the display. Then again, maybe I’m just too jealous of his Jaguar D-type and gorgeous XKSS to think straight.

In the Bibliotheque Nationale de Paris is an interesting Richard Prince show through June 26 titled “American Prayer,” which combines his extensive book collection from what he calls the “Beat-Hippie-Punk” generation with some of his newer book-related art works. It includes important dedicated editions of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road and Hunter Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas as well as amazing hand-written letters from Jimmy Hendrix to his father, ones in which he complains about not getting paid or not even getting a gig.

Mr. Prince also uses the show to hang his new works made from pulp-fiction novels alongside their original cover art, as well as some of his “celebrity” works. His recent art production has been prolific but many question its quality. This show, carefully curated by the artist’s friend (and collector) Bob Rubin, seeks to strengthen the artist’s credibility by showing the complex collection of material from which he draws his inspiration. But the show really works only for the Prince-obsessed who collect his work, like me. As great as the collection is, books are something you need to hold in your hands and feel. Placed in a vitrine, they are no longer books; they are lifeless objects. Art-loving British starchitect David Adjaye built a beautiful shingle house inside the space to house part of the show and installed the rest with his elegant touch (I did my house with him too, coincidentally). The end result is complex and interesting, but I couldn’t help feeling that I was being pushed to a foregone conclusion: that this artist, who became so famous for the large prices achieved by his paintings, is much more than a market phenomenon. I agree with the message but I like to draw my own conclusions.

Thinking about art and how we experience it, whether individually or in large groups, drew me to the Anish Kapoor installation Leviathan at the Grand Palais. The fantastic Grand Palais is a soaring, glass-roofed, steel-skeleton structure built for the Universal Expo of 1900. In the days before good electrical lighting, its glass roof allowed light to get in so that large groups could gather and see the exhibits. In recent years, France invited Richard Serra, Anselm Kiefer and Christian Boltanski to do shows, and luckily I saw and enjoyed them all, but Mr. Kapoor’s installation will be the standard by which all future shows will be judged: it was really amazing.

I’m not a fan of Mr. Kapoor and loving this show underscores why. Though over the past years he has become one of the top-grossing artists in the world, his brand of postminimalist sculptures with Buddhist overtones doesn’t work for me. I’ve studied some Mahayana and Hinayana Buddhism and I’ve been to Dharamsala to visit the Dalai Lama, so the infinite feeling of the one and the many that his commercial works evoke falls flat for me, about as hollow as the “om” they chant at the end of a yoga session. And yet when Mr. Kapoor creates monumental public artworks—like the 110-ton reflective steel blob (a.k.a. The Bean) he did in Chicago’s Millenium Park, or Marsyas, the giant trombone, vaginal in appearance and named for a satyr, that he installed in the Tate Modern in 2002—he achieves transcendence. Leviathan is a huge inflated stomach and intestine, entering which makes you feel you have just been swallowed. The viewer then exits the interior space and tours the outside of the piece, where the three enormous balloon wombs are so big that they fill the entire 135,000-foot space of the Grand Palais. What Leviathan means I don’t know, and don’t care. The strong emotions and amazement it evokes in the audience make it one of the most successful public works done anywhere by anyone. I’ll never be able to look at another Kapoor without thinking of this incredibly successful installation.

If by now you are wondering what an overdone 1962 Ferrari GTO, an exhibit of an artist’s book collection and a sculpture over 100,000 feet in scale have in common, don’t. But they did teach me how dependent what we see is on how we see it: the shows I was looking forward to disappointed me because of their presentations, whereas something I had no interest in was the most successful art I’ll see all summer. I’m not that interested in the pairing of art with books I can’t touch—though a few years ago I was inspired by Mr. Prince and began to collect books myself—or in gawking at beautiful cars that don’t get driven. But Mr. Kapoor’s Leviathan is perfectly designed for the mass audience it satisfies and proves that he is a master of the monumental sculpture. If an artist has a great collection of books, that doesn’t prove that his art made from books is any good, while success with large scale work doesn’t mean that smaller scale works will also be successful: a jack of all trades is, after all, a master of none, and even the world’s greatest artists can sometimes look like jacks.

editorial@observer.com

The fair now draws a good portion of the world's major galleries as well as many of its better small ones. It's something of a gold rush: dealers come seeking the few heavyweight Chinese clients who have been spending millions of yuan recently at New York auctions. Majority control of the fair was recently purchased by Art Basel, which runs the most prestigious art fairs in the world, further confirming the art world's hunger for growth in an emerging market and its continuing need for new sources of collector dollars.

Although some dealers will always claim to have sold every artwork in their booths during the fair's opening hours, a few key questions asked after midnight in Hong Kong's raging nightclub district revealed to me that as the event's second day drew to a close, many hadn't yet sold a thing--but admittedly that information was obtained after several doses of vodka and Red Bull.

Galleries brought higher-quality pieces than I'd expected; their booths were filled with choice contemporary artworks of manageable size, presumably selected to fit into smaller-scale urban Chinese apartments. But if these works weren't by marquee-name artists like Damien Hirst, they were likely to be passed over by the local clientele.

Ironically, this made Art HK a great place for Westerners like me to shop. New York dealer Marianne Boesky hung an entire suite of hard-to-find Barnaby Furnas paintings; elsewhere in the fair, one could snap up desirable pieces by Rudolf Stingel or Piotr Uklanski, and ask for a discount--which is precisely what I did. At Art Basel, or its sister fair in Miami, those same works would have sold within minutes.

In Hong Kong, the pace is different: a disciplined crowd arrives after work, around 6 p.m.; locals told me to expect the biggest crowds over the weekend. But even then, the Chinese don't seem interested in a long learning curve. Many appeared to get impatient when artworks required too much explanation; frankly, I don't see them "learning" the ins and outs of the broad range of Western art for at least a decade or more.

Why, then, are Western dealers so eager to pack up their inventory and ship it, at great cost, to China? The answer is that the need for fresh clients is pressing because the ones they have at home have bought so much that their appetite has slackened. Even if things aren't moving quickly now, dealers are optimists; they won't easily give up their belief in Hong Kong's field of dreams.

And some business was done. Hong Kong is full of transient private bankers from the West who relish a chance to see what they're missing at home. And some Chinese who hail from Taiwan--or the mainland, as well as the occasional new collector from Indonesia or Singapore--are prepared to step up for a medium-size and medium-priced work ... as long as it's by a brand-name artist. Hong Kong is plastered with luxury brands: Hermes, Chanel, Louis Vuitton, Dunhill. Chinese buying of Western art seems to be in keeping with this: they'll opt for Damien Hirst or Takashi Murakami, and pile into a Richard Prince show at the new Hong Kong branch of the Gagosian Gallery, because Gagosian, with 11 outlets around the world, represents the premier global art brand. Buying art there is like buying an Hermès bag: it comes with a stamp of status and credibility.

That's the theory, but not the reality. I saw many Chinese collector-types frown at the "Girlfriend" photos--bare-breasted biker chicks--in Richard Prince's show at Gagosian, and Prince's medium-size Nurse painting had too much blood-red paint and perversity to appeal to a conservative Chinese sensibility. Nevertheless I heard rumors that other brand-name galleries from the West, like London's White Cube and New York's David Zwirner, are looking to open Hong Kong branches.

Chinese society is emerging from 60 years of communist rule, and what's on its mind are the features of a fairly new capitalist system: real estate, stock market speculation, consumer goods. If art can make them money, they'll pay attention, but they have no patience for the Western art market's taboos about buying for resale, or its dealers' moralistic credo against the "flipping" of artworks at auction. The tacit prohibition against selling primary works at auction is contrary to the very nature of the Chinese; in fact, they want auction action. The Chinese love to gamble and speculate; the more art is linked to money and trading, the more they're going to like it.

Christie's auction preview is one of the only ways the Chinese get to see Western art, since they don't have many museums of their own. They like the game of "show and sell": it's an opportunity for a gambling instinct to meet the public spectacle of auction. Christie's cleverly sponsored museum-style show of new works by Mr. Zeng came complete with a ribbon cutting featuring the second-highest-ranking Chinese official in Hong Kong and Christie's distinguished French owner and collector, François Pinault. Chinese love their own cooking and this show featured an artist whose early fame came from the skillful mask paintings he made in the 90's, one of which sold for $9.6 million at auction in 2008. Edward Tang, an expert at Christie's London who hails from Hong Kong, explained that Mr. Zeng paints every work himself in a style reminiscent of classic Chinese calligraphy, and that his latest series fits precisely the taste of the newly minted regional Chinese oligarch looking for big city savvy and status. Mr. Zeng's prices reflect the strength of his brand; similar new paintings from his studio apparently sell for over $2 million today whereas, according to Mr. Tang's father, China Club owner Sir David Tang, they were $500,000 just three years ago.

Are they a good investment at these levels? My Chinese friends spoke with pride of the value of this great painter, and I was reminded that, at auction, it takes only a single new buyer from the mainland of a country with a population of 1.3 billion to double yesterday's value. The fact that Mr. Zeng recently left his sporadic representation at Acquavella Galleries and is rumored to be going to Gagosian serves only to confirm his blue-chip status.

The Chinese take pride in their newfound economic might. Motivating them to buy our art won't be the easy layup some dealers hope for and the century-old European tradition of polished dealers advising wealthy client-patrons on how to create the great collection is a nonstarter in Asia. The wealthy Chinese like to socialize with their famous artists and buy directly from them or at an auction where the comfort of an underbidder makes them less suspicious of being taken for a ride. The great new art frontier is real, but pioneering will be risky and expensive. Success in China will be dictated by Chinese tastes and mores, and they're going to play by their own rules.

editorial@observer.com

Mr. Saint Laurent died in 2008 of brain cancer; he and Mr. Bergé, his life partner and business manager, had been married in a civil ceremony a few days earlier. Mr. Bergé does most of the film's narration, which is interspersed among slices of vintage footage. The sale's proceeds went to the French AIDS charity Sidaction, which Bergé founded and still runs; it was an elegant, poetic ending to liquidation of the King of Haute Couture's worldly possessions.

Those treasures wouldn't have done as well if Mr. Bergé hadn't been so knowledgeable about the three key ingredients in blockbuster prices: a single-owner sale, important provenance and freshness to the market. I've spent hours thinking about this and often wonder if an unremarkable hotel ashtray in which Mr. Saint Laurent once stubbed out a cigarette wouldn't have made $7,000 on that magic night. For my recent book Collecting Design, which was in large part inspired by the Saint Laurent sale, I interviewed fashion designer/collectors like Marc Jacobs and Karl Lagerfeld, as well as interior designers like Jacques Grange (who did many of Mr. Saint Laurent's homes) and Peter Marino, the go-to guy for luxury brands like Louis Vuitton and Chanel.

I found that they all share a common thread--the eye of the designer--and look at art differently than I do. The impatient Mr. Lagerfeld puts a whole house together in a certain style, then liquidates the lot at auction. Mr. Jacobs collects things that connect with his emotional life--mainly the work of artists he befriends; collecting as an investment would be anathema to him.

The art world loves fashion. In addition to being the man who revived Gucci, Tom Ford is a celebrity, and the fact that he owned a painting adds to its value. In May 2010, his large Fright Wig Warhol self-portrait made $32.5 million at auction; a few weeks ago, a similar, and arguably better one made almost $10 million less. Even with that kind of money to spend, I wouldn't go for a big, theatrical 80's Warhol, like a Fright Wig. I would buy a great early work from the 60's. Nor do I covet a large Warhol Lenin portrait like the one I've seen in photos of Valentino's Paris apartment. I'd go for a disaster painting--an "electric chair " or a "car crash"--every time. I'm not looking only at the pictures; I can't help but consider their historic importance and my feel for their future value.

The great designer/collectors bring celebrity to the art world: if the sublime Anne Hathaway sees a show, it's on the arm of Valentino or his life-partner, Giancarlo Giametti; Mr. Jacobs brings sophisticated Sofia Coppola or sexy Scarlet Johansen. The actresses look but almost never buy--ditto rock stars like Mick Jagger and Bono--but the designers dive in and play an important role in taste making and trend setting.

Mr. Saint Laurent was a fascinating figure. Born into a comfortable French family in Algeria, he got himself hired as Christian Dior's assistant by writing a letter to the editor of French Vogue. Within a few years Mr. Dior anointed him his heir apparent, then died in 1957, leaving the 21-year-old Mr. Saint Laurent at the helm of one of Paris's greatest couture houses. In 1960, during the Algerian revolt, he was put into an asylum for refusing to do his military service, so Dior's conservative owners fired him, leaving him no choice but to open his own house, which he did, with Mr. Bergé at his side.

The success story starts there, and it's a complex one of genius, changing social mores, depression and drug addiction. In the 2002 documentary Yves Saint Laurent: His Life and Times, we meet the designer as an elderly man. It's not a pretty picture--he's bloated, his hair is dyed blond, he slurs his speech and chain-smokes nervously--but nevertheless we get to feel how the man changed fashion history.

Reminiscing, he explains that he "freed fashion from elegance, and made it about seduction," and it's worth remembering that he was designing in the 60's and 70's, during a sexual and social revolution for which his designs became a conduit. He changed haute couture from a business that dressed the richest of the bourgeoisie to a platform for artistic expression and personal whimsy; he made it a mirror on society.

His muses give us insight into his genius, whether it's Betty Catroux saying that he gave fashion "attitude" or Loulou de la Falaise attesting that he "liberated it, making it real, younger and freer." Innovations included shoulder straps for handbags, and (shockingly at the time) dressing women in men's clothes, i.e., pants suits, while keeping them sexy. He found inspiration in vintage clothes, as well as styles from then-exotic places like Russia and China and, in 1962, was the first to put black models on the runway. He virtually invented prêt-a-porter.

(He had an idiosyncratic side: the other night I got to chat about him with the brilliant Mr. Jacobs, who revealed that when Mr. Saint Laurent and Mr. Bergé interviewed him for a position, their first question was, "What is your Zodiac sign?")

The wild life of the 70's led to a split from Mr. Bergé, but the untold story is of the bouts of depression and drug addiction that kept Mr. Saint Laurent hidden from the public during his final decades. And yet his output and creative energy are astounding: Yves Saint Laurent is the history of French fashion.

The art he collected is an important part of his story, but not in the way the market perceives it to be. I'm no expert, but I don't think any of his three Mondrians were the artist's best work--even though one of them, a 1922 painting, sold for a record $27.5 million. His Brancusi is an atypical wooden one, not the iconic marble or bronze "Bird in Space" that a trophy hunter would lust after. But I don't think any of this mattered to Mr. Saint Laurent. He drew inspiration by surrounding himself with great art­--not only  vetted masterpieces--and curios. He and Mr. Bergé filled their homes with 19th-century silver, a smattering of medieval art, a few Greco-Roman busts of nude young men and Duchamp's wonderful little perfume bottle called "Belle Haleine" (which sold for $8.9 million). These lavishly decorated homes gave him comfort and a beautiful place in which to hide. Though some of the works broke auction records, they didn't do so based entirely on their own merits; they did so in large part because he touched them.

Most serious art collectors don't buy this way. There is no coup de foudre because, faced with the numbers, they put on their green visors and start doing research and analysis. More and more bring a consultant or two, and perhaps a conservator.

Does this make sense? It does if you are about to make a serious investment, but I'll bet Mr. Saint Laurent never dreamt of such a process. He bought what he loved. When he died, there was no reason to keep any of it: he had no interest in a private museum or even a mausoleum (he was cremated).

I too like to buy on impulse. One year at the major annual art fair in Maastricht I bought a pair of 19th-century porcelain boar's head tureens, and my art dealer wife scolded me for overpaying. "Sorry," I retorted. "I must have had an Yves Saint Laurent moment." Thinking about this film, I realized that Mr. Bergé, the man who orchestrated the sale and knew how to maximize the value of its artworks, had the eye of the collector. He brought his deceased partner's legacy new life and provided a platform for his private possessions to tell us a story. Mr. Saint Laurent had the eye of the designer, the eye of impulse and inspiration without the constraints of estimates, condition, research and calculation. I don't pretend to look at art that way most days, but I'll never lose the emotion and spontaneity of collecting because that would turn the whole endeavor into a pointless exercise in commerce. Yves Saint Laurent may be gone, but the sale has become an important part of his legacy, which lives on.

editorial@observer.com

With the major biannual contemporary art sales at Christie's, Sotheby's and Phillips once again upon us, it's worth remembering the fuss over Warhol's 82-inch painting which, through a single, repeated photographic image, tells the story of a famous love triangle. Liz Taylor is at a racetrack squeezed between her movie producer husband Mike Todd and his best friend, crooner Eddie Fisher, who was then married to starlet Debbie Reynolds. Todd's marriage to the beautiful Taylor, then a dewy 24, was his third; when he died in a plane crash in 1958 it would take less than a year for Fisher to dump his own spouse, hook up with his dead friend's young widow and marry her in 1959. As it turned out, this spelled doom for Fisher, because his clean-cut showbiz persona was, in part, dependent on a storybook-perfect marriage to the wholesome Reynolds. It wasn't long before the unfavorable publicity surrounding his affair and divorce prompted cancellation of his television series with NBC and his recording contract with RCA. By 1964, his marriage to Taylor had also ended. Warhol's painting captures the beginning of what would be a series of disasters for both men.

The same week that Philips sold "Men in Her Life," Sothebys's sold a large 1962 Warhol painting, "Coca-Cola [4] Large Coca-Cola," for $35 million. They are both from the artist's early, and most valuable, period, but for me the similarity between them ends there: the Coca Cola bottle is merely a great hand-painted early pop image, whereas the newspaper-appropriated image of Liz's love triangle is representative of Warhol's most important contribution to art history, and well worth double what the other painting sold for.

All it takes is two bidders to chase a painting well past its presale estimate, and nowhere in any catalog does it say, "Please don't overpay." Do we really need a regulation setting these prices in their appropriate ratios to insure that clients don't overpay? Auctions today are about theater. Face it: it's pretty amazing to see such large quantities of money lavished on works of art whose value is strictly subjective. No matter how great they are, they aren't gold mines or oil wells.

As much as I love Warhol, the blockbuster prices at the high end feel like they're topping out. This season yet another large Warhol "Fright Wig" self-portrait comes up at auction, and once again it has been dubbed "the last in private hands." This blazing red one from collectors Norah and Norman Stone of San Francisco carries a $40 million price (a purple one made $32.5 million last year). Also on offer is a blue Liz, estimated at over $20 million, and an assemblage of "16 Jackies" priced at $25 million. There is little oxygen in the upper reaches of this market, but eventually a picture will crash and the cycle will turn or slow down. Until that happens, the auction experts will continue to source the material and find the clients, season after season. But then again, maybe it won't happen. Maybe, like Columbus, we'll find that the world of demand for Warhol is bigger than we thought it was. Meanwhile, the sums traded for these top lots are staggering, and the brouhaha surrounding them adds to the conviction of some that regulation lurks just around the corner.

The last time the government interfered in the art market was after the scandal over the price-fixing arrangement between Sotheby's and Christie's. It's been over 10 years since this debacle, and still the pain is fresh. Remember when Christopher Davidge, then CEO of Christie's, ratted out his competitor, Sotheby's, took $7 million in severance and jetted off with the young, attractive Asian art specialist Amrhita Jhaveri? Both Christie's chairman Sir Anthony Tennant and Sotheby's chairman Alfred Taubman were found guilty of price fixing under U.S. antitrust laws, but only Mr. Taubman was incarcerated -- he spent 10 months in prison -- because there is no applicable criminal law in the U.K.

The U.S. laws that were violated were the 1890 Sherman Antitrust Act and the 1914 Clayton Act, neither of which was intended to regulate the sale of high-quality collectibles. It is absurd to think of rules created in 1890 and 1914 protecting me, as a collector, from getting screwed by the auction house out of a few commission dollars when I consign my paintings. A jury will almost invariably convict a wealthy man in a criminal case, but having known Mr. Taubman most of my adult life, my feeling is that this one was wrong to do so. I know him to be too smart to have been involved in this type of deal, and it would not have been worth it for him.

These deals were struck by the operating people at the two houses, like Christopher Davidge and Sotheby's ex-CEO Dede Brooks, and even if they did conspire to fix their commission rates, what difference would it make? Auction houses still compete with each other through different advertising packages, shipping deals, placement in their catalogues, and all kinds of perks and side deals. The commission card is only a starting point, and is never final, so where was the real harm?

In any event, I don't believe in the notion that auction houses control the market. As a client, if I don't like what they offer, I can go to one of hundreds of dealers around the world. Today, neither house charges their large clients seller commissions, and buyers' commissions are the same at Christie's and Sotheby's and, for that matter, Phillips: 25% up to $50,000, 20% up to $1 million and 12% thereafter. So, what did the government achieve by prosecuting these people, and wreaking havoc in their lives? Nothing.

Funny that I have never heard a single dealer point out how unfair it was that one house was busted while the other was allowed to get off for turning in state's evidence. But sadly I often hear one dealer backstab another about taking double commissions, when in fact they all take what they can get every day in what, despite the government's interpretation, is an extremely competitive business. I have always given any dealer I sell through a simple net price; if they were able to sell a work for that price, I thanked them very much. They are all working on my behalf to find a client, and if they need to split the commission to get the deal done, so be it. What do I care how many people they involve?

I also take issue with collectors who mistrust their dealers, a popular and ugly recent trend. These collectors hire lawyers and create copious documentation; they only sell on consignment (no net price) and then they meticulously check every receipt, invoice and wire transfer. I've seen some of them sue dealers for works they didn't get or commissions they think they're owed. Forget right or wrong: art is a handshake business, and if someone treats you poorly, don't deal with them again, but don't go public with your gripes: it's bad form, and will result in bad karma. As a collector, you are the buyer, but you're also a patron and a caretaker -- you don't want to look like a personal injury litigant.

The art world may be old fashioned in this regard, but I don't think there's any good way to change it. And that's fine. As it is, I deal only with the people I trust at galleries and auction houses; regulation wouldn't alter that. And the only thing to regulate is precisely what could never be regulated: information. The art market runs on it. There are those who know, and those who don't, and that's why it's important to have friends. There's neither a need nor a use for regulation; anyone you've heard pontificating on the subject is an outsider looking to bring on an auto da fe. The real experts work on knowledge, feel and trust. If you're not feeling it, don't participate.

editorial@observer.com

Mr. Prince emerged as part of what the Metropolitan Museum of Art dubbed in a recent show the "Pictures Generation," an 1980s group of artists that includes Jack Goldstein, Laurie Simmons, Cindy Sherman and Sherrie Levine. Though I don't believe he invented "appropriation," he is definitely the most successful practitioner of the technique. It entails taking an image from one place, and creating a work of art by changing its context. Hard to believe, but that's all he did in many cases, and in so doing, he carved out his own place in art history, as well as disrupting traditional definitions of what constitutes "photography." This because his "Cowboy" photographs are just pictures of existing Marlboro ads, and his "Girlfriends" are just re-photographed pictures of pages in biker magazines. So his photographs are pictures of pictures; He's carved his place in art history for that. He gives them new meaning by making us see them out of their original context, which is the thread that holds all his work together: cowboys, girlfriends and what came next.

It was at a Barbara Gladstone gallery show in 2003 that Mr. Prince showed a new body of work: paintings that were based on pulp fiction book covers from the '50s and '60s. These were soft-core porny novels like Nightclub Nurse and Man-Eating Nurse. The paintings, priced at $75,000, sold out immediately. By July of 2008, only five years later, Overseas Nurse made almost $8.5 million at auction, a more-than-100-times return on the original investment, making Mr. Prince one of the most expensive living American artists.

By the fall of 08' he had already left Gladstone and joined Gagosian gallery when he debuted with his apocalyptic "Canal Zone" series. His prices were doubled for this auspicious occasion (new paintings were then priced up to about $3 million), but neither the artist nor his gallery could predict that the world would be entering an apocalyptic financial crisis of its own. The timing couldn't be worse, so if the artworks of Rastafarians with whited-out eyes and electric guitars as machine guns didn't scare off most collectors, the prices sure did. Stylistically, the works suggested Bob Marley as a terrorist rampaging through Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon. To make matters worse, the Rastafarians had been lifted from a recent book titled Yes Rasta by French photographer Patrick Cariou. The Frenchman didn't approve of the use of his images out of context, and sued.

On March 18, in U.S. District Court, he won a summary judgment against Richard Prince and Gagosian Gallery for copyright infringement, fair use and liability. (In the lawsuit, we learn that only 8 of 28 paintings found paying clients.) Now a judge has ruled that the entire series is illegal; even worse, it was decided that the gallery must "deliver for impounding and destruction all infringing copies including paintings and unsold copies of the book." The court went even further, declaring that the "paintings were not lawfully made under the Copyright Act and they cannot be lawfully displayed."

I always liked the series, and I'm a contrarian, so, in the pit of the crisis (summer 2009), I had bought a big one, and proudly hung it in my living room where many have shown curiosity and some experience serious disapprobation. Did I know about the lawsuit at that time and was I concerned? Yes, it was a perfect Richard Prince scenario: a work that was made under a potential copyright violation, the subject of a lawsuit, by a self-avowed "appropriation" artist.

Now some have mistakenly interpreted the judge's decision to read that I need to give it back to the gallery, but possession is 9/10's of the law, and there is a whole chapter in this story yet to been told.

A few days ago, I spoke to Patrick Cariou. He said that he was never offered any settlement money by Prince or his gallery before, during or after the show. He felt that that the artist had exhibited "arrogance, an overwhelming sense of power, and plain laziness."

The Frenchman was clever to hold out in court, his damages will be substantial and they will be decided on May 6.

But, I wondered: What of his subject matter, the poor Jamaicans living up in the hills. Did they get a modeling fee? Did they give consent to the publication of their likeness for profit? What, if anything, were they paid, and shouldn't they be entitled to some share of the suit proceeds? Well, Mr. Cariou agreed, he said "absolutely they are, and if I get anything, they will." It irks him that the images were used out of context, "he (Prince) made them look like zombies, it's a racist piece of art." He summarized his views for me: "Hell, No. Fuck Prince, Fuck Gagosian".

Synonyms for appropriation include stealing, confiscation, seizure, usurpation as well as pilfering. If, as Pablo Picasso (paraphrasing T.S. Eliot) is oft quoted as saying, "Good artists borrow but great artists steal," then there is no doubt that Mr. Prince is a great one, since he has stolen successfully for years. With the "Canal Zone" series, the law says he went a step too far, taking images out of a book recently in print and without any semblance of concern for ownership of copyright. But the paintings were really good, and as collectors, that's all we care about. This time, Mr. Prince got busted, but I'm not too concerned for him.

These days, he can well afford it.

Basquiat sought fame and fortune from the very beginning of his career, eager to hang with Andy Warhol and dine nightly at the Odeon, where I would sometimes bump into him, earning me a nod, if that. He was tremendously prolific, creating more than 500 paintings in a brief career that ended in 1988 with his drug overdose at age 27. In Europe and here, his legend is at an all-time high, and his market has rocketed, making him probably the priciest painter to emerge from the 1980s.

Actually, the 1980s threw up an entire generation of superstar painters. But history has not been as kind to most of them. Many suffered through the late 1990s, after the art market crashed, and have yet to make a real comeback. They're still working, but you don't hear about them. Where is the excitement today surrounding the work of Ross Bleckner, Tim Rollins or Francesco Clemente? And he buzz isn't deafening for big vintage names like Julian Schnabel, David Salle or Eric Fischl. Instead, a new crop of star painters, like Neo Rauch, John Currin and Elizabeth Peyton, ate their lunch, with million-dollar prices and all the fanfare. That prior generation hasn't felt the warm spotlight in a long while.

So it's interesting to see so much attention lavished now on George Condo, a contemporary of Basquiat's. His show "Mental States" opened Jan. 26 at the New Museum. Both young, talented and extremely prolific, the two artists were friends and George, in his early years, was acclaimed as a genius, too. (The Museum of Modern Art owns his work but no Basquiat paintings.) But I don't think George, unlike Basquiat, ever sought to be a art-world heavyweight champion; he wasn't out to be a hero, and perhaps he wasn't as focused on fame. Over the years, he's been doing his own thing: paint, and paint, and paint some more.

The New Museum show is a great opportunity to get a full dose of George's prodigious achievement, and also an occasion for some thought on why this 53-year-old painter is there in the first place, since he isn't very young and he certainly isn't very new. This beautiful but somewhat modest mid-career survey (full disclosure: I lent work to this one, too) makes me wonder why he didn't get a show at the Whitney or the Guggenheim or even a little show at the Met? So now, I'm going to ask the real question: After all these years, why does it feel like George (and perhaps some other '80s painters) is still not where he deserves to be?

His work itself is varied, but continues to revolve around a signature grotesque vision of the human figure. Imagine an artist who paints a beautiful woman and then gives her a freakish head, different-size eyeballs, a severe underbite and a smoldering cigarette. The many grotesque ghouls of Condo's world show almost infinite variation, and style, from classic figurative all the way to abstraction, but they are always part of the same family. It's the way people would look just before you go insane, or perhaps what they would look like after someone at a very strange party slipped them an absinthe cocktail.

The largely positive publicity surrounding the show has created some misunderstandings. In his eloquent 10-page New Yorker profile of George, Calvin Tomkins gives the impression that the artist has been living a grand life in a sumptuous Upper East Side townhouse. Funny, when I visited him only a year ago in the very same house, I found a narrow, rather modest, somewhat bohemian rental. Overall, the now-widespread notion that the great art boom of the last generation has been a seamless joy ride for "name" artists is wrong; interest in George's work in particular has waxed and waned many times over. He's even bounced around several galleries, thus creating the mistaken impression that his career has been inconsistent and chaotic. He's been a bit of a journeyman. In an artist's career, that can be a limitation. But in his case, it's also part of his charm.

I see some artists as sprinters, and some as pole-vaulters or even shot-putters; I'll call George a marathon runner. It's not a glamorous sport and it takes a really long time, but there's a lot of respect at the end, combined with some disbelief. Amid the miles, and years, he gives us something different, something strange. He's created his own language, an unforgettable one. Last summer, he showed me, with some reserved enthusiasm, a new sculpture. Then, as we had a beer, I realized that he actually does look like one of the crazy faces he paints. When leaving, I noticed that everyone around me started to look freakish. Everyone started to look like a George Condo painting, including me.

At the opening dinner, George was joined by rap star Kanye West, for whom he just did an album cover. Maurizio Cattelan, Richard Prince, John Currin and even Cindy Sherman all came to pay homage. So, if the '80s are still cold, why is George Condo hot today? The only good answer is the obvious answer: He's on a roll, making his best works ever. Most art-world pundits will repeat the same old refrain about liking the "early work"; it's always an easy thing to say, and they think it makes them sound safe and smart, but in this case they are dead wrong.

We live in a world of "winners" and "champions," but perhaps our art world is a bit too consumed with competitive terms like "best" when, in fact, art and artists can create their own thread. They don't need to be turned into blockbusters, and they don't need to always win. Sometimes all you need to become great is just to keep painting.

editorial@observer.com