Is buying art a different activity altogether for collectors who are not artists and for those who are artists? Or do similar reasons unite them in their pursuit? A factor perhaps common to both is pure, sentimental enjoyment — buying what catches the eye, buying what agrees with a knotted bunch of inclinations and preferences that one carries around vaguely in one’s head and which makes certain works of art more urgent and attractive than others.

Famous collectors such as Isabella Stewart Gardner (founder of the Eponymous Museum in Boston) have been known to go to dramatic lengths to acquire a work that had taken their fancy and, having acquired it, perform small, personal rituals of devotion for it (Gardner would reputedly offer fresh violets to one of her favourite paintings, ‘Christ Carrying the Cross’ painted by a follower of Giovanni Bellini).

The desire to possess something that lends gravitas and prestige to a life and a home also motivates spending on art. Art has a history of making new money look old. John Berger observes so succinctly in Ways of Seeing: “Oil painting, before it was anything else, was a celebration of private property. As an art form, it derived from the principle that you are what you have.” The appeal of art as a status symbol and an asset saw patronage shift from institutions to wealthy individuals belonging to a growing mercantile class. Today, many private collections rival, or even dwarf, those of public museums.

Buying art is essentially a social activity which engenders feelings both of community and competitiveness

And if Woody Allen’s cinematic output is anything to go by, artworks make for excellent conversation pieces. When tastefully gathered, they can sprinkle a space and its occupants with culture or, at the least, an appearance of it.

But is this impetus enough for artists to invest in art? It can be, although artists usually have other incentives. Since they make up the very carapace of culture that the laity wishes to hoist onto itself, they do not need the validation that comes with a superior art collection. What they do need is to learn from the art of their predecessors and contemporaries.

Degas, for instance, amassed an enviable trove of artworks that included works by the Neo-classical painter Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres and the Romantic virtuoso Ferdinand Victor Eugène Delacroix, both of whom he admired and wished to study. Reviewing a 1997 exhibition of Degas’ private art collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, American critic Michael Kimmelman wrote: “Degas didn’t really acquire the greatest works by artists but instead the ones that meant something particular to him, which, after all, is the right way to collect. He bought art because it was his instructor and companion, and he brought to collecting an engagement, even a passion, that should cause people to think twice about the common gripe that he is a chill artist.”

Of course, with artists, the reasons for doing something can be spectacularly puzzling as well: Picasso allegedly used a painting by Matisse — which he had obtained through a swap — for darts practice, and Jeff Koons, on being asked by The New York Times’ Randy Kennedy why he bought Gustave Courbet’s 1873 painting of a belligerent-looking bull calf, ruminatively replied that he is drawn to a patch on the bull’s fur which looks to him like it could be a part of Courbet’s soul.

Picasso’s rivalry with Matisse has lately become the subject of much eager investigation, so his acquiring and then degrading a work by Matisse can be seen as a very human act and not enigmatic at all. As for Koons — his own bright, bouncy oeuvre is a proof that inspiration can take many forms, so who is to argue with the bizarre logic behind his unusual, hotchpotch art collection?

The appeal of art as a status symbol and an asset saw patronage shift from institutions to wealthy individuals belonging to a growing mercantile class.

Buying art is essentially a social activity. It engenders feelings both of community and competitiveness amongst those who participate in it. The last few decades have seen it become an elaborate commerce involving individuals, organisations, auction houses, and the world’s art capitals. Just a month-and-a-half ago, records were smashed as a painting by Jean-Michel Basquiat became the most expensive American artwork ever sold. After what must have been an electric session at Sotheby’s, the painting went to the young, Japanese billionaire Yusaka Maezawa for 110.5 million dollars. Maezawa tweeted a picture of himself looking up at his purchase, visibly satisfied, with the following caption: ‘I am a lucky man.’

These are telling words. They bring back art-buying from a vertiginous game of mega-fortunes and invisible, towering forces to the smallest, gentlest tug that a picture can exert on one’s heartstrings.

Published in Dawn, EOS, July 9th, 2017