Art Journal: The Neurotic Collector --- As Spring Auctions Kick Off, Skittish Buyers Play It Safe; Best Bet: Michael Jackson
YOU'VE SEEN the headlines, and they're breathless. An auction of photographs from the Museum of Modern Art raises $4 million in a morning, with 90% of the pictures sold. The "La Favorite" diamond, a 50-carat bauble, brings $3.6 million. On Monday, a Paul Cezanne mountainscape goes on the auction block and could climb, its investors brag, to $80 million. As the economy slows, the art world seems to be in its own shiny bubble, insulated, giggling and still sipping champagne.</br></br>It would be nice it if were true.</br></br>As the huge spring art season kicks off Monday, with a dizzying two weeks of million-dollar auctions and gallery openings in New York City, collectors may indeed be opening their checkbooks wide, particularly for cutting-edge contemporary art, but they're buying scared. What's selling and what's going to sell well are the blue-chip Picasso portraits, the Matisse sure-things, the still-wet, still-cheap new art and, in effect, anything and everything that's been owned by somebody famous or that the Museum of Modern Art has said is all right to buy.</br></br>It's May 2001: Meet the neurotic collector, the still-wealthy buyer of art who'll only do it if his friends, his broker and even art history agree he's doing the right thing. Money is still going into art hand over fist, particularly into contemporary art, but collectors want the Prozacs of paintings: works so good, so rare or so enveloped in deafening buzz that even a $10 million purchase seems "safe."</br></br>Consider Walker Evans. This gifted photographer of the Depression-era South has a cult following, but never had the prices or household-name recognition of Ansel Adams. Then both the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art held shows of his work at the same time. Last week, he was the stellar success of a MoMA sale, with his works selling for as much as $171,750 (even though, as photographs, they weren't one-of-a-kind). How come? A collector couldn't ask for a greater comfort level than to buy works by an artist the two biggest art-world gorillas fought over.