Authors: Dirk Wittenborn,Jazz Johnson
Why did we tell Vicki to specify her $5 million be used to buy a work of art from a famous living artist? Because a dead painter can’t tell everyone what impeccable taste and connoisseurship Vicki has.
Vicki should also know that when she goes to the painter’s studio, the curator in charge of this acquisition will try to get all the credit for her deciding to spend her millions on this artist whom Vicki never heard of before she joined the club. To prevent this from happening, as soon as Vicki shakes hands with the artist, she should announce that she has always dreamed of owning one of his/her paintings. “As soon as I got my $500 million, I told myself I have to have one. But you’re such a fucking genius, it would be selfish of me to hang your painting on my wall; I should put it in a goddamn museum and share it with the whole frickin’ world.”
We know, it sounds corny and vulgar, but Art Whales say
things like that all the time to artists. In part because famous artists love flattery backed by cash so much, they will show their appreciation for the intelligence Vicki showed by calling them a “genius” by giving her a small work on paper with a personal inscription. Congratulations, Vicki, you now have an art collection.
The curator will be pissed off at Vicki for stealing all their glory until she asks them to become her personal art consultant. Chances are, they will tell her they are honored but, because of a conflict of interest, they can’t. The curator will then recommend someone else for the job who will invariably be his/her husband, wife, boyfriend, or girlfriend. An art consultant is generally paid a flat fee, augmented by what Vicki’s dead husband would refer to as kickbacks, or favors,
schmears
that sometimes but not always involve cash. An art consultant is a paid best friend whose job it is to keep you buying museum-quality art and eventually persuade you to donate it to their girlfriend/boyfriend/friend/husband/wife curator at the museum. Because Vicki has read
The Social Climber’s Bible
, she will know they are trying to screw her.
Why do we say that? Because there isn’t enough museum-quality art available to those new to the game to keep you spending. The dealers won’t sell the best paintings/sculpture to you no matter what your art consultant says because they save the best for Whales who are regular customers.
Now that Vicki is a member of the Art Club, the fun and profit for you will come from figuring out a way of screwing more established members out of paintings, sculptures, etc., that
they thought they were in line to buy. This is where art collecting becomes a game.
Though we wouldn’t presume to tell you what kind of art to collect, you will have more fun and be invited to better parties (which is two-thirds of the reason anyone joins the Art Club) if you collect the works of hot artists who are young enough to have sexy friends, yet not so young as to be a risky investment, as opposed to collecting dead Old Masters.
Do not just let your art consultant arrange meetings only with his or her favorite dealers. Insist on being introduced to the directors of every single one of the top galleries. Knowing that you have given MoMA $5 million, the dealers will be very nice to you. You should also know, Vicki, that no matter what your consultant and the dealers say, the “best” paintings by whatever artists you have expressed interest in will not be shown to you when you go to the gallery. Why? Because you are new to the game. And it is in the “interest of the dealer,” i.e., he will make more money, if he sells the best paintings to more established members of the club, due to the fact that being in the collection of an Art Whale with an established, first-rate collection (one that museums covet) will elevate the sticker price of all the other paintings/sculptures by that artist. How do you get around this, Vicki? By using much the same approach your late husband did when he muscled his way into the toxic waste disposal business.
Do not dress up for these initial meetings. The less chic you are, the more seriously you will be taken in the early stages of your Art Club life. (Do not worry, Vicki, very shortly you will have a great many events to buy couturier clothes for.) Look
thoughtfully at the first painting you are shown. No matter how ugly, grotesque, shocking, strange, or beautiful the painting may appear to be, tell the dealer it’s “too decorative.”
Decorative is the worst thing that can be said about a contemporary work of art. While your art consultant and the dealer are trying to figure out if you actually know what you’re saying, announce that you are not interested in “studio sweepings.” Then ask to use the restroom.
While they think you’re in the bathroom, slip into the rooms of picture racks in the back of the gallery. They will be arranged alphabetically. Once you locate the ones that contain canvases by the painter you’re interested in, give a shout out to the art dealer and your art consultant in the same tone of voice your late husband used when dealing with garbage men who tried to skim: “Who the fuck you savin’ these for?” Again, do not worry about seeming crass. Part of what makes the art world so fun is that it
is
so blatantly crass.
The dealer will of course tell you that they are on hold or are already sold. If the market value of each canvas is, let’s say, five hundred thousand dollars, offer to buy three for a million cash, now or never, and the chances are those paintings will magically become unsold and no longer on hold.
You will now be invited to every party, dinner, and opening that dealer throws for the next year. More important, you have established yourself as a savvy connoisseur. When you go to the next gallery, you will be shown better paintings. And you will only have to spend five hundred thousand dollars in total to become that establishment’s new best friend. By the time you drop
into the third gallery on your list, museum-quality paintings by the hot artist that your art consultant told you to be interested in will be pulled out without your having to pretend to go to the bathroom so you can sneak back into the racks.
Spend $20 million on living painters/sculptors at an assortment of galleries over the next three months, go to the art auctions at Sotheby’s, and bid a record price, say, for a Richard Prince painting of a nurse or a Jeff Koons porcelain of Michael Jackson and his monkey, and dealers and museum directors will be fighting over who gets to throw the first party in your honor. Your days will be filled with studio visits. You will now know the thrill of having certified geniuses suck up to you. And you’ll be invited to more celebratory events than you can attend, even if you go out seven nights a week and triple-book. Name any person in the world you’ve always wanted to meet, and a dealer who has something he wants you to buy will arrange it. Sex, drugs, boys, girls, five-course dinners where all the food is blue. You only have to say what you want and there’ll be an art dealer ready, willing, and able to give it to you, Vicki.
Donate another $10 million to the Museum of Modern Art, and you’re on the board of the Museum of Modern Art, ergo, you’re friends with other board members. Which means that in less than six months, you’ve gone from being a suburban housewife in Jersey to becoming pals with the likes of Wallis Annenberg, Sid Bass, Leon Black, Clarissa Bronfman, Glenn Dubin, Marie-Josée Kravis, Philip Niarchos, Michael Ovitz, Ronald Perelman, David Rockefeller, and Alice Tisch. What will you talk about with these fancy people you had absolutely
nothing in common with until you started shopping for art? Art, of course.
People who would have been horrified by your lack of sophistication, taste, and vulgarity less than a year ago will now be inviting you to fly on their private jets to art fairs—Art Basel in Miami, Art Basel in Hong Kong, Art Basel in Basel. Courtesy cars will whisk you round the fair to make sure you get all your shopping done in time to attend even more lavish parties thrown by luxury brands and fashion houses.
For argument’s sake, let’s say Vicki spends $200 million of her $500 million on art in her first two years as a member of the Art Club. She will not have blown $200 million, she will have made a $200 million investment that in all likelihood is now worth $250 million. When you buy a yacht, a plane, or a Ferrari and try to sell it two years later, it’s a secondhand yacht, plane, or Ferrari. Not so with art. Better yet, Vicki’s now $250 million collection, if she so desires, can be traded, transported across international borders, sold for cash, and/or be used for collateral. Since banks are happy to loan money on museum-quality contemporary art—especially if it belongs to a collector who’s on the board of the Museum of Modern Art, i.e., has the influence to make sure the market values of her favorite artists don’t decrease in value—Vicki can leverage her collection and buy even more expensive paintings. Which will be worth even more in another two years because they’ve spent that time hanging on Vicki’s walls.
What someone like our Vicki chooses to do with her collection when she finally shops till she drops is up to her. It is our
hope that she does what a good Whale should do and bequeaths part, or better yet all, of it to a museum so it can be appreciated by small fish and Whales alike. To our way of looking at the world, the Art Club is what social climbing can be at its very best.
EMPOWERING THOUGHT #48
If you are Mountaineer with a highly developed sense of aesthetics, possess a Taste Meister’s personality traits, and would like to have access to all the parties and perks that come with membership in the Art Club but lack the financial wherewithal to join, do not give up hope. The art world is a service industry in which merely rich social climbers cater to the needs of obscenely rich social climbers. Convince your NBF Whale to invest in art instead of boring stocks and bonds, and the art world will love you almost as much as they love your Whale, plus you might just get a commission.
Mountaineering on Horseback
Equine sports—show jumping, three-day eventing, dressage foxhunting, polo, etc.—have always had a special appeal to the advanced social climber. Though it lacks the profit potential that comes with membership in the Art Club, the Horse Club, the
tightly knit world of horse love, with its devotion to aristocratic traditions and dress code—velvet hard hats, britches that disappear into glistening knee-high leather boots, and scarlet tailcoats—offers Whales a chance to look like old-fashioned snobs while indulging in an extravagant pastime that allows them to act like snobs.
Whereas art collecting is not a child-friendly sport, big-time horse love offers elitist fun and outdoor competition for the whole family. It’s a natural for Whales who’ve just bought a starter estate but have not yet been accepted by the local gentry. Fill those barns and paddocks up with the right kind of horses, and their pedigrees will make up for what yours lacks.
If you are a middle-aged Whale who is being given the cold shoulder by the horsey set because your new wife was a pole dancer, corset her in a tweed waistcoat, trick her out in a Bernard Weatherill hacking jacket, put a bowler on her head, mount her on a half-million-dollar Danish Warmblood, and she is no longer an ex exotic dancer, she’s a horsewoman.
The horse world looks ultra-WASPy, but it isn’t anymore. The few remaining WASPs who can afford an equine hobby are too busy torturing guys like Chester who are trying to get into their golf clubs to have any free time to mount up. Being a member of the Horse Club not only gives Whales of all walks of life the feeling they were “to the manor born,” it also allows them to look down their noses at those who actually were born in a manor but had to sell the manor and their horses to pay death taxes.
Some Whales join the Horse Club because they’ve run out of other pricey pastimes to burn money on. For others, it’s the adrenaline rush of galloping recklessly across a meadow, whip in hand, coupled with that old-fashioned “Master of the Universe” thrill that comes when you can dismount and berate a stable boy for not mucking out the stalls. But the vast majority of Whales invest the time and money it takes to join the horse world because their child, usually a daughter—aka the Little Princess—wants a pony of her very own.
Naturally, once Mama and Papa Whale get her the pony, she’ll want to enter horse shows where the other little princesses with ponies win long silky blue ribbons and silver stirrup cups with their names engraved on them. Whales, being competitive, will soon realize that in horse shows where the pony is the one doing the jumping, the princess with the best jumper, i.e., the most expensive pony, almost always wins the blue ribbon.
Because Whales love their daughters and want them to win, they then get the riding teacher to find their seven-year-old princess a pony that is right for her, i.e., a four-hundred-thousand-dollar pony that, nine times out of ten, will beat the other Whale princess ponies whose cheapskate parents were willing to invest only three hundred thousand dollars in pony flesh.
Aside from being an ideal vehicle for Whales to teach their children the true value of money, horse shows are a great way to let their princesses know just how much in dollars and cents their parents love them. In the process, Mom and Dad get to meet and compete with other Whale parents with
horse-loving princesses such as rock legend Bruce Springsteen, famed
SNL
producer Lorne Michaels, and New York City’s billionaire former mayor, Michael Bloomberg. Not bad social climbing, eh?
What really makes the horse show world so appealing to Whales who want to make their daughters happy is that it is less disappointing than teaching them to play a game like golf where buying a princess the most expensive clubs won’t necessarily ensure she’ll be able to put the ball in the hole, much less win.
Of course, your daughter’s horse love will become more costly as she grows up. Because ponies go lame, to keep your daughter in the winner’s circle she’ll need more than one pony. And by the time she’s twelve, a four-hundred-thousand-dollar pony will no longer be able to carry her over the jumps required to get her into the winner’s circle, even if she is anorexic. By the time she’s seventeen, if you love her enough to keep her winning, she’ll need a $5 million herd of horses.