What I Actually Do

The Diary of an Art Advisor

This week I’ve returned to what this newsletter was meant to be about - the Diary of an Art Advisor. When I began writing a couple of years ago, my intention was to explain the benefits of collecting contemporary art to a suspicious public and increase awareness of my role. But the newsletter has become something else - I have written about the lives of artists, the difficulties of sustaining a practice through middle age, the impact of Epstein, and even produced a pseudo government ‘white paper’. Every so often, though, I remember that this was also meant to say something much simpler: you should buy some contemporary art? I can help…

A friend recently asked me what I actually did, and that’s what a diary should answer. “I’m an art advisor” is accurate enough, but it explains very little. It suggests a neat professional life in which collectors ask for paintings and I find them. There is some of that, but it only accounts for a fraction of my day.

If I’m not visiting a studio, my mornings tend to begin around seven. I go downstairs, let the dogs out, make coffee and sometimes breakfast for someone… That sounds as though I regularly wake beside a stranger - I mean my wife or one of my children. If the house is still quiet, I sit at the kitchen table with my laptop and begin with admin. I might answer emails, finish the text for a new exhibition, finesse a PDF for a collector or organise a zoom for later in the day. All fairly mundane.

Quite often, I begin with a firm intention - today I will upload that show to Artsy, and by the evening, the images remain exactly where they were because a dozen other things have competed successfully for my attention: an artist has asked for advice; a collector wants clarification about a work; an NDA needs to be redrafted for the fourth time; I spend an hour on the phone discussing a Richter; then reread the Plaster magazine article I had already finished and make three tiny changes that nobody, including the editor, would ever have noticed. I’ll spend too long changing the photograph on an artist’s biography, correcting the font in a PDF or making sure the images sit exactly as they should. This is particularly ridiculous when I already suspect that the artist will be difficult to sell and the presentation may produce no immediate interest at all, but I can’t bring myself to send it out looking shoddy.

The days are a flurry of competing activities, many of which a more commercially disciplined person might decide not to undertake. At the moment, I am involved in a patronage scheme for which four artists are developing proposals for projects they want to pursue. I am talking to artists whose work I think is intelligent, relevant and worth spending time with, while knowing that some of it will be difficult to sell. I am working with estates, thinking about exhibitions, publishing a book, preparing selections and looking at photographs of paintings that may or may not genuinely be available.

That is one part of the job. The rest is harder to describe. I spend a surprising amount of time advising artists. I talk to artists about prices, galleries, exhibitions, collectors, careers and the work itself. Younger artists, in particular, can arrive with prices that bear little relationship to the stage of their careers or the market for their work. Prices may rise quickly during a fashionable period and become almost impossible to lower afterwards. An artist needs to remain able to sell (when they are no longer fashionable) to the doctor, developer or lawyer who buys only two pieces a year but chooses them thoughtfully. A sustainable artistic career cannot depend on a brief rush of attention and a handful of collectors.

Advising an artist sometimes means saying that I believe in the work but can’t recommend it at the price being asked. It may mean admitting that a brilliant series will be difficult to place because the paintings are enormous, the medium is fragile or the subject is not appropriate for a family space. And good work has often been overlooked because it arrived at the wrong moment, belonged to an unfashionable generation or did not resemble the market’s current idea of what important art should look like. I work with several artists who received considerable attention ten, twenty or thirty years ago and have since slipped partly from view. With them, the conversation is often about recontextualising the work. We can look again, identify what remains powerful, assemble a coherent selection and introduce it to collectors who are not simply trying to buy the person everyone else discovered last Thursday. There is excellent work sitting in studios and stores that has not become less excellent simply because fashion has turned elsewhere.

When I visit a studio, my preference is that they show me everything: the current work, the older work, the things stacked against the wall, the painting they are unsure about and the piece they had not imagined I would want to see. I would much rather make the selection myself than receive six images the artist has chosen as the official version of the practice. I can then put together what I think is the strongest and most coherent presentation for the collectors I work with. Nine times out of ten, the artist appreciates the selection.

When I first visited Marilyn Hallam, I had seen some fairly recent paintings in a group exhibition, but when I was in the studio, it was the work from the 1990s and early 2000s that blew me away. It was the art-world cliché made real: walking into a studio and discovering a lifetime of extraordinary work that had been allowed to recede from view. Those earlier paintings did not look dated or like material requiring a dutiful historical reassessment - they looked vivid, intelligent and entirely present.

With Justin Mortimer, the situation was different. I have known Justin for decades, from the period when his studio was above mine, and I have watched the work move through many stages. When, a couple of years ago, I saw his new works on paper, sketches and collages, they didn’t feel like peripheral studies for the paintings - they felt like the engine room of the practice, where the imagery and anxieties were being taken apart and reassembled. I asked immediately whether I could do something with them, which I am happily doing now – Material Witness.

Selection is not an administrative stage between studio and collector - it is part of the advice. I am choosing what I believe deserves attention, how it should be grouped and the context in which another person might be able to see it properly. This brings me to what I am actually paid for.

I have spent thousands of hours looking at art, studying markets and working with collectors, but the hours that matter more are the ones I spent making art, and the ones I spent teaching on degree courses. That is where I developed an understanding of what it means to make something that is visceral rather than theoretical. When I look at a work, I bring whatever art-historical, conceptual and intellectual knowledge I possess, but I also have an instinctive sense of what it took to produce the thing. I know the time in the studio, the failed passages, the frustration, the false confidence and the point at which an artist may have stopped one decision before the work became mannered. I know the difference between a painting that has genuinely found something and one that competently repeats an earlier discovery. Auction-room knowledge, prices and provenance all have their uses, but they are not the same as having lived through the making of work. Nor is an art-business course a substitute for twenty-five years spent in the studio.

There is an extraordinary amount of poor work in the art world, much of it offered with great conviction by charlatans and people with just enough knowledge to be dangerous. There is also just too much to look at… degree shows, galleries, art fairs, online platforms, auction catalogues and endless emailed PDFs produce an avalanche of work in front of anyone trying to make a sensible choice. A collector can come to me, give me an indication of what they are looking for and I will show them only good things. I will also show them good things they did not know they were looking for. I produce bespoke selections in response to particular tastes or spaces, but I will also send collectors some of what I have been showing more widely. A collector may ask for black-and-white hard-edge abstraction or garden sculpture, and I will respond to that brief, but I will also leave a door open for the work that does not fit the description but might be the thing they remember.

When I could not find an existing garden sculpture that I thought was both strong and affordable, I went to artists and asked them to develop proposals. The job was not simply to locate an outdoor object of the right size, it was to find, or help bring into existence, something I would be happy to see the collector living with.

The best collector relationships are responsive and curious. Someone doesn’t have to buy constantly or decide within an afternoon. One person may buy only one or two works a year but always replies, which I greatly appreciate. Others are actively building and want to consider everything. I particularly enjoy being told that a collector and their partner sat down together, cast the PDF onto the television and discussed each work. That is precisely what I hope will happen. They do not need to agree with me, but they should want to look.

Over time, the pace of buying may slow, but trust grows. Collectors have lived with the work and know whether the advice has held. We have occasionally sold things because circumstances required it, but nobody has yet asked me to sell a work because they stopped liking it. That seems a reasonable measure of success.

Buying in depth also has a direct effect on the artist’s life. Every time I sell a work from a studio, the artist can pay some rent, buy materials or gain another period in which to make art. I have sold ten or twenty works for some artists, and I know that it enabled them to keep their studios. Then you see what follows - they produce the next body of work, secure another exhibition and find gallery representation. A serious collector’s early commitment can alter an artist’s sense of what is possible at a point when confidence is still fragile. I increasingly think that the central purpose of Blackbird Rook is to help good artists keep working.

The estate work belongs to the same kind of activity. It can be labour-intensive and the immediate financial return may be moderate, but that is a bargain I make knowingly and usually with pleasure. You enter a studio or archive containing an entire life’s work and begin trying to understand what is there. There may be paintings, drawings, photographs, exhibition records, rights, old film formats, storage questions and competing family memories. Somewhere inside all of this is the question of how the artist wanted to be understood. The alternative to doing the work properly is that significant art becomes dispersed, mislabelled, simplified or lost.

And the writing… A more efficient Blackbird Rook might look more like an ordinary advisory. It would identify saleable stock, send it to likely buyers and spend less time thinking about everything around it. It might also lose the reason anybody should choose it over an ordinary advisory. The writing presents the clearest version of this tension. It began as a form of marketing and has become one of the most significant parts of my working week, perhaps more significant than it really should be.

I write partly for myself and partly for my colleagues and contemporaries as artists. I justify this by saying that collectors benefit from hearing what artists think about, what they struggle with and what it means to sustain a practice. Understanding art should involve some understanding of the conditions from which it emerges. But I also write because I want collecting to feel less remote. Buying contemporary art is not inherently weird, elite or intellectually forbidding. It should be a normal part of cultural life, just as caring about music or food is. Having music you love is better than owning one of those 40 Moody Love Songs compilation CDs and deciding that the matter has been dealt with - I realise that reference dates me, but the point remains. Britain has a particular discomfort with artiness and intellectual enthusiasm. Reading a broadsheet newspaper can be enough to get somebody called professor. Caring openly about paintings risks appearing ‘poncy’. We are good at making people feel self-conscious about taking culture seriously, but I would like to make the invitation wider. Everyone should engage with art, argue about it, buy it and have an opinion about what belongs in their home.

A more commercially disciplined version of me would probably stop writing these newsletters. He would spend less time thinking about democratising collecting, patronage and cultural policy. He would not propose podcasts, publish books or spend so long preparing beautiful presentations for artists he suspects will be difficult to sell. He would concentrate on the work most likely to produce immediate income. There are days when I think he might get considerably more uploaded to Artsy.

The difficulty is that I know I shouldn’t give up championing artists whose work I think is exceptional, and making the case for paintings that I believe should be on people’s walls… or for artists whose work collectors would love if only they encountered it properly. That is not an act of charity or altruism, it’s the basis of my judgement and the reason the business has the character it does.

At the end of a good working day, I like to have completed something. Finishing a piece of writing I am proud of is satisfying. So is completing a sale, paying the artist their share and making my own bank balance look a little healthier. The two outcomes are not enemies, although I sometimes organise my time as though they were.

So perhaps I should simply say it again. Do you want to buy some contemporary art? I can help.

Rabbit holes

One artist this made me think of: Moyra Davey. Her photographs, films and writing grow from books, domestic objects, correspondence and daily repetition. She folds and posts some photographs before exhibiting them… an artist after my own kitchen table, although she has had the wit to turn the admin into art.

One film - The Price of Everything, Nathaniel Kahn’s 2018 film about artists, collectors and the gap between price and value. The most interesting figure is Larry Poons, who abandoned the work that made him fashionable but kept painting whilst the market looked elsewhere. Fashion eventually turned back towards him.

One exhibition: What Remains of the Day, which placed Marilyn Hallam, born in 1947, in conversation with Ellie MacGarry, born in 1991. Their paintings shared interiors, bodies, fabric and light.

One related Blackbird Rook post: Reassessing Marilyn Hallam: A Hidden Luminary in Contemporary Art. An earlier case for Hallam’s sustained practice and the issue with confusing reduced visibility with reduced achievement.

One available work: Clyde Hopkins, Chaunticlere, 1989, oil on canvas, 183 × 170 cm. A large, striking painting carrying the nervous energy of Thatcher’s Britain. At nearly six feet tall, it is both immersive and performative.

One unexpected tangent:John Peel understood trusted selection. Listeners tuned in because he might play something peculiar or abrasive and make them want to hear it again. A good adviser also risks somebody else’s attention on the thing they did not ask for.

A brief summer offer

This week’s newsletter looks at what I do as an art advisor, and questions the time I spend writing. In order to help justify that time, for the next seven days, I’m offering 20% off an annual paid subscription to Blackbird Rook on Substack.

Paid subscriptions include the monthly Collector’s Note, longer essays and practical guides for artists and collectors, as well as access to the full archive... and they support the time required to research and write the free pieces.

The offer ends at midnight on Sunday 16 August.

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