Contemporary art collectors

Ruthless, greedy, tyrannical, disreputable, they have had one principle worth all the rest, the principle of delight! ~ Kenneth Clark on collectors

Collecting includes seeking, locating, acquiring, organizing, cataloging, displaying, storing, and maintaining items. Therefore a collection is a group of items that have been gathered together. And the person who does the gathering is a collector.

So far, everything is as easy as ABC. But these bare definitions can`t explain why occasionally an owner of a collection worth more than $1 million will not sell it, or anything from it, even if he’s having trouble with living expenses. Nor does it explain why some collectors dedicate all their lives to their collections, and are ready to do almost anything just in order to get hold of a last, desirable piece for their collection? The answer is that for many collectors, collecting is a way of life, almost amounting to a form of belief and vital to their concept of life. Their collection represents their dream. And this feeling is above any price.

Art enriches us emotionally and culturally, it brings to our lives sense, mystery and beauty. So it`s no surprise that art collecting is so popular. Art is a passion for many billionaires, and for them collecting is a favorite pastime, but it is also a valuable investment.

Because of the financial crisis, the art market too fluctuated in terms of stability and value. However 2010 became a starting point of its recovery. As William F. Ruprecht, the president and CEO of Sotheby's, said, "As things get better, people with wealth come back into the art market and it gets better faster than the overall economy. And when things deteriorate, our business deteriorates even faster than the global economy. It's faster on the way up and faster on the way down." And the 14th annual World Wealth Report 2010, prepared by Capgemini and Merrill Lynch, bears out this statement, showing that art became the most popular segment of the passion investments market in 2010.

The list of the ARTnews 200 Top Collectors was prepared by widely read fine arts magazine ARTnews in the summer of 2010, and a list of the top ten international art collectors corresponds in ten places with the Forbes billionaires list.

The list is:

- Roman Abramovich – Modern and Contemporary art
- Hélène and Be
ard A
ault – Contemporary art
- Debra and Leon Black – Old Masters, Impressionism, Modern painting, Chinese sculpture, Contemporary art
- Edythe L. and Eli Broad – Contemporary art
- Alexandra and Steven A. Cohen – Impressionism, Modern and Contemporary art
- Joseph Lau – Modern and Contemporary art (especially works by Andy Warhol) - Philip S. Niarchos – Old Masters, Impressionism, Modern and contemporary art
- François Pinault – Contemporary art
- Emily and Mitchell Rales – Modern and Contemporary art
- Sheikh Abdullah Bin Mohammed Bin Saud Al Thani – Antiquities, Old Masters, Islamic art, Contemporary art

Everybody on this list is an art collector: if you have money and a passion for art you become a person on the list above; if you can`t imagine your life without art, you strive for a place in this list by searching and discovering new artists; if you are an art student you have your favorite art collection in Facebook or LiveJou
al; and even if you think that you have no connection to art, it’s likely that when you simply travel abroad you still bring postcards back from the art museums you visited, to become part of your own small collection of art.