Put Yourself in the Picture

Next time you’re at some bleak outlet mall in Camarillo, about to splurge $200 on a pair of gleaming faux-croc Ferragamo loafers, stop and think to yourself: For this same amount of money--this same substantial yet measly $200--I could own an original work by a contemporary artist of unlimited potential. I could contribute to the culture, impress my boss, annoy my mother and, in the process, finally replace that old yellowed poster of the Van Gogh sunflowers that hangs over the Ikea sofa in the den.

Then get back in your car and head for the art world. But where, exactly, do you go?

Emerging artists and emerging collectors are pulled together at gallery openings--entertaining rituals that take place all over the city and are easy to slip into unnoticed. The art schools here do their own bit nurturing the next artistic generation, showcasing work with student sales where genius is remarkably affordable. There are classes and special museum symposia that are one part information, one part social scene. And there are definite rules to negotiating with dealers.

But first, put your $200 into a CD or money market account, because everyone in the business, from collectors to art dealers, will tell you to start by looking at art for a good six months--some say as long as two years--before you buy so much as an etching.

A good place to start your elementary education is Bergamot Station, the arts complex in Santa Monica where nearly 30 galleries share space with the Santa Monica Museum of Art. Bergamot Station provides an easy point of entry: It attracts a wide cross section of visitors, making for an egalitarian atmosphere, while the quality of the art ranges from cutting-edge to indifferent.

Strolling the station on a Saturday afternoon is a little like visiting an extremely exotic, uncrowded shopping mall. Small groups of people wander about, tourists, locals, artists: a couple of women in sweaters and gold earrings who look like prosperous Brentwood matrons; a guy in a polo shirt with a blond Pamela Anderson clone on his arm; a few conscripts on furlough from the Westside Armani army; some young professionals taking their out-of-town relatives for a spin; a pair of young men who must be artists, with their black T-shirts and paint under their fingernails.

Track 16 is one of the complex’s anchor galleries (think of it as the Gap for art). You can walk into Track 16 without feeling the least bit self-conscious about how un-cool you are, because it is owned by the guy who co-created the ‘80s sitcom “Alf” (you know, the one with the nerdy nuclear family and that alien that looked like a velveteen anteater), Tom Patchett. Patchett, who cut his teeth as a stand-up comedian and writer for Carol Burnett and “The Bob Newhart Show,” has a vast collection of pretty great contemporary art, but he also collects things like lunch boxes and neon signs.

He began collecting in the late 1980s, working with an art consultant at first, then on his own. He found his niche as a collector one day in 1991, when he walked into a gallery and bought Sherrie Levine’s “Fountain (After Marcel Duchamp).” A brass sculpture of a urinal, Levine’s work was a reference to Marcel Duchamp’s “Fountain,” an actual urinal the artist signed and submitted to an exhibition in 1917, a gesture that shook the humorless art world.

Incredibly, Patchett didn’t know a thing about Duchamp when he bought Levine’s sculpture. “I was happy to learn later that I had appreciated it on the level Duchamp intended,” he says wryly. But after that decisive purchase, his seriocomic collection was off and running. He now owns several works by Duchamp himself, including “L.H.O.O.Q.,” a reproduction of Leonardo’s “Mona Lisa” with a mustache and goatee doodled in--definitely not in the $200 range.

In February, Track 16 will resume its series of entertainment events--opening up on a Tuesday or Friday evening with music or performance. And while you’re there, you can dip your toes into some of the other Bergamot galleries, which recently offered everything from cardboard armchairs at the Gallery of Functional Art to 3-D optical-illusion paintings by Patrick Hughes at Flowers West. The latter works are so mind-bending, you’d be ill-advised to try to drive immediately after viewing them, and they could tempt you to liquidate the 401(k) at $25,000 a pop. On the other hand, if you’d like to start your collection off for $150 with a Jacquelyn Tough drawing of a cherub smoking a cigarette and leaning on a giant Prozac capsule, you can do so at Richard Heller Gallery.

This seems so easy. So why don’t we all have art? We should live in a world where the neighborhood manicurist can’t decide whether to give her daughter the Beuys in the foyer or the early Charles Ray for a wedding present. But we don’t. For most of us, the first exposure to art is in a “look but don’t touch” museum--where it seems unapproachable and unattainable.

To get past that feeling, head to the even more casual and friendly Chung King Road in Chinatown, a paper-lanterned walk street lined with galleries, many of which have retained the names of their original storefronts (“Black Dragon Society” and “China Art Objects” among them).

“Things are very affordable right now,” says Michael Queenland, a UCLA graduate student who happens to be minding the store at the Lord Mori Gallery on a Thursday afternoon. Queenland bucks the artist stereotype: He isn’t wearing a single item of black clothing but is dressed down in what might be called nerd chic. “Art in L.A. is totally accessible, especially when compared to New York,” he says. “For the past 10 years, this has been the prime city. There are four major art schools here, and people come from all over the world to study and teach.”

The galleries in Chinatown are mostly artist-owned and often show student work. At the moment, Lord Mori is featuring work by seven artists from New Zealand, a good number of which would be easy to love, including primitive paintings by Saskia Leek in which birds have musical notes coming out of their mouths and skinny Santas fly over picket fences.

Queenland, who graduates in May, just made his first purchase, a drawing from an upcoming show by Thaddeus Strode. “It’s really exciting to come home with a piece of art,” he says. “I had a roommate at UCLA who started collecting. He didn’t have a lot of money, but he would save up, and he was buying good stuff, drawings by Ray Pettibon for $1,200. And he was just an art student.”

In Chinatown, it’s easy to feel as if anyone could buy art. After all, teenage boys spend more on car stereos and CDs than you’d need to spend here to begin a really interesting art collection. And your $200 or $600 or $800 would be a real boon to any of the young artists showing at Lord Mori.

As a beginning collector, it’s worth remembering that your counterparts--the beginning artists--usually have day jobs and are poor, and your cash makes a huge difference in their lives. Not only can they now go out and buy a pair of Ferragamo loafers (or pay the light bill), those artists now have the ability to say, “Oh yes, I’ve sold my work.” And when those fledgling artists are a bit further along and start to be asked whose collections their work is in, your name will come dancing off their tongues (even if it’s just to pad an as-yet thin list), and their listeners will feel cowed by the fact that you’re obviously a prescient, adventurous collector and they’ve never even heard of you. This is cultural symbiosis at its best--you’ve made your proteges “real” artists; they’ve made you a “real” collector.

Once you’ve had a good look around and can tell your gouache from your tempera, you can best deepen your knowledge and widen your circle of acquaintance by joining an art council or signing up for the collecting seminars that are sometimes offered in conjunction with major exhibits.

At PhotoLA2002, a popular show organized by Stephen Cohen of the Stephen Cohen Gallery, dealers from all over the world filled the Santa Monica Civic Center during a recent weekend in January. The event began with a gala benefit for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art hosted by Ben Stiller, and throughout the show several curators offered private lecture tours before it opened to the public each day.

On one such tour, LACMA’s associate curator for photography, Tim B. Wride, led a gaggle of 20-odd collectors through a maze of booths, offering quips and commentary. “I know someone who only collects pictures of dogs!” Wride says. “Then on the other hand, I know a very serious collector who has a sub-collection of pictures, all of the Brooklyn Bridge, and it’s amazing what that focus brings out in the works.”

Wride stops in front of a grouping of very small photographs by young artist Deborah Luster, who produces tintypes of prisoners, eerily modern little portraits contained in artifacts from a past century. He talked about the decisions one makes to collect work like this. “Do you buy one? If you do, it’s a portrait. If you buy two, it invites comparison between the two--you have to be careful. But then if you buy three, it’s suddenly a conversation.”

After the lecture, collector Bill Butler, who drove in from the desert to attend the show and Wride’s seminar, is approached by a woman in a cape, who asks if she can show him her portfolio sometime. Butler is a trim, sculpted man who manages to make jeans and a work shirt with the sleeves cut off look crisp and elegant. “Once word gets around that you’re a collector,” he says, “you can’t help but meet a lot of artists.” Butler asked a lot of questions of Wride during the seminar, and after careful deliberation bought a pair of the Lusters at $450 each, along with a couple of other works. “My one bit of advice: Never buy anything at an opening, when there’s wine being served,” he says with a wink and a grimace.

Wride recommends that aspiring collectors consider the art council route; these generally are museum-sponsored groups combining fund-raising and volunteerism with education and socializing. LACMA has 12 councils, each tied to a particular genre, such as photography, prints and ancient art. Like Butler, Wride urges caution when it comes to buying a work of art in the heat of passion. “It may be that affair that’s too hot not to cool down,” he says. Then he immediately confesses that he’s done just that.

As a curator, Wride is responsible for collecting photographic work of major historical significance for LACMA, but he is also a collector in his personal life. “I collect drawings--not photography, as it would be a clear conflict of interest.” And though he’s an art world insider, his personal collecting budget allows for no more than $400 per work.

The next step is to start talking to art dealers, “the most underused resource out there,” says Dean Valentine, the former president of UPN (he now describes himself as a “boulevardier”), whose collection is big enough to require a warehouse. “There isn’t a lot of money in contemporary art. If [art dealers] wanted to make money they’d be stockbrokers. They do it because they love it.”

And they want to talk about it, with anyone who cares to listen. “I’d walk into a gallery and ask, ‘Why would I buy this wretched piece of string that’s glued to the wall?’” Valentine says. “And they’d explain it. Even if you don’t buy anything. This was my experience before I became a collector, before anyone knew who I was.”

Valentine began collecting in 1994, focusing on contemporary art because it was what he could afford and, luckily, what he liked. And he vows that learning to appreciate contemporary art is not as difficult as it may appear. “There are people you think are jerks the first time you meet them, and then later you get to like them,” Valentine says. “It’s the same with art.” As for the stereotype of galleries guarded by sallow, beady-eyed wraiths with long noses the-better-to-look-down-upon-you-with, Valentine shrugs. “The obnoxious ones are almost always just some employee who feels empowered by sitting behind some miserable desk. If they’re rude, walk out.”

Once you’ve found a dealer, there are the nuts and bolts of the actual transaction. For starters, the price on the art is the real price--there’s no dickering to speak of. Galleries take an average 40% to 50% commission on artwork they represent, but despite what may appear to be a high margin, there is very little wiggle room until you get to the “blue-chip” level, are buying a number of pieces at once or unless the dealer has worked with you a long time and expects a lot of your future business.

What’s more, you do not have to buy the art from the dealer who is showing it. This is the reason it’s called an art “gallery” and not an art “store.” Dealers love to develop long-term relationships with collectors, and this means that they will cooperate with one another, split commissions and go out of their way to obtain any work that one of their clients fancies. “Let’s say that while on a business trip to New York or Philadelphia, you see a work you want to buy; you can come home to L.A. and ask your local dealer to get it for you,” says gallery owner Cohen. Your dealer will appreciate that you included him or her in the equation, appreciation expressed when the dealer sets aside particular works you might like or offers you a first view.

There are many fringe benefits to cultivating friendships with artists and dealers, aside from the simple pleasure of their company. Once you’re in, you may be invited to an artist’s studio open house, events that take place all the time and are publicized entirely by word of mouth--or, as is more frequently the case, by much-forwarded e-mail.

E-mail is the only way you would have found out about a recent studio show by Anne Militello, a preview of her installation show “Radiate Not Fade Away,” currently running in New York. Militello is an architectural lighting designer, responsible for Disneyland’s Toon Town, the stylishly minimalist Avalon Hotel in Beverly Hills and the much-touted New 42nd Street Studio Building in New York’s Times Square, the entire face of which is an ever-changing light show. But she’s best known for lighting Sam Shepard’s plays and concerts for Tom Waits, Lou Reed and Pearl Jam.

The show is in her studio space, a converted warehouse wedged between Stadium Way and the Los Angeles River. The studio is reached by passing through the living quarters of the loft’s primary tenant, restaurateur Michael Leko, proprietor of Eat Well and the Silver Lake scene-of-the-moment, the 4100 Bar on Sunset. From 6 to 8 p.m., guests come and go, wearing whatever they wore to work and pouring themselves wine or soda from the modest Trader Joe’s spread. Militello, in glitter-flecked hip-huggers and stiletto boots, tends to the sound system, playing ambient music by Bill Lazwell. The room is dark as a disco, because Militello’s “light paintings” are fluid, softly evolving projections of colored light on a blank wall.

The guests are a diverse lot of Silver Lake rock musicians, artists, writers, editors and design professionals: Militello’s friends and friends of friends of Militello, including Roger Trilling, a political journalist who used to be the West Coast editor of Details; Ray Lopez, the art editor for the Mary Kate & Ashley Olsen magazine; and Hank Koening and Julie Eizenberg, the L.A.-based architects behind the renovation of the Avalon.

You probably won’t buy one of Militello’s works, which run to the tens of thousands of dollars (the industrial lighting equipment involved is pricey), but you might end up getting invited to have a private look at work by John Williams, Militello’s ex-husband, whose innovative paintings sometimes wrap around corners and doorways (he has described them as “viral”). And Williams’ work might lead you to discover his friend Anthony Ausgang, who layers cartoon-like images onto “found” thrift store paintings. Both Williams and Ausgang show in major galleries, but it’s a gratifying adventure to seek out artists like these on the private circuit, especially when you find that they are approachable and friendly.

Of course, there are as many ways to start an art collection as there are collectors. Screenwriter Laurie Frank has taken an entrepreneurial approach to building a collection by mounting shows herself. “My writing partner, Floyd Byars, bought a still photograph by a cinematographer at his kid’s school fund-raising auction, and it started from there.” Frank and Byars organized a show. Since then, Frank’s Mediarare Gallery has put up more than 30 exhibits, most of which have roots in what she calls “the extended Hollywood community.” The show she has running currently at Miau Haus in Hollywood includes work by directors, cinematographers, even actor Yul Brynner. “I’ve collected everyone I’ve shown,” she says.

For Valentine, art collecting isn’t simply a way of looking at art, it’s a way of thinking. “That’s when it really gets exciting,” he says.

This is why it pays to take time, learn everything you can--and then go with your gut. “Buy what you love,” virtually all experienced collectors say, and “Trust your instincts.” The worst mistake Valentine sees young collectors make is succumbing to brand consciousness. “I see people buying 10th-rate art by big names, and the work is worthless the minute it walks out of the gallery. Better to buy something you love from an unknown.”

One of the better places to seek out your first work of art is at the senior shows held at the top-notch art schools scattered around L.A.: Otis College of Art and Design, Art Center College of Design, UCLA and CalArts. “I’ve bought a lot of art at these shows,” Valentine says. “The art stars of tomorrow are in those graduate shows.”

In the end, taste really does matter more than money. Even the Broad collection of late 20th century art, recently exhibited at LACMA, drew mixed responses from viewers. Even though Edythe and Eli Broad are the most magnanimous art patrons in town, some thought the collection lacked vision, or had great names but not great works. This isn’t to say that the Broad collection isn’t wonderful, just that it’s all a matter of preference. And isn’t it heartening to know that someone might find your collection, however modest and obscure, to be a more satisfying oeuvre than that of the richest couple in L.A.?

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Hillary Johnson is a Los Angeles-based freelance writer.