Building an art collection is a long-term commitment, a complex and ever-evolving relationship between objects and owner. As with any good romance, sometimes you need a little outside help. Long Island City-based sokoloff + associates’ Ana Sokoloff, and her colleague Laura González, say that amassing an art collection, and working with an art advisory company, is much more about the journey than the end goal.
Mansion Global: What does an art adviser do for a client?
Ana Sokoloff: Art advisers fill a collection — that would be the most basic definition of what we do. We build a collection according to whatever mandate that we get from the client.
Those mandates can be wildly different — it has to do with budgetary questions obviously, and it has to do with space issues. It has to do with the purpose for them to want to collect, what are their own personal interests and general culture, aesthetic tastes, backgrounds. It is always varied.
MG: How do you help a new collector begin the process?
AS: We ask lots of questions, and there's a lot of back and forth. There are very important conversations that both the adviser and the client should have on remuneration for their services, and how much the client is willing to spend. There needs to be a full understanding of what the scope of the responsibilities are going to be on both sides.
Laura González: Clear expectations.
AS: At the beginning we accompany clients to fairs and galleries because we believe that a lot of the learning experience comes from that dialogue.
LG: And you also need editing. There’s so much to look at, and it's not possible to navigate all of it on your own.
AS: We carefully edit what we think they should be exposed to. Of course, editing is not just sending them to particular museum shows or to fairs or art events, but giving them good information on artists or movements, also music… a little bit of everything.
MG: You're really educating your clients along the way.
LG: It’s impossible to develop a collection otherwise, really.
AS: One of the challenges is being able to build a collection with a common thread, one that has a strong story to tell, and actually reflects the character of the owner or of the people who are living with it.
And we believe that collections, like everything else, should be alive. There's always room for improvement and change, especially as people's tastes and interests change over time.
Some people might start in something that is extraordinarily abstract, and then one way or another start getting into some sort of figuration. I think that more than taste, what they have to have is true interest.