When Art is Conceptual, Displaying it at Home Can Be Tricky

Art can be painting, sculpture, drawing and other related forms — but also, for close to a century now, effectively everything and nothing at once.

Since Marcel Duchamp presented an empty toilet bowl as a "readymade" masterwork in 1917 (see: "Fountain," as important an artwork as the modern era has turned out), the art world has been in the thrall of ideas as much as objects. Those ideas can assume new forms by way of unorthodox materials or, sometimes, without materials at all. In any case, collecting concepts can be complicated.

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"Somebody who buys conceptual art needs to be an intellectual," said Barbara Bertozzi Castelli, director of the Castelli Gallery in New York. "It’s not enough to like it — you need to be somebody who understands what the art is all about and how the market functions."

By market she meant not just the changing vagaries of values and commodity pricing, but the whole idea of a system by which art transforms from something strange conceived in the brain of an artist into something that can be prized and owned.

Some of the foundational artists of the Castelli Gallery, founded by the legendary dealer Leo Castelli in 1957 and integral to the rise of conceptual art in the 1960s and ’70s, worked to do all they could to game the system, or at least ask questions about that system in a manner that could make the questions themselves art

Works by Lawrence Weiner often comprise just one or two sentences with permission to write the words in those sentences wherever and however you like. "He told me that somebody bought a work and wanted it tattooed on his arm," Ms. Berotzzi Castelli said.

Artwork by Fred Sandback, represented by the blue-chip David Zwirner Gallery in New York and London, generally comprises just simple string that is arranged to create the illusion of room-filling masses and planes that count among the most minimalist art possible. The string itself isn’t a major matter, but its color and arrangement is—so much so that, for prospective buyers of Sandback’s art, the gallery sometimes pays a visit to that buyer’s home to figure out how and where certain pieces might work.

Sometimes a home visit is necessary

"Some clients come to us with the aspiration of collecting Sandback and want to know if their home would accommodate a piece," said Kristine Bell, a senior partner at David Zwirner. "At that point, we visit to think outside the more regular and obvious locations where artwork can be installed in a home."

Following the late artist’s lead, they look for idiosyncratic sites — including, for a work recently installed in a home in California, a stairwell that connects three floors and now plays home to a formidable vertical construction in string.

Materials enlisted by artists unencumbered by convention can vary widely. Linda Nieuwenhuizen, a conservator who operates under the name Give Me A Break Art Conservation, proudly lists among her specialties materials ranging "from sugar to shagreen to shale." (Shagreen, for those understandably unfamiliar, is sharkskin.)

Among the services she provides are oft-needed condition reports provided prior to a purchase. "I’ll look at things and do a condition report to tell how it’s made and what its prognosis is for the future," Ms. Nieuwenhuizen said. "Maybe it’s got some crizzling plastic or needs what we call consolidation"— a process that allows for relaxation of structurally stressed assemblages.

Changing the way people think

The sky is the limit for what art can enlist — including, sometimes, the sky itself. In the service of a series of "Skyspace" works created around the world by the famed "light and space" artist James Turrell, a collector in New York gave over an entire room in his apartment to the construction of a mechanically retractable roof over a large opening in the ceiling and a place to sit and peer up from below. The piece, ideally experienced as the sun sets and colors shift from blue to black, turns the sky and the act of looking at it into a transforming work of art. The collector of such a singular holding chooses to remain private but has friends over sometimes to sit and share in the experience. "It changes the way people think about art," he said.