Three steps a collector takes when buying art

There are several types of collectors and two fundamentally different practices.

Ovidiu Șandor, art collector and president of the Art Encounters Foundation, revealed in Krakow, after the opening of his exhibition ‘One Eye Laughs, Another Cries’ during the Romania-Poland Cultural Season, what his art-buying practices are.

‘There are collectors who hire art historians or curators to make the selection for that collection, and there are collectors, like myself, who insist that the selection be made personally,’ said Ovidiu Șandor.

He buys art only after talking to art historians, artists, curators, other collectors. He researches and ‘tries to read as much as time allows’.

His acquisition process is not that strict, but follows three steps:

1. Stage one: reaction. “There has to be a first reaction to a work, to an artist. It’s important to feel something. That something can be very intellectual, the concept of the work, it can be something hard to put my finger on.”
2. Second stage: analysis. “I try to read about that artist, I try to understand more, I ask people, I try to understand what the artist’s journey has been up to that point and where in the oeuvre that work is positioned. I ask myself to what extent that work adds something to the collection and whether it makes sense alongside the other works.”
3. Third stage: financial. “You ask yourself to what extent the price you have to pay is reasonable or not, in relation to the artist’s quota, in relation to the financial market context. What every collector is trying to do is that if in 25 years’ time when they decide to part with the work that they don’t lose very much of the money they paid, that’s kind of the thought, not to do something stupid, rather than calculating that this artist is going to grow and make you a profit.”

The exhibition ‘One Eye Laughs, Another Cries’, organised by the ICR and the Ministry of Culture and open until 20 July at the International Centre for Culture, features 170 works by 60 artists from one of the most important private art collections in Central Europe. Visitors can admire works by Constantin Brâncuși, Andrei Cădere, Tristan Tzara, Adrian Ghenie, Geta Brătescu and others.

Photo credit: curatorial