Too Tacky! What Is the Fine Art World Coming To?

From Art Today: “Kim Kardashian and Tom Brady competed over an original George Condo drawing at a charity art auction in Atlantic City. The reality star kicked off the bidding for “Standing Female Figure” (2023) at $500,000. The former NFL star ended up outbidding Kardashian with an offer of $2 million. However, the American artist agreed to make a matching $2 million work for the loser.”

What’s wrong with this? Two things.

Celebrity art auctions are tacky. I can count the number of celebrities that know anything about museum-quality art on one hand. And Kim Kardashian and Tom Brady aren’t two of them. They attend these events for PR purposes. Their publicity agents tell them it will make them look sophisticated. Instead, it makes them look foolish.

In this case, they are bidding on what to me is a very sketchy (pun intended) George Condo piece that might be worth $50,000 to $80,000. On a good George Condo day. But they bid the work up to $2 million, which distorts the market and has all the serious art buyers in the room shaking their heads.

So, who are the celebrities today that have props as serious collections?

At the top of my list is Elton John, who has focused on photography and has a collection that includes Cindy Sherman, Nan Goldin, Robert Mapplethorpe, Minor White, Irving Penn, Man Ray, and George Platt Lynes.

Next, I would nominate Cheech Marin, who almost certainly has the finest private collection of contemporary Chicano art in the world.

Madonna is next on my list, for no other reason than she was an early collector of Frida Kahlo. Also in her collection are works by Frida’s husband, the great Diego Rivera, as well as Picasso, Fernand Leger, and Man Ray

Barbra Streisand. Over the years, she has smartly restricted most of her buying to 18th and 19th century American furniture and folk art, of which she has, I’ve read, a very impressive collection.

Honorable Mentions 

Steve Martin, who has an esoteric collection of relatively unknown but respected artists. He gets on the list for having been a trustee of LACMA from 1984 to 2002, for giving $1 million to the Huntington Library to benefit its American art collection, and for writing Picasso at the Lapin Agile, about a meeting between Picasso and Einstein in a bar.

Ellen DeGeneres and Portia de Rossi for their collection of works by Giacometti, Mark Grotjahn, Ed Ruscha, and Andy Warhol.

Oprah Winfrey. I don’t know anything about her collection except that she has significant pieces by Gaston Lachaise and a Harry Rosalind. But she has proved herself as an art dealer, having made a $62 million profit when, in 2016, she sold a full-length Gustav Klimt portrait for $150 million.