In dialogue with collector Alain Servais and the hope of a more regulated art market

Collector Alain Servais has become somewhat of a public figure for his notable openness and active engagement in the issues of today’s art industry. We visited his project space The Loft in north Brussels in the occasion of the recently concluded art fair week and met with him at his home in south Brussels to ask a few questions about art and politics.

 

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Mr. Servais, you have already discussed in previous interviews about what collecting art means for you, especially in your conversation with Selina Ting dated 2009. It is a very illuminating text on what I would call your content-oriented or critical approach to art. We would like to start from that and ask you if some of your ideas have changed since then.

 

Generally, I don’t think there has been a total turn since that article. Art for me is still a way of living rather than accumulating objects. It was very clear then, it is more now. Art is a dialogue, a discussion about the world, about what’s going on around us. You see, there is a convergence between my profession as an investment banker and collecting art: as it happens with financial success, if you want to build a collection you need to be ahead of your time, to precede evolution. And to do that, you need to embrace diversity of viewpoints and know the broader context. For years I have been looking at art made outside of the western world, art that is less fashionable because is less polluted by money and therefore still stands with a purpose. But I cannot limit myself to that. I love that I can be one of the 70 members of global patrons council of Art Basel, which is probably the most exclusive selected collectors group, while also being interested in the grassroots of the art such as the Brussels emerging art fair, Poppositions.

An aspect that has evolved much since 2009 is sharing, which not only means what I share with the public but also what I share with the artists. For instance, when I acquire large installations, I ask the artists if they are still interested in showing these artworks around and then to collaborate for the logistics and restoration. I generally lend more to museums than I did in 2009, and my project space The Loft has been developed also with the help of curators.

And then there is the research activity about the art industry I pretty much started in 2012, which culminated last year with a publication called Art In The Shadow Of Art Market Industrialisation.

 

Do you regret things you bought in 2009, things you would not buy now?

 

The overall collection is a few hundreds works and honestly I regret only a few. I am careful about what I’m buying, there is always a strong reason why I decide to acquire a piece. I’m not one of those multi billionaires that can buy the entire world, I need to be careful.

 

You were talking about diversity and not limiting ourselves to our comfort zone. And yet, when stepping out of the art world, the impression is that it is generally seen as an elitist bubble by those who are not part of it. Why do you think that is?

 

In a certain way, art is elitist by nature. Even if it is open to everyone, not everyone is interested in it. There are three comments I can make on this unfortunate “elitism”. The first is by remembering the famous pyramid of needs, the one where security, shelter, food are at the bottom (fundamental needs) and art, along with culture in general, stands only at the top after other needs have been fulfilled. Therefore not everyone is interested in art. To be honest, most people prefer to go to the shopping mall when they are not working, and apart from that 5% (my guess) interested in culture, nobody would choose for art even if it was free. Second, there is a class stratification in the level of education which bears heavily on how much people can develop an understanding of culture or not. Third, getting involved in art is like being in the cave of Plato: everybody is sitting at the back of the cave and they are simply watching shadows of the real things. Only the wise will try to stand up, turn around and look at the hole and maybe see the true nature of things. These three elements for me are strong forces towards the elitist nature of art and culture. I would love to see more and more people getting interested, but let us not be naive about this possibility.

At the same time, there is the opposite risk, that of popularising art too much, the very contemporary question about museums going too far into entertainment, a territory which, in case of films for example, often ends up horrifying me. We have to make the effort to broaden the art audience up, but this can’t happen at whatever cost.

 

Do you think events such this year’s Venice Biennale, with its anticipated attention on including the so-called Other, are the right strategy to change the public image of the art world?

 

I can’t really comment on this year’s edition since I haven’t seen it but Biennales are indeed one of the possible tools. To those who say they are corrupted, I say yes of course, pieces are sure bought and sold at Biennales but my point is that even if as institutions they don’t have enough money to get by without trading, they can be a tool to blur the limits of the elite we have been mentioning, they can strongly contribute to the popularisation of quality art.

 

More on the financial side, do you think the art bubble is going to explode?

 

From cars to expensive apartments, from art to jewellery, the market of luxury product is booming and the prices are sky-rocketing. It is important to see this trend within a big scenario and not just from the point of view of the art world. As I wrote in a recent essay: without changes toward self regulation, the art market runs the risk because of its unbridled excess.

We will come back to that topic. For now, we are interested to know your opinion about those that have just recently entered the art business and world.

I think most of them are not making the necessary effort to see art’s cultural potential. Humans need to see everything around them as stable, and these new buyers don’t seem to understand that the art they dislike is the one they should buy. They should get rid of beauty in the sense of acquired aesthetic. They just want nice decoration with a twist that in fact is a twist from past recognised movements. Unfortunately these people have a lot of influence on the whole ecosystem because, after all, we live in a society that is ruled by money and therefore artists end up producing what is in demand. I’ve recently heard a definition for this: “the fair art”, the art that’s made for art fairs.

 

Taking as an example events such as the Extinction Marathon at the Serpentine Galleries in London or the symposium on the Metamodernism at the Stedeliik Museum in Amsterdam, both taking place just a few months ago, the art world doesn’t seem to have forgotten universal or political questions, perhaps another way to refer to that cultural and political value of art you just mentioned. And yet, not many artists, art critics or curators have decided to drop out and become active in a country’s political institution like a parliament or senate. What do you think the reason behind this is?

 

The reason has to do with the political world being a professional world, a world that is totally closed and where everything is about power games and not enough the care of others. As an artist, curator, critic, collector, you cannot enter the political world but what you can and should try is to wake up the people around you.

 

You seem very disillusioned about democratic political institutions.

 

I generally consider myself an optimistic pessimist. I have a disillusioned vision about many things but eventually I am optimist because life seems to always get through in fascinating ways that escape final catastrophes. It seems to run very fast to the edge of collapse and eventually stop just before it. Going back to art, that’s what it should be focusing on: bring more people to like it when it functions as a language that opens the heart to the Other.

 

Whether expressed in your essays or in a post from your active Twitter account, you seem to be pursuing a campaign for a more regulated art market. Can you talk a little bit about that and the possible future of its institutional control?

 

Until the 1990s, the art business was so marginal that looked like a golf club, a bunch of craftsmen acting as if they were simply splitting the bill at the end of the dinner. The situation today is very different. Taking data from auctions of art made by artists born after 1965, we see that from 2001 to 2008 and afterwards up to today, the volume has increased by more than 21 times. Even so, I like to remind people that the art business is still a small one: a rough figure estimates the whole trade in 52 billion USD worldwide right now, not that much when we consider that the pet food industry only in the US totals the same. And yet, the time when people involved in art were simply shaking hands and trusting each other is over. I have studied many lawsuits in the art business worldwide and I can say that the situation right now resembles a jungle where the most powerful can easily win just because of their size. It is time everybody acknowledges the fact that the art business has become an industry and just like all the others before, it should give itself some rules. For example, is it not time we think about a gallery association? An artist trade union? Or standard model contracts between artists and gallerists, even inspired by those used between footballers and football clubs?

 

What about state regulation?

 

That comes after the self-regulation. Like it happens, when industry’s rules are well tried and accepted, they eventually become laws. For the moment, art is such a complex market that no legislator could properly intervene.

 

Do you see this happening in the next 5 years?

 

I’m working on it everyday. But there’s a resistance which is very typical of the art business and world: individuality. No one wants to get together to organise themselves. Everybody in this industry still prefers to call each other friends instead of business partners even when it’s clear that the latter is the case. And I believe the public authorities are still thinking it’s just rich boys stealing from other rich boys. So it is not their priority to intervene.

 

In this rich boy game, what is the position of the artist?

 

Their position is being polluted by this game. Artists cannot live with the current system, squeezed at the base, they are like slaves in some way. They have no choice but accept whatever conditions they are offered.

 

Some of them, at least in Belgium, see public funding as a way to escape from that situation.

 

We mentioned this topic when we talked about Biennale: culture is being privatised, that’s for sure. It is a political choice, I am not entirely happy with it but it is a fact. Can you go against that? No, especially when politicians don’t see any point in culture. Because of this political change, self regulating the art business becomes even more important. Besides, I’ve seen so much abuse of public funding not to feel sceptical about it.

 

You don’t trust artists enough not to abuse this system?

 

I don’t trust humans enough not to abuse any system. So if the question is whether public funding for the arts should be the final solution, I say absolutely not, I believe in a properly self-regulated market economy, regardless of the commodity.

 

You recently re-tweeted an article about the 1031 tax regulation in the US and its improper use in the art business. Doesn’t abusing the system also mean evading taxes?

 

Art is certainly used as a mean to abuse fiscal systems, thanks to imbalances among countries and tax loopholes. Again, this is where regulation comes into play.

May 4, 2015