Episode 026: Alain Servais

Show Notes

This week on the show we are diving back into exploring what it looks like to collect time-based media art outside of institutions, by chatting with another collector who has developed a real passionate focus on time-based media art. Alain Servais has been collecting digital art for many many years, and not only lives among the work in his home in Brussels, but also operates a loft space specifically dedicated to sharing the collection with the public and serving as an experimental space for guest curators to continually reinvent how Alain’s collection is seen. Just a heads up – this week’s show contains some spicy language!

Links from the conversation with Alain
> Alain on Twitter: https://twitter.com/aservais1

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Transcript

[00:00:00] Ben: From Small Data Industries, this is Art and Obsolescence. I'm your host, Ben Fino-Radin and on this show, I chat with people that are shaping the past present and future of art and technology. 

Welcome back friends this week on the show, we're delving back into exploring what it looks like to collect time-based media art outside of institutions, by chatting with another collector who has developed a real passionate focus on digital art. 

[00:00:28] Alain: Hi my name is Alain Servais I'm investment banker by training and I'm happy to have changed my life through art. 

[00:00:36] Ben: I am so excited to share my chat with Alain with all of you. Despite having known him for many years now and having had the absolute treat of visiting his collection in Brussels, in our conversation I learned so many new things about his life long love affair with art, and really what makes him take as a collector. 

Now I know you're probably tired of me asking for donations, so I promise I'm going to stop asking you for a little while, but this is the last and final week that your donations will be matched 100% by the Bates-Gosset family fund. We provide each and every artist that comes on the show with a $1,000 speaking fee. So when I say that supporting artists is a major part of my mission in doing this show I want you to know that I really mean it. Thank you so much to all of you that have already contributed. It really means the world to me and a special thank you this week to Joseph at for your donation last week, You can join your fellow listeners and supporting the show by heading on over to artandobsolescence.com/donate and making your tax deductible donation through the New York Foundation for the Arts. No donation is too small, everything helps, thank you for any help you can provide. If you're not in a place to donate, you can share the show with a friend post it on social media, share in your group, chat, whatever floats your boat. 

Now without further delay, let's dive into this week's conversation with Alain Servais. 

[00:01:57] Alain: I believe very much in, um, life of a series of accidents. The success of the failure of life it's about how you react to those accidents of life. So for me, art was an accident waiting to happen in some way. There's no artistry or any form of art in my curriculum. There's no art in my family at all. A lot of experts you're talking to, they are born in arts born and raised in art and they never heard or felt anything else. So me, it was not the case. There was never an interest in arts before me in the family. So how did it happen? Why was I attracted to visit museums like the MoMA when I was in New York for business when I was 16 years old? I started my career at Drexel Burnham Lambert in, um, Wall Street and in my spare time I was happy to go to museum. When I was entering a museum, I felt serene. It took me time to understand what was giving me serenity in going to museums. I realized that it was the facts of listening to other people's stories. And I realized that it's helped me very much in other ways, because for example, when I cannot sleep, funnily enough I turn on the radio and when I hear anything happening, whether Ukraine or Biden or whatever, it gets me asleep because it takes my personal worries away in some way. So I realized that yes, opening up myself to other people's stories was helping me. 

I cannot say that I knew the the art scene at the time. I was just hanging around the East Village where I was living. I was living in third street between first and second avenue at the time. I was fully committed to my job and I was absolutely not having much time. It happened a little bit later around probably 95, 96 that first of all, I had some money to spend, but also a little bit more time in my career having achieved some goals and some position of responsibility. That I had a little bit more time, then a second accident arrive. I love accidents because it gives turn to your life and the way you handle them can bring good things are bad things, depression or whatever, worse if you don't take them well. So second accident was meeting an old friend that I was playing tennis with as a kid. And he had the little gallery in Conoco, which is the seaside, the Hamptons of of Belgium. And because he, had a hernia was supposed to be a professional tennis player so I had to stop his career and find something else in his life. Totally change of life. And his mother uh, involved in art, found him a little space and then found him a job in New York. And this place was called Gagosian. At the totally other time, there was only one location on Madison. What is very important for me that through this friendship and the fact that I was visiting New York very much, I went to the very original path of entering the art world through the back door, straight to the top. And I was hanging around all the guys at Gagosian and learning what happens. I had lunch every time I was in New York with Michel Cohen one of the big fraudsters, of the 1990, as well, but also all the guys, the art world was much tighter. Philippe Segalot was close by Amy Cappellazzo, Dominique Lévy, Tony Shafrazi, Stellan Holm, and of course, Larry Gagosian, and starting up David Zwirner and Anton Kern. But at the time I was not collecting. So it was not the way it happens now that you become someone in the art world because you are spending dollars. It was more about, meeting people, discussing, nobody cared about the art world that's also a big difference from today. Nobody really cared. Nobody spoke about, vast sums of money and everybody was trying to enjoy a passion in a way that was sustainable in many ways. And so I started collecting more like 96, 97, which means that I knew already how the things work.

Some key lessons, for example key lessons was to buy an artist rather than a work of art. And when you like an artist is to go for the stronger work and the best work you can afford from them, rather than trying to cut something that would fit your wall in some way or, the social environment to which you living. The first works I bought were by Andres Serrano from the History of Sex and Nan Goldin. What is important to note as that is what a little bit like a red thread will be of the collection is that I saw both of them in museums first. I cried when I was watching the Ballad of Sexual Dependency of Nan Goldin at the Whitney Museum at the time on Madison. And Andres Serrano is the same. I saw his work in different museum shows. With photography I could actually acquire work. I saw museums. They were an edition I didn't mind edition that's also something very important in the rest of my collecting path. Is that I don't mind. That's 5, 6, 10 people have the same. And also it's something totally superficial in some way, because you know, it's funny to see some subject of Magritte, did something like 10 version of that door in the night because everybody wanted the same. So this idea of originality never made it for me from that point of view, but the museum was the benchmark. So I studied collecting because I found extraordinary to be able to replicate at home some elements of the museum. And this is really where it started.

It was still the infancy of photography as an art medium, what I would call contemporary photography. And of course, you know, the prices of arts had nothing to do with what, considering yes, you could afford it with one month salary or something like this equivalent or one or two months salary you could afford some of those works they were not the most important, artists, but they had definitely museum shows under their belt already. In terms of evolution of the art market, I make very much kind of parallel with the luxury good industry. In the 1980s Hermes and Gucci and Prada where craft men doing very beautiful objects and very beautifully designed things, but nobody. Cared so much about what it was and as a social status very much. So the prices were very affordable. There was a premium against the general retailing, but not very much. And it's only later when some people realize the potential and those people are, for example, Mr. Pinault and Mr. Arnault they realized the power of building on those brands. And this is what changed is the branding of things. And so it was the same, a little bit with art at the time. Nobody really knew, and nobody thought about reselling. There was no reselling I really attended around the year 99. When Philippe Ségalot was the first to introduce really contemporary art or it is called now ultra contemporary with less than 10 years old at Christies. It didn't exist before, and it was important to adapt because of course, you know, I've seen quite a lot of people it's still today of that generation that are giving up because they don't want to go in the kind of capitalist that is jungle, that we are hanging around at the moment. So you need to adapt and that's what it is about collecting as well as you need to adapt yourself to the changing world around you.

My involvement with art was a life experience. Since then I sometimes had some people standing in front of me and telling me said, yeah, you don't know me, I want me to become a collector and people told me that you are the one to talk to to help me get into process. And it's very strange because I don't feel that I, I followed uh, any training to become a collector. I believe that, you know, it's about a lot of life experiences. My line of business, it's a rat race, from school university and jobs in wall street and the rest it's about, what can you get that your neighbor will not have and puts you in better position and so on, that's the way society drives us to go and art is an alternative is saying, hmm look at who you are and what you're becoming. Is it what you want to be really? Those experiences are important, one of them and it's so it's always following, meeting that friends in New York and following the path and then enjoying to, to speak to mentors. 

So I was enjoying at the time to visit more senior collections and collectors and listen to them. And it was therefore very natural that at the moment that you had a few works that were reasonably interesting to give back the courtesy and so when people were visiting Brussels, I was happy to open them my house. But then I realized something when I was visiting people abroad in other cities or in Brussels, and what struck me is that some people were having the same setup of their collection every time I was visiting after year 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and then I realize the impact that it was fossilizing the art In some way it was becoming furniture, a part of the wall. And in fact, you were not looking at it anymore. So I said, Hmm that's interesting. My philosophy of life is thinking that human is a strange animal that always wants to stay at the same place, but life is always pushing him or her or they to move to another place. So life is movements and humans are only feeling comfortable in staying at the same place. So it was not easy process, but I said, okay, let's change. Let's move things around at home and then it creates something else. Exchanging your interior completely, you still learn about the impact of art because you think it's objects, but it's not object. It is stories and friends that you are bringing in and at some times that were not there before. Also you realize that art works are in some ways a word, but this word can have different meaning depending on the context, meaning that the same work shown in a different context, a different place in the house had a different meaning.

 So it taught me this process that art in fact is alive and that's was a very important teaching for me at the time, then I realized that there was one thing I didn't like so much is to make that selection myself. So very early on I introduced professionals because it's also, my way of living very much is, you know, I'm not so much do it myself. I just trust and I'm very happy to work with good professionals. That's the same in finance as in my daily life. So I brought in curators and asked them, okay, do you want to do this? And I was paying them to do the rehanging and I was really in the same way I do my businesses, I was giving full independence and freedom, meaning that I was giving them the collection and they could rehang whatever they wanted. That was an interesting process again, because funnily enough, it was giving me a an expected satisfaction. It was giving me the collection a second time because by that selection that, that would not have thought about suddenly I was getting back works that I forgot or didn't expect to work so well in such environment and so on. So those people were, I was thinking them very much because they were giving me my collection a second time. Then I moved from this lofts to another house with a garden. Because the loft is kind of a former factory within the city. And then at the moment then I said, okay, let's keep the loft for showing the collection to the public and make it a little bit more professional in some way.

We started doing the loft and rehanging systematically every year with a different theme, but also an outside curator doing research on the collection and choosing, and then again it was bringing me unexpected return in the sense that someone was in fact validating the collection after it happened, meaning that, if a professional curator can do something meaningful with this collection, it's a good sign because, it showed that there is the aspect they were underlining that I was not even aware of. As you notice, since the beginning it's about learning and that's why I keep insisting that art was not about object for me. It's about a way of living. It even had impact on my way of doing business. As I said earlier we are trained to stay. On the line and not to go over the red line and if possible, to hold the handrail to make sure you don't fall. And art is the way I conceive it, and that's unfortunately not the case in 90% of the art that is now produced today in 2022, but what I consider art was still driving me away of this red line, this handrail and was really pushing me to question things. And that's interesting because when you get used of walking without the handrail, suddenly your flexibility and your possibilities are widened in a big way. And in business is very important, you know, in finance, if you follow the line, uh, you are always too late and you making massive mistakes. If you dare once in a while and you start trusting your hints based on hard work and hard research, but you get used to trust your hunches, then suddenly it's opening a wide range of possibility that are really very exciting.

[00:16:07] Ben: So in Silicon Valley, they go out and take hallucinogenics in the desert, and for you, it's art that inspires your creative thinking. That's beautiful. I'm curious, you know, since you have two spaces, you have, your home and then your former home, your loft that you've dedicated to showing your collection. How do you decide what goes, where, I mean, I understand that what is in the loft is decided by curators, but I would assume that you're getting to choose what art you're living with in the home day to day? 

[00:16:33] Alain: It's the same principle. There's a turnover. That means that we are changing what is home, which means no work is ever acquired to be at this place on this wall ever. It's always about the importance of the work and the necessity to preserve the works for the next generation, because that's in fact, the question I'm asking myself before acquiring a work is again based on the museum and my experience in museums is do I stand a chance that someone, we want to look at this in 30 years, for example fell in love with that Gretchen bender exhibition at that space in Chelsea, everybody forgot that woman in some way and suddenly, yeah. And I was so happy two weeks ago to be at the MoMA to see that piece I saw there at the MoMA. in fact, in the contemporary art hanging of the MoMA, which has been incredibly renewed to find a lot of works that I have in the collection, a lot of names that I have in the collection. My benchmark is still the museum.

Today you have collectors that open a space before having a collection. I must admit some museums 10 years ago were asking me, how can we show you collection in the museum? And I said, no. I said, no, because I considered it was not mature enough. And I found that it was prepotente of me of going to a museum, putting my name on top of the thing, then say, come and see the collection of Alain Servais. No. It doesn't mean that I'm not lending to museum for sure. We always have lent to any museum exhibition or institution exhibition we could, but it was a totally different story to push myself as having let's say a mature or a finished collection in some way. It's another story to have people saying, Hey, man, I want to visit your home and your collection and say okay. I'm not so sure it's so good, but you know, come by if you want, and tell me what you think about it. 

The way it's happens is that when you enter you're gonna hear stories. It's not that you're going to see brand names, of course there will be big names. I don't know, there will be a Danh Vo Vo or there would be, uh, Frank Stella or Barbara Kruger or Jenny Holzer, Robert Rauschenberg. So there will be some big names, but it's not that what is important is every one of them, there will be also extremely young artists. Artists that maybe it's the first work that ever sold and there will be along established artist. It's always a challenge to try to have a young artists being able to hold his own in front of those masters. And that's what is interesting. So you're going to have stories. You're going to have contrast between names that you know, and names that you don't know. Because I consider that the important role of collectors is to preserve the works before the museum wake up. Because I remember I was in New York for so 15 years ago on the upper west side, visiting an amazing collection with I don't know, ceramics of Jeff Koons with the chimpanzee and Michael Jackson and all the kind of masterpieces around. And I was just coming out of the Guggenheim and MoMA and I said, wow, how lucky you are in New York to have all those amazing museums, the best in the world. And the guy answered me saying that's for sure not. I'm sure I agree with you because in fact, the only thing those guys do is wait for guys like me to die. And really, it sounded a bit arrogant, but in fact, I thought about it and it's not far from the truth. A lot of people are today, they don't have very high regard for the private collectors in many ways. I must admit that for many today because I don't call them even collectors, I call them art buyers, but maybe it's true. But if you look at art history I mean, where's the MoMA coming from? It started from some private collection, the Guggenheim, the same, it grew up around a private collection that were integrated to the museum collection. I think the role of private collectors to still support young creation. Even if today, again, many people are focusing more on the investment things and buying brand names and big names, supposedly have an investment value, but I don't agree with that. It's my role to support young artists and they are very tightly integrated in the loft and in the collection in general.

Very often when I do tours myself because we have curators and people doing tours when I'm not around I start always with asking a question to my visitors because that's, I think very important is art is not passive. Again, it's not about you know, following the lines and listening to someone who supposedly knows better than you, it's about making you think. So the first question I'm asking my audience always when I do tours is can you give me your definition of what art is? Because depending on it you will see something that you're gonna like, or maybe something you will not like, because one thing you will not find here is I would say comfort. You will be disturbed here. If art is about accepting to be disturbed by taking the point of view of someone that is different from you, then you're going to feel comfortable here. If not, if you want to see let's call it abstract zombie formalism. No, you will not find any of them here.

[00:21:54] Ben: So, you know, you mentioned Nan Goldin and Serrano. What was the first piece of time-based media you collected that was video or film or software. 

[00:22:07] Alain: I was involved very early on in digital arts. I think I can even say that I was really one of the very, very first one. It was around 99, 2000. I think that one of the first work we can associate to this were the McCoy Kevin and Jennifer, I acquired this work, which I was very happy to see many years later at the Met. It was that thing about Starsky and Hutch. So I think we could associate that is one of the first works. The second work was probably and again I haven't checked any notes, so it's just from the top of my head. It was Christophe Bruno, a work, which was purely online which was in fact hacking of the last 10 searches on Yahoo at the time. Because Google didn't exist and then it has been transferred to Google in different countries and it was of course live-changing and it was also a work there. Another work, which I think was very early on, probably the same period was a work bought by Mark Napier a wonderful work about the three holy books the Bible, the Torah, the Quran, and that were read by a software and producing a visual effect, but was also non-recurring. And also very early on what Siebren Versteeg that early work, where he was using a Coca-Cola can to just print the news. It was the beginning of CNN at the time, and it was the way news were becoming kind of consumption in some way. And he was using the current news again, it was linked directly to internet but it was as if it was written in the topography of Coca-Cola on the turning can of Coke. So, yeah, it was early on 2000, 2002 from that time and for me, it was very obvious in many ways, because again, coming from an analytical background of investment banking and looking at arts and art history, because it's my automatic DNA to try to find threads in supposedly random data. That's how I make money in some way. So approaching art history I said, okay, what's happening here? And then I understood art history a little bit better. I looked at the impressionist I understood that the impressionist were not just the guy waking up one day and saying hmm I got to paint what I feel like today. Oh, this sun rise is amazing. So I'm going to paint Soleil Levant by Monet , No, I don't believe it. I think it was linked to industrial revolution that turned society upside down that transferred power and wealth from the nobility and the religion towards the industry. And suddenly then breaking old institutions of the former power. And one of them was the academy, which was deciding how you were painting. And now you've looked at the surrealist link to the translation of the theory of dreams of Freud and then the people were discovering they had subconscious and trying to use it in art as well. The same with the Dada which were the reaction to the first world war, the first industrial war and the butcher it was. We thought human were wise. But they are not, I mean, to do such horrible things is, was impossible. So I said, Hmm, okay. Let's put myself in 2100 and let's look at what happened in 2000, what will be in the history books? It was 100% certain that one thing that would be there would be computers and internet. And then when I realized that there were artists actually working in the field for decades sometimes. I said, wow, that's what I want to collect. And I went there in digital arts 

I was collecting from museums, as I said earlier and I, remember one day I went to see the surrelist show at the Met and I saw beautiful Hans Bellmer photography. And I looked, it was people sometimes don't understand when I say I'm collecting from museums, but at the Met, it was written courtesy Timothy Baum which was a dealer I knew from Madison. So I called him from the museum and I said, Tim, is it for sale that beautiful photography of Hans Bellmer he said, yeah 10,000 I said, okay I buy it. And I took delivery with the sticker of the Mets behind. So first I was there then maybe I grew up and I left the hand rail of the museum and I went to find my own things and it was by going everywhere I could go. And of course it was off-fairs which were discovery places at the time, still, not the case so much anymore, but I was going everywhere, whether it was Scope or things, or sometime bigger fair because some works the Siebren Versteeg I bought it at the Armory Show and it was funny because she's told me the story. I, I didn't know even anything about this artist Siebren Versteeg. It was maybe 2002. And it's so funny because I saw the 10 edition among them to Marty Margulies and to museums and so on. So you see, that was interesting that the good guys were finding the wheat through the chaff in some way and so on. So it was about going everywhere. Galleries for sure. And it's about finding the right galleries from the art fairs. Biennial were very important, very early on because in a way, you know, the biennials are just a step before the museum. The big encyclopedic museum in many ways. I remember my first Venice biennial, 1999 and I was puzzled because I didn't understand anything. It's funny because I was having dinner with a guy 35 days old, and he said, I have zero interest in contemporary art and I said, yeah, it's very fine. And in a way I could tell you by walking around the fair or galleries or museums let's say that you see a piece of of rug at the bottom of a booth somewhere. You know, it's a Franz West, but I don't know it there's two ways is that either you pass in front of it and you say, what the hell is this bullshit? My son could do the same. Okay. Or you say to yourself, Hmm. Why the hell is this guy bringing what looks like shit thrown in the corner of the booth, but knowing that he has to pay $20,000 to show it. So you said, Hmm, maybe this guy knows something. I don't know. And that's the path of people involved in contemporary art is about, rather than waving by the hands and saying, no, not important. It's about saying, oh, okay, let's dig into it. Which doesn't mean everything is good because 99% is rubbish. But then among the rubbish, you're going to find some jewels and hopefully they're going to end up at the MoMA which is still the ultimate validation before history books.

[00:28:37] Ben: So as somebody who has virtually every medium in your collection, in your perspective, what is different about collecting time-based media versus, you know, sculpture or photography? 

[00:28:49] Alain: It's extremely important to understand this difference. First of all, you need to understand that it is not about acquiring a finished work. You are entering a partnership with the artist. For today and for tomorrow. Which means that it is totally delusional to think that you're going to buy a finished product, that you're going to turn it on next week, next month, next year or 10 years from now and it's going to work. Very probably it will not work. For different reason first the hardware and the software, but I am just talking here for the audience because I know you know all this inside out. So the first thing is to realize that you are entering a partnership with the artist which I was not aware again, I learned through the process of all those early works that suddenly were not working anymore and I was talking about the preservation of the McCoy. Originally there were on CD. There were kind of audio CD the kind of a CD you were backing up, your file with at the time. And of course, you know, after a while they were not working so well and the readers were very schematic. So I went through the first process of financing for them the transfer of those CD on DVD, which was a little bit more solid in some way. And then of course there was recently a very deep um, restoration with online backups and so on. So, I learned from practice, but today the kind of basic rules I'm trying to reach with the artist is to say, okay, you. Are in charge of making it work for five years and after five years we deal with it together, meaning that if we need to share costs, if I need to pay additional restoration things, but we agree on some kind of timeframe of, okay, you're going to maintain it for five years. And after that, we're going to do it. It's a little bit the same as for Windows, it has certain numbers of version of Windows that are supported by Microsoft and then after you are you're on your own in many ways. 

So that's the first thing: partnership. Second thing is copyright. Even in the most basic thing, because you think that you acquire painting, you put it on your wall, you lend it to a museum and you do exactly what you want. Not true. But at the time nobody cared about this copyright of a painting over photography in some way because you had the print of the photography. But when everything became digital, suddenly that copyright became very prominent. As you know, meaning that suddenly I realized that I had to ask permission to show works publicly, and it was the case in my videos, you know, I was collecting videos as well. I had a William Kentridge tape still in VHS form and a museum asked me to borrow it and I say, of course, like I say borrow installations or sculptures or whatever. And then suddenly someone came up from Goodman, South Africa and said, oh no, you need to pay that much for exhibiting every day. I said, wow. I thought I own this. Then I looked and they were rights. In fact, I own nothing. I own just a souvenir tape. The same DVD you own when you're watching Titanic and then you reading the small print and you said, this is only for family use and so on and forbidden, blah, blah, blah. And it's the same, except they don't say it when you pay $15,000 for acquiring it. So that's the main things is partnership for the maintenance and the preservation and copyrights. 

[00:32:16] Ben: What do you know now that you wish you knew when you first started collecting?

[00:32:22] Alain: I'm super happy with the path I think I did it the right way, which means going slow. I would recommend people with $10 million to go slow, meaning buy things for 10,000, don't go for the a hundred thousand, 200,000 and so on, not even talking about the 1 million piece because you're gonna make mistakes. And I made mistakes early in the things, but it was form a small things. So it didn't matter. The same with, what I described in the time-based media I call it digital art it's the same know I made mistakes in the preservation. I made mistakes in the way I was acquiring it and so on. So go slow and go through the process of experimenting rather than rushing into first art fair you're going to see. You know, the process today is very addictive. It's very kind of retailing based it's like luxury goods, what's happening the first time you enter a Gucci boutique is that the sales woman, or the sales man, look at you and say, who the hell are you? And they're going to try to assess, and you're going to buy, maybe you're low to the t-shirt and the belts. And then, you know, after showing off a little bit of your potential, then you're going to reach maybe the higher level, and you're going to enter the back room. And then after you're going to get a special treatment of the dinner, but it means that you're already spending $15,000 or more and so on and so on. So don't go through that kind of socialization, addictive things, do it for yourself. And I did it for myself. Maybe final question, which often comes is when are you going to do with the collection? I say, I don't mind. I don't care. In any way because we don't have the tax advantages that American have of giving up everything to the museum and getting a tax rebate and huge tax rebates, we don't get that here. So, I don't know and I don't care really because it's not a huge part of my, patrimonium and what it brought me is, uh, a life. It brought me visiting Mumbai visiting Venice for the first time. I never went to Venice before visiting the Venice biennial and today I'm looking forward to going every two years. It brought me to Kassel who the hell would go to Kassel without the Documenta. It brought me to Miami first time in 2002 I never went before and it brought me to Sao Paulo, brought me to Rio, it brought me to Cape town, and it brought me to meet you I don't even remember where we met for the first time, but it was always a pleasure to sit down with you at coffee shop. If I managed to get an appointment with the extremely busy Ben Fino-Radin. But when I managed to do that, it was very nice to hear your stories and your insight, which were very exciting about how you were working on preserving those masterpieces. I remember for sure forever when you showed me that amazing piece that you were so proud of having restored, the last time we met at the MoMA. You know, art is about everything you will learn and the people you meet and the place you visit, this is what it is. Okay. The objects in many ways become a souvenir of it and that's the richness of it. And of course, then you can build a book it's a little bit like if you were doing books of photography from all your trips, maybe one day, because it's very smart and very well done. You're going to publish it and people will be happy and study it for years. Okay. Fine. But what will never be taken away from you is those experiences and those encounters.

[00:35:43] Ben: Yeah. I'm curious did the pandemic impose any changes in how you do your business as a collector? And if so were there any kind of things that changed that you actually prefer and that you'll be keeping that way? 

[00:35:58] Alain: COVID taught me something. It taught us all something. So of course it told us something about ourselves, but it taught us a lot of things about the society we live in. So to me, fear was back because in normal life, what do people fear? Being run over by a car or, getting cancer, but it should not happen if you don't smoke and you don't do this and you don't do that. But you know, risk in our society was something very limited. So suddenly you had that death hanging around us and this massive uncertainty, because we were not understanding who it was hitting why it was hitting them and nobody was immune of it. So what I saw is first of all, the dysfunction of many of our political systems in the way that they cannot handle uncertainty, they cannot handle taking decision that they are going against the will of the public sometimes and squeeze between the experts and the public and so on. So we saw unfortunately the big dysfunction of our societies and for me, it was important.

What it taught me as well is in my relationship to people, is that I'm 58 years old. So normally I'm more in the riskier level of people higher risk people, but still I consider pretty early on that, if I was taking the right measures, the risk were not that big. In a way I'm doing off-piste skiing and things like this, and, they're dangerous as well. So I took the position of saying. Okay. I don't want to stop my life. And that's why I went back out very quickly. Art for me is life. In terms of art, it was very interesting because I was almost alone on on the path. I did my first trip in Paris for Paris gallery weekend in July, 2020, when there was the respites of the first version of COVID and it was lovely to see the galleries again, and they were very open and you felt that there was a change maybe people were thinking about moving out of the rat race and those the rat wheel. I don't know how you call it. The discussion were again, about art and again about life. If it's a passion, you take some risk for it. If it's just a leisure, I mean, you can go on your Peloton bike. It's another leisure, except if your passion is about seeing art in galleries then you go. If you're not ready to take risks, whether it's acquiring a work that nobody tells you to buy and that you trust, isn't it the same thing? Taking the plane to see your friends, or you don't want to take that risk and then you stay home and you stick to what you advisers tell you to buy. And it's another experience and it's not the way I'm experiencing art. For me, art is directly linked to life.

[00:38:43] Ben: Well, speaking of taking risks I'm curious to hear what you make of the whole NFT craze and if you've been collecting any and if you have why or why not? 

[00:38:54] Alain: When we opening debates today, whether it's about January 6th or whether it's about NFT, or a GameStop, or Robin hood or whatever, I remember someone talking to me many years ago and said, what is funny now with a referendum? There are three categories of people. There are the people for the proposal, the people against the proposal and the people who read the proposal. It's very important to start saying this before discussing NFT. There are the people pro there are the people against, and then there are people trying to understand what it's about. It's Belgian humor I'm sorry, but it's very important. So my analysis of NFT is the following. Of course I'm an ultra fan of digital art, as you noticed. I really believe it's the best and I really suffered with the artists for so many years that they were so underestimated and under assessed. I definitely never understood why the gallery system never took the time and didn't ever know how to sell them and the result was that the artists were left on their own. So no one was more in favor of finding a way of getting them some place. And for me again the place is not about the place in the market. It's not about selling for 100,000. It's about the place in the history books and in the museum. So, when I saw the blockchain appearing like four years ago, I was of course looking at this and I'm looking at the blockchain in finance. The big problem of the art world is it thinks that this is the navel of the world is nothing else that the tip of your toe of the real life, it should understand that it's nothing else than a replicate of the real life. That's why I knew about blockchain and it was already for six years that everyone was turning blockchain upside down in finance to find a use for it. We are trying to use it in trade notes and we were trying to use it as an alternative for back-office and registration of shares trading and everything. But it never worked. It never worked because it was too heavy and it was not bringing enough advantage to go through all the pain. And I challenge you to find any proper use of blockchain, of definite use of blockchain that is anything else than hypothetical. And I'm talking here about the larger life. Every article that comes out about JP Morgan, trying to develop something about blockchain and there was a consortium of JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs and so on doing a joint venture trying, but they cannot. 

So it's the same with art. I mean, what is art bringing? Of course art would be helping us to follow the path of the provenance. Okay. So if everyone was happy to register, whoever bought and sold things would be super nice. But look at this, you cannot negate the nature of the art world and the art markets. Today there's an amazingly fantastic story of a Belgian gallery suing Edwards Nahem in New York because he's giving mission by a collector to sell a Rothko and a Rothko has no value, if you cannot justify the provenance the whole time. Okay. And Edward Nahem bought that piece in 2006 and sold it to a client, except he refused to say who he bought it from. Now the gallery is suing to give the name because otherwise the Rothko is unsaleable so you could say, oh wow, that would be fantastic. Except that nobody will want to come out saying that the put online, the whole thing. The same way as no country would ever be able to register all the real estate transaction. Of course, it would be wonderful to have all the real estate transaction on one blockchain system, but it cannot happen. It will not happen. Technically it is an utopia to do that. 

So first step is blockchain. So I saw blockchain appearing. I watched it and I said, okay, cool. Then I saw NFT appearing and then I realized that it had nothing to do, neither with art, neither with blockchain. It was only. In fact, the crypto mentality, trying to stretch out to any other kind of willing asset. Everything I was reading about the successful people in NFT, whether it's the artists or whether it's about promoters of NFT, it was all about monetizing, fan hoods or manipulating micro celebrities in many ways, or manipulating the system as a whole. There are guys that are bluntly telling you, I decided to make a coup, so I said, okay, let's do a kind of a pop remake of Salvator Mundi okay. Super cool to use. Salvator Mundi everybody knows about Salvator Mundi. So he's hiring eight artists and he asked them, can you make me 100 variation of this Salvator Mundi pop, color, blah, blah, blah. Okay. The artist is a tool, only a tool for a promoter. And whether the promoter is whoever. And and then at the end he goes with Beltracchi. He said, okay, I will not put my name on it. I will say it's about Beltracchi. Of course, everybody knows Beltracchi in the art world and say, wow. So everybody's suddenly Artnet is um headlining about it and Wall Street Journal, Beltracchi appearing in the thing, but it's only about giving support to the thing. So my conclusion to make a long story short is that the only art in NFT is about selling NFT. That's the only art that there is. The source of the money then is interesting and there's an element of populism because it's also about , going against the establishment, we don't give a fuck about the old art world established art world, the gatekeepers, and we do our things. For me it's not made very different than January six in some way. 

So it's not that I'm indifferent to NFT I'm brutally against NFT, and I'm fighting it as hard as I'm fighting Trump's populism. Does it mean that there are all bad artists in there? Of course not. Everybody's trying to sneak in and get something, but most of those true artists then don't get anything. They don't get success. Who's true artist is making a living of NFT, not very much. And that's my conclusion is do I mean that digital art with blockchain is not a path of the future? Yes, very probably, but it should drop the toxic brand of NFT. 

I'm really keep informing myself trying to challenge myself and I'm maybe you're wrong, maybe you're wrong, maybe you wrong. And the more I'm going in there, the more I'm convinced of my judgment. There was a talk, in Art Basel, of course, Art Basel, they would not refuse to have Tezos throwing them a few hundred thousand dollars or more to be in the middle of the fair in Miami good. And Tezos could even afford to have Hans Ulrich Obrist by throwing a little bit, also a few hundred thousand at the Serpentine here and there. Okay. No problem. I can have a talk and then there's a talk of Hans Ulrich Obrist, at the Tezos thing with three artists in Art Basel, Miami. Of course the whole NFT crowd and oh look, look, this is validation. I listened to that talk. What is absolutely fascinating is in the first few minutes, Hans Ulrich is trying to talk about NFT none of the artists is using the term NFT during the whole one hour talk. They only speak about digital art, actual art and blockchain. They don't use the word NFT once. Of course Hans, very aware of his, sponsors always is trying to get NFT. And then he gives up because in fact, true artists, they don't want to be associated with NFT anymore in my opinion. Of course let's work on building something. I wrote a note about digital art and video art. You know, we need to define what we selling and we said about the copyright, the transfer of rights, people are not looking at all those things, but it's extremely important. That's my conclusion. No NFT let's fight them the same way we fight anti-vax and 6th of January and Trump in 2024.

[00:47:13] Ben: That's so fascinating. I have to admit, I was totally ignorant in terms of, where you stood on this. So I'm curious Alain, what's coming next for you? 

[00:47:20] Alain: Collecting is always keeping the ability to take the pulse of the real world. I know the experience is that many, many collectors are good collectors for 10 years. If you look at art history, even after the second world war to be really the top collector you had to collect expressionist art in the fifties, Rauschenberg and Jasper Jones in the sixties, then minimal art, then Warhol and pop art in the mid sixties from 1950 to 1965, you had to go through all this who the hell has got the intellectual flexibility to move from Pollock to Donald Judd?

I remember the first time I came back with the Siebren Versteeg piece from New York, I was carrying a portable PC through the customs and it was a software uploaded on the PC and I really asked myself, wow, this is art now. Okay. This is art. So my thing is about, can I still be so flexible mentally? And that's the key question that I have because different things, my kids are grown up and gone. No one home anymore and no touch with that youth that is around me and questioning me and pushing me in my limits. So it's very easy to become sclerotic. And also at 58 not so many are involved in investment banking and I'm still involved every day and I love it because in fact, it is changing all the time and it's keeping me very young and the same way as even Warren Buffett at 90 something is incredibly sharp because if you stay in touch with why Netflix went down 20% last night, or Facebook went 20% down last night, you have to understand immense amount of things about what's going on underlying in the, in our societies. So for me, the challenge is to stay young, but I'm not delusional about myself it will stop. And then it's better to stop because, if you still collect Rothko in 2021, man, you're making a big mistake. So am I going to get old or am I going to get able to stick to curiosity, which is the number one quality necessary for staying involved in art?

[00:49:41] Ben: Well, I don't think you'll have any shortage of curiosity. Alain, Thank you. Thank you. So much. This has just been such a delight to chat. 

[00:49:49] Alain: You're very welcome. I'm looking forward to meet again in person. 

[00:49:52] Ben: And as always, thank you, dear listener for joining me for this week's conversation. If you enjoyed this week's show, you know, what would be super awesome? Share with a friend, you can find the show notes and full transcript artandobsolescence.com. And as always, you can find clips and highlights on Twitter and Instagram @artobsolescence on both platforms. Have a great week my friends. My name is Ben Fino-Radin, and this has been Art and Obsolescence.