Business Trends : Firm Deals Artfully With Office Walls : Partners’ Library of Works Is Rented to Businesses
They start out as clients, business owners wanting books balanced and money managed, but one step into accountant Steven Phair’s office turns them into art critics. Loud ones. Mean ones. All it takes is one look at the pink, blue and red abstract painting that screams across two canvases on the muted beige wall.
“People come in and say, ‘Why would you ever do anything like that to an office?’ ” Phair said. “Don’t ask me to explain what I have on my wall. I just like it. . . . I look at black and white all day--contracts and code sections. It’s great to look up and see a bunch of color.”
Phair bought the Donald Kawelis diptych, or paired paintings, in 1984 as part of a $25,000 collection that he and partner David Cooney had purchased for their small office on Corporate Plaza in Newport Beach. But when their firm moved into its expanded MacArthur Boulevard quarters less than a year ago, their old art did not fill their new office. They found themselves with empty walls and emptier wallets.
Enter Art Resource Group, a fledgling firm formed by two Orange County women who have compiled a library of original fine art for rent to local corporations.
While not exactly Rent-a-Rauschenberg, Art Resource of Laguna Beach gives prestige-hungry firms with lofty tastes and limited budgets an artful alternative to calendar kitsch.
By offering a revolving palette of sculpture, tapestry, ceramics and paintings at monthly rates ranging from as little as $9 to more than $100 per work, the tiny company is moving in on turf traditionally trod by the nation’s larger museums.
But while many large institutions from Los Angeles to New York have long-run rental galleries--mostly as nonprofit enterprises to raise money for museum acquisitions--local art authorities say that Art Resources is on the cutting edge of corporate art involvement, offering fine art for the first time to Orange County’s faint-of-heart and weak-of-wallet.
“We’re filling a niche for people to get out of that ‘poster syndrome’ and into the regular artists,” said Miriam Smith, who started the company six months ago with partner Lynn Smith (no relation). “And we’re an alternative to silk flowers.”
Although corporate support of the arts has grown greatly in Orange County in recent years, not all business owners have the money--or the acreage--to follow Henry T. Segerstrom’s lead and commission a work such as Isamu Noguchi’s “California Scenario,” the 1.6-acre garden of rocks, granite, cacti, cascading water and silent streams that graces the C.J. Segerstrom & Sons’ Town Center office complex.
In fact, many executives find that even $40,000 to $60,000 is too much to spend on original art for office purposes, especially if their companies are in the throes of expansion or moving into new quarters. But Smith and Smith contend that such a budget is “modest,” the minimum necessary to purchase enough original works to fill the basic two-floor, 40,000-square-foot office.
“A lot of businesses would be intimidated to see they had to buy three floors worth of art,” Miriam Smith said. “But there is an alternative. They can rent, try it on, buy slowly.”
Which is exactly what Cooney and Phair are doing. For about $250 a month, the accountants rent nine artworks--from abstract mono-prints by Scott Reed of New York to ceramic plates by Patrick Crabb of Tustin. Some they like. Some they love. Still others they are glad to return to the Art Resource Group library in Laguna Beach when the customary two-month rental period is up.
Although the works are interspersed with the usual employee knickknacks--the “Real Men Don’t Need Tax Shelters” signs and visor-wearing stuffed cats--they go far toward giving the Newport Beach office an impression of class and competence, Phair and Cooney said.
And they give the accountants a chance to expand their art horizons while supporting the arts and covering their walls--all for about $100 a month more than it costs them to rent plants for the office. And as Phair points out: “Plants can die. Art can appreciate.”
It is clients like Phair and Cooney that Art Resource Group is trying to woo, and the two Smiths contend that Orange County--with its booming economy and burgeoning office space--is just the place to find them.
In 1986, 6.4 million square feet of new office space was built in Orange County, according to real estate analysts. An additional 4.7 million square feet should be completed this year, and an estimated 2.6 million is expected to be added in 1988.
That’s a lot of wall crying out for art, and a new business waiting to happen. Six months ago, it did.
As a corporate art consultant with the Irvine firm of John Lodge & Associates for the past five years, Miriam Smith said she saw the aesthetic needs of many businesses go unfilled.
Although some art galleries provided lease-purchase programs, no one in Orange County offered rentals. Many business owners had no idea how much original fine art cost, and, even if they had the money, few knew how to navigate the Southern California art market.
“The end result was that business was spending far more than necessary for art and often not getting the quality they were paying for,” Miriam Smith said.
So Miriam contacted Lynn Smith, a high school art instructor and founder of a beachwear manufacturing firm in Capistrano Beach. Together the two women set out to compile a library of works created primarily by Southern California artists. The works are not purchased outright by the gallery but are rented from the artists on a consignment basis.
When clients call, the two women go to their offices, slide show in hand, and analyze the clients’ tastes and art needs. After individual pieces are chosen and rental agreements signed, an installation firm delivers and hangs the works. The customary rental time is two months, after which a new round of art can be rotated into the office.
Artist Resources Group keeps half of the rental fee, and the artists get the rest. While it’s not a lot of money, Lynn Smith said, it helps keeps artists in supplies and studio space.
But it is that aspect of the company’s operation that irks some local art authorities.
Paul Schimmel, chief curator of the Newport Harbor Art Museum, contends that rental fees don’t really cover the costs of creation and that the continual moving of works from office to office could potentially damage the art.
“Then there’s the issue of quality,” Schimmel said. “Obviously, given the parameters of whom they’re choosing from, staying with Orange County artists and not buying the works outright, you won’t attract the leading artists in Orange County or those with great sales elsewhere. They will be clearly unable to get on consignment important works of art.”
But linking clients with major works is not what art rental is all about, its proponents say.
Miriam Parmenter, who founded the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art Sales and Rental Gallery eight years ago, considers her rental operation to be a service and an outlet “for emerging and some forgotten artists in the Bay Area.”
“I think that the reason ours has been successful is because we started it as a service for artists,” said Parmenter, whose rental gallery generated $42,000 in revenues for the museum last year.
During its first six months of operations, Art Resource Group has gathered about 300 works on consignment from an estimated 120 artists from Los Angeles to San Diego. About 50 are already hanging in clients’ offices, Lynn Smith said, but the fledgling firm projects that it will need to rent at least 150 works at any given time to break even.
Although a rental gallery with the breadth of those at museums in San Francisco, New York or Los Angeles is still out of reach for the two Smiths, the women are optimistic about their company’s future and its place in the corporate art world of Orange County.
“We’re acting as a bridge between the artist and the company,” and benefitting employees in the process, Miriam Smith said. “After all, you can’t expect someone to be creative in a void.”
