Acquiring Minds : When Buyers Are in a Hurry to Get Something on the Walls, a Controversial New Variety of Specialists, Art Consultants, Can Fill the Order

XILIARY TWIL sits in the monochromatic office cool, dressed in red--a powerhouse red that stands out against the silvery astringency like a matador’s cape. She is coifed in a spirited mane of Hollywood hair and self-named in a Max Headroom-style composite of Xiliary, from the auxiliary drive of her Toyota Land Cruiser, and Twil, borrowed from a friend’s musical group.

An art consultant at Lonny Ganz & Associates, Twil has a job that suits her, she feels. She is one of a new cadre of art professionals that is part upscale sales, part cultural chic.

Working as a corps of advisers for the decade’s ardent art acquirers, consultants have been hanging out their shingles in growing numbers--about 150 have opened shop in Los Angeles--their once low-profile business propelled to prominence by the ‘80s bull market in art. Acquiring art, once a genteel avocation of the wealthy, has become a pastime of the upwardly mobile. In 10 years, the number of galleries in Los Angeles, the country’s second - largest art-buying market, has more than doubled, while major international auction sales are seven times higher, up from $324 million in 1977 to $2.2 billion last year. The boom has lured enthusiasts for whom hanging expensive art on the walls is more a symbol of personal style than a mark of passion for painterly aesthetics. These collectors want art for investment and social imprimatur, and they want art now--instant designer-label collections.

A savvy consultant can rapidly lead the raw aesthete through the foreign and often intimidating terrain of cultivated tastes and exalted prices. But connoisseurs lament that many consultants are providing art for mere decoration--over-the-couch, or OTC art, as it is known in the trade. Art as a soul enricher has fallen from its pedestal, becoming for many people little more than a luxury commodity.

Consider the afternoon’s business in the office of Xiliary Twil. Cool and straight behind her desk, Twil is poised to sell art. She is meeting the wife of a real-estate developer, a new client named Helene Rabin, who appears in black lounge wear and steep silver heels.

Rabin typifies the neophyte client. Her motivation for buying art is to decorate her new house, and she speaks of the activity as “choosing accessories.” To date she has only bought one painting, sold to her by her interior decorator. The decorator, Richard Killeen, has accompanied her on four exhausting days of visiting art galleries. Rabin has found nothing she likes and, with Killeen, has turned to Twil for assistance.

Twil is certain she can help. A graduate in art history from the University of Cincinnati, she managed Doug Chrismas’ now-defunct Flow Ace Gallery for three years in Venice, then worked as an art broker before joining Lonny Ganz’s 15-year-old firm in Marina del Rey.

Moreover, Twil is imbued with enthusiasm. A message from a fortune cookie is framed in her apartment: “Art is your fate, don’t debate.” Twil, 37, hasn’t debated for a minute. She’s planning a novel about artsy romance and intrigue, and she compares her job to being on TV’s “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous.” “I like the glamour. I like being known. . . . I want to be recognized as an important force in the art world,” she says.

Today it is Twil’s job to determine her new client’s taste.

She begins by showing a slide of a painting of yellow tulips in a black-and-white ceramic vase. It is just the thing, she feels, for the Rabins’ sleekly post-modern house.

“What do you think?” she asks.

Killeen speaks for his client. “Absolutely perfect except that Helene doesn’t like flowers. Everything else--the composition, the colors, the size--everything is great. If that were an empty vase, it would be perfect.”

“Yes,” Rabin concurs.

“Great. Excellent comment.” Twil thinks a minute. “Sometimes they have lemons in them. Do you like lemons?”

“Well, lemons are better than flowers,” Rabin says.

Twil pumps the slender positive note. “Yellow is stimulating to the brain” in either lemons or flowers.

“Not to mine,” Killeen says.

Twil likens the artist’s handling of interior perspective to that of Vermeer. It is an unproductive tack, yet suddenly Killeen perks up.

“Is that a Roseline Delisle vase he’s copying there?”

“It could be,” Twil agrees.

“It sure looks like it. Yeah! It’s a great piece!”

“Then what I have to do is find a picture of a vase without flowers,” Twil concludes.

A less-determined consultant might have bowed out at this point. Not Twil. She continues to click through the carrousel of slides--pointing out long horizontal paintings for the dining room, suggesting tall verticals for the high-ceilinged foyer, sculptures for the swimming pool and ceramics for the bath.

Then a painting of monumental gray columns materializes on the screen. Killeen gazes beatifically at the work’s soothing simplicity. Rabin happily pronounces it non-confrontational.

Twil senses a sell, and when Rabin says she is going to New York, suggests that she drop by the SoHo gallery that represents the artist.

Rabin asks if SoHo is a good place to look at art. Twil says it’s easier than 57th Street, where galleries often are located upstairs from the ground floors.

Rabin shakes her head decisively. “No, I don’t do that. I just quit when I have to go up stairs and elevators to look at paintings.”

An hour after it began, the meeting ends. A success, Twil declares. Rabin has expressed her taste and Twil has her homework cut out: to track down a painting of a flowerless vase.

She’ll also have to look up the bio on the column painter, Eduardo Oliver Cesar. Admittedly, Twil does not know all of the four or five dozen artists whose paintings and sculptures she has shown. Unlike galleries that represent small rosters of artists, she works from a sizable slide library of works from across the country.

She assures Rabin that if she is unable to find the exact artwork she requests, her client can always commission a piece--for example, “some sort of an incredible trompe l’oeil painting” with all the qualities the couple desires--”your ultimate fantasy.”

IF ART CONSULTANTS are willing to accommodate their clients’ decorating needs, much of the old-line art community is less enthusiastic. Traditionally, dealers have been eager to place their artists in prestigious collections and museums, where aesthetic and monetary appreciation are likely to increase. They have little respect for the business of art when it is devoid of sensitivity to the artwork itself.

Margo Leavin, who has run her gallery for nearly two decades, meticulously lifts her reading glasses off her nose before she explodes. “We’re too busy to slow down for someone to come in for an hour and a half with a client who knows absolutely nothing about art. It’s the first time they’re buying and it’s to go over the couch.

“You don’t want to sell the work of an artist you respect to someone who doesn’t know what they’re buying. That’s the part that just kills us!

“And when the consultants are looking for a particular size and color--even the good ones--I personally die on the vine when that happens.”

From another corner of the art Establishment, curators worry that while earlier collectors came to connoisseurship largely through personal inquiry and lifelong commitments, under the consultancy system, collecting has assumed a breakneck pace. A well-connected consultant can put together a $1-million collection in a few short years, while a good museum curator will watch an artist’s work for years before making a single purchase.

“I question how much one’s eye can grow in a short period,” says Mary Jane Jacobs, senior curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art. She also criticizes the passivity of clients whose collections lack personal expression.

“It bothers me because it’s not about putting together art in any meaningful, coherent way. There is a certain sameness among many collections, because you should have a so-and-so, a one-of-this and one-of-that. It becomes a kind of brand-name collecting.”

Jacobs and others also question the consultants’ expertise. The field is new, spawned in the ‘70s when corporations began using serious art to furnish their offices.

And although consultants number several thousand nationwide, only 50 belong to the field’s 10-year-old professional organization, the Assn. of Professional Art Advisors, which says a mere 20% of applicants meet admissions standards. These require a college degree in art or three years’ experience in a respected gallery or art institution and prohibit such prejudicial practices as working as a private dealer and accepting the average 15% gallery commissions, often taken in conjunction with a $75 to $200 hourly fee.

Says Beatrix Medinger, co-principal of VIART in New York, the largest consulting firm in the country: “It’s still a field overrun by women who have a passing interest in art.”

Yet, Medinger strongly defends top-flight professionals. “Much as people use a lawyer to get legal advice, people use consultants who know the art market.”

Adds Barbara Guggenheim, a New York consultant with a high-rolling Hollywood clientele, “We act as a buffer between the client and the dealers. Most of the people we work with don’t want to be bothered by phone calls. They’d rather deal with one person. A good art consultant is like a funnel where all the information comes in and is siphoned to the client.

“There’s an evolution of taste,” she says. “Art consultants help people go through that evolution faster. We save people from making terrible mistakes.”

Indeed, uninformed collecting can result in unproductive investing. While the Sotheby index showed a 26% increase in the price of art bought at auction last year, in a recent issue of its Investment Perspectives, Morgan Stanley & Co. noted the ebb in demand and prices for secondary work, including lesser paintings by great artists. Collections with the stock Frank Stella of recent vintage and the Andy Warhol portrait of the patroness hold little interest for serious art professionals. “I don’t know what super-trendy art means when it’s just a decorating item,” says Maurice Tuchman, senior curator of contemporary art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. “I think it’s irrelevant.”

MICHELLE ISENBERG throws her appointment book into the back seat of her car and starts out on her afternoon schedule of art installations. Isenberg has blond gel-moussed hair, wears stylishly outsized tortoise-shell glasses, and terms most of what she perceives in life as “w-o-n-derful,” a word that is a hallmark of her pervasive enthusiasm.

An archeology major in her student days, she drew and took art classes while raising a family. Four years ago, she opened her firm, Corporate Art Consultants. Isenberg is 46, and this is her first full-time profession. Yet, by keeping on top of California art, she has built up a tidy clientele. While most consultants run one-woman operations, with yearly earnings from $30,000 to $70,000, Isenberg employs four full-time consultants and places more than $1 million worth of art a year.

In a bare 18 months, she has collected around $500,000 worth of art for the wife of a Los Angeles businessman, filling her new home with work by such name artists as Richard Diebenkorn, Willem de Kooning, David Hockney and Sam Francis.

She is now on her way to oversee an installation of a painting for a young real-estate developer and his family who have a new weekend beach house at Malibu, and who order up art largely in absentia, with a secretary interceding in the transactions.

It is the secretary who has arranged with the Malibu Colony guardhouse to admit Isenberg and the artist, and it is the secretary who phones to make sure they have arrived.

Decorator-furnished in sleek minimalist grays and white, the house has no colors, no odors, no sounds--no imperfections. Fern fronds outside form loose patterns on the drawn white shades. The sudden blare of a neighbor’s stereo comes as a relief from the silence.

Isenberg, who is supplying art for the house, is looking for a painting that will cover the inset wall TV in the master bedroom and will slide aside by remote control.

She and the young artist, Tom Dowling, whose work she has recently discovered, take a soda and a beer from the refrigerator. Dowling brings in his toolbox and nails up the silver triptych he has made. He and Isenberg descend the stairs from where the art will be best observed. “It’s w-o-n-derful!” Isenberg raves.

Dowling gathers his tools; Isenberg deposits the empty cans in the trash compactor and locks the gate.

Driving back along the pale late-afternoon ocean, she is asked if it bothers her that her clients were not present for the installation. “A year ago I would have said yes,” she answers. “But you see so much in this businesss. . . . Today I’m numb.

“I know how busy they are,” she adds. “I understand it.”

IN THE HIERARCHY of art consultants, Tamara Thomas is considered one of the top in the country; her Los Angeles firm, Fine Art Services, annually sells about $3 million in art work.

Recently, however, Thomas has moved to public art, coordinating site-specific work for corporations. She has always eschewed private clients (“The husband has to like it, the wife has to like it, their friends have to like it”), and even corporate collecting has become more than she will tolerate.

She has no more patience for the kind of discussions required to change the attitudes of the majority of people, who she feels have little sensibility toward serious art.

She will no longer stop to explain that the statue in an office plaza has a blue arm because it is only an abstraction of the artist’s idea of an arm and that it is blue because it is merely a takeoff point.

“My natural reaction now is to say if you don’t like it, that’s too bad. It’s going to stay here because the chairman of the board says so. Goodby. But that is very wrong ,” Thomas says.

So it is Thomas’ longtime associate, Jody Rassell, who handles the firm’s private work, Rassell who on a Friday afternoon sets out on a rush assignment. She must supply art for a Japanese real-estate developer’s new Los Angeles office, having it approved, framed and installed for an office reception Tuesday. The galleries are closed Mondays, and Rassell faces the weekend.

But Rassell is a pro; she has been working the backrooms of local galleries for more than a decade, long enough to know that art, like any commodity, can be supplied on even a moment’s notice. “We can do this in one-stop shopping,” she announces breezily.

After all, except for the French Impressionists, the client knows little about art, she says. Therefore, she will find works that are “big, colorful and easy.”

Like most of the art she buys, it will have little in common with the pieces that fill her own walls. “It’s hard to keep your personal taste out of the profession,” Rassell says, indicating an art magazine picture of a painting depicting a lugubrious tortoise gnawing on the tentacles of a pink seaweed. “Now, that’s the sort of thing I like.”

At Gemini G.E.L., a well-known gallery specializing in prints, she considers some Sam Francis pieces, rejects Richard Serra (not enough color), Chinese-style landscapes (not for a Japanese client), a Pop Art Rosenquist peach, a too-big Jonathan Borofsky and a too-small Ed Ruscha.

It is the James Corcoran Gallery in Santa Monica, however, that she is really counting on to fill the order. One of the city’s oldest galleries, Corcoran carries many of California’s noted artists, whose works are both prestigious and pleasant. Says Rassell: “You can look at the work and get a hit, and the hit is an up.”

A gallery assistant wastes no aesthetic posturing. “Small, medium or large?” he asks, nodding at the aisles of canvases stored in wooden racks.

Rassell wants a horizontal and a vertical for the reception area, and the assistant slides out some appropriate wares--Chuck Arnoldis, Billy Al Bengstons, a Laddie John Dill, a Joe Goode, a Peter Alexander.

Rassell pauses in front of some Bengston night skies; they would open up the room and, she muses, “No one would have a problem relating to them.” The Dill is a masculine concrete wash and glass work that would project a sense of solidity and construction appropriate to a real-estate firm, Rassell observes.

She is satisfied and believes that the client’s associate, who will select the art, will like them, too. “I think I can just bring the woman here tomorrow and wrap it up,” she tells Corcoran.

In 20 minutes, Rassell has laid the groundwork for what will be a $22,000 purchase of art. She has provided her client with quality, image-right work, and she has done it within her deadline.

Yet driving through the city streets, a a reflective tone softens her bedrock professionalism. “Art is such an ephemeral thing. I don’t think it belongs to anybody,” she says.

“The art world has become so much about power and money that it’s hard to hold onto true values about what art means and how it enhances people’s lives. There’s a game that goes on with it. When you’re buying and selling, you can lose your perspective, you can lose yourself.”

The philosophical mood is rapidly dispelled, however. Rassell is giving a dinner, and she addresses the subject with her habitual efficiency: “I’ve got to hurry up and buy a cake.”--