Advice on Art Collecting: ‘If They Kiss Your Hand, Get Out Fast.’

Some advice for beginning art collectors from people who work in the field:

Real art collectors never ask, “But will it go with the sofa?”

Real art galleries do not advertise sure-thing investments.

Real art dealers do not kiss your hand.

“If they kiss your hand or call you monsieur when you walk in, turn around and get out fast,” Joni Gordon said with a laugh. Gordon is the owner of Newspace, a contemporary art gallery on Melrose Avenue. “If you are spending your hard dollars on art, you don’t want any soft, easy answers.

“Art collecting is a serious endeavor.”

It can also be a giant headache, especially for novices. Those who enter the collecting world are faced with a dizzying array of art, artists, trends, art experts (some of whom are self-appointed), galleries and prices, even if they stick to just one style, period or medium. Yet, the new collectors keep on coming.

“People are much more convinced now, as opposed to when I started teaching, of the need for art,” said Mumsie Nemiroff, who has been teaching an art collection class at UCLA Extension for 15 years. “They understand art as commodity, art as symbol and art as one of the things that will enrich their lives.”

Nemiroff and others who have guided novices into the art world had some advice for would-be collectors.

The first topic: money.

“Contrary to what many people think, you don’t have to be rich to get into collecting,” Nemiroff said. “Oh, sure, there are those people with the money to just blindly buy themselves a collection. But you can’t buy taste and knowledge.”

Most people who get into art are not into speculating. But no one wants to get ripped off by paying an inflated price.

“There is a wealthy couple I know who decided a few years ago that they would like to collect art,” said Jackie Silverman, a Beverly Hills-based art appraiser. “They plunged into art. They spent millions. Then he died, and she wanted to sell everything, and she called me in to appraise what they had.

“The problem was, on the secondary market, the collection wasn’t worth nearly what they had paid for it.”

Silverman said the couple had bought the works of name artists but had not received good advice on how to build a collection.

“The value of a collection depends on what the auction houses or other collectors want at that time you go to sell it,” Silverman said. “They may not want too much of one artist. They might be interested only in certain periods of an artist’s work.”

Bad advice is not just the province of the rich.

“The man who installed my satellite dish saw my art and said, ‘I’m really into collecting, too. I should have gotten into it years ago,’ ” Nemiroff said. “But the art he told me he owned is just commercial art, which is different from fine art. Commercial art is OK if that’s what you like, but you should not be fooled into paying a high price for it because of some salesperson’s claim that it is worth a lot.

“This guy thinks he will one day be able to sell his collection for a lot of money. Who is he going to sell it to? The art auction houses won’t touch it.”

As examples of commercial art, Nemiroff cited commonly available prints by Salvador Dali (many of which are of questionable authenticity, she said) and Erte. “Erte was a designer, and he was great at what he did, but that does not make it fine art,” she said. “It doesn’t mean that it has any value on the secondary market.”

Even works by as respected an artist as Chagall might have little monetary value. “In the latter part of his career, he got very repetitive,” Nemiroff said. “He was the dupe of unscrupulous publishers that put out many, many prints of work that was no longer relevant. The auction houses won’t have anything to do with them.”

Nemiroff and Silverman suggested that before paying a hefty price for a piece of art, a novice might want to check with an established art auction house to find out if the artist’s works are ever at auction.

“You have to be an informed consumer,” Nemiroff said. “I have no quarrel with anything that anyone in my classes buys as long as they know what they are getting and they pay a price appropriate to the value of the object.”

Taste is a hazier topic.

“All the time I hear people say, ‘I don’t know anything about art, but I know what I like when I see it,” Nemiroff said. “That kind of thinking makes me nuts. People who say that are just reacting to the superficial--colors that are pleasing or the fact that the girl in the painting looks like one of their daughters.

“Good art is not superficial. Good art is very intellectual.”

“Art is a problem, not a solution,” Gordon said. “People are always looking to solve their decorating problems with art. They want to know, ‘What will go with the walls in the living room?’

“But good art does not provide solutions; it asks questions. It takes us places we have not been before. It deals with real issues. It is not always comfortable.”

To appreciate art, they say, you have to study its history and become familiar with how it is made. “It’s like good music,” Silverman said. “You can’t really appreciate it unless you know something about it.”

Pamela Leeds, who taught a course in collecting for UCLA Extension last summer, suggests that her students join museums to take advantage of those institutions’ education programs and to take every possible chance to talk with well-known dealers and the artists themselves.

Leeds said she told her class: “Go on the Venice Art Walk that takes you right into artists’ studios. You have to see a lot of art and find out about it if you are going to train your eye.” With this in mind, Leeds took her class every week to the residence of a different local collector.

At one of the houses, the proud collector, who asked that her name not be printed, led a tour of a former industrial building that she and her husband had converted into an imposing living and art space. The living room, which was so tall that the art near the ceiling had to be placed with a boom lift, was full of paintings and sculptures.

Most were abstracts. Several incorporated pieces of industrial materials. One vibrantly colored painting had sharp metal edges jutting out from the frame.

“As you can see, I love Angst-ridden work,” the collector said with a laugh.

The students wandered up and down the steep staircases, gazing at the art. They didn’t like everything they saw, but they seemed to enjoy the chance to look. Several said their taste had changed since they’d started to attend classes such as Leeds’.

“My husband started collecting first, and he bought a lot of art,” Vicki Baker said. “I thought that if I don’t get into it, too, my house will be overridden with his stuff. So we both started taking classes. Now I look at the stuff we got four years ago and I don’t want it on my walls anymore.

“It’s all stacked up in the bathroom while I figure what to do with it.”

Hector Ziperovich, a physician, agreed. “The more you see, the more your tastes get refined,” he said. “I can’t describe exactly how I have changed, but I look at what might have caught my eye five years ago and realize it is just commercial, flashy.”

The collector urged them to try and get close to artists. “One of the best things about collecting is that artists become your friends,” she said. “It’s part of the fun. Maybe they even send art as Christmas presents!”

One of the students asked her how she decides to buy a piece of art.

“If I’m haunted by an image, think about it, dream about it, then that’s a good guideline for me,” she said. “Every time I buy something, it teaches me more about myself. I guess that’s why I collect.”