Helping Corporations With an Eye for Art

Litigation had been good to them.

To reflect their law office’s rising fortunes, these high-powered lawyers needed more than just a bigger office. They needed an art collection.

Attorney Paul W. Sweeney Jr. had a perfect mental image of the office art genre he did not want: somber portraits of graying patriarchs, “people who have been dead 300 years [that] you might find in some of the stuffier law offices in the East.”

There was one hitch.

“I don’t know anything about art,” confessed the thoughtful, well-spoken barrister. “I know what I like. But if you start asking me about brush strokes and Impressionism versus Renaissance, I’m going to say, I can’t help you on that. We don’t have time to go to the galleries. We need someone who can come in and say, ‘I’ve looked around and this is what I think would work.’ ”

So like many corporations nationwide, his new Century City suites--the Los Angeles office of Kirkpatrick & Lockhart--brought in an art consultant. Soon, the firm’s enormous meeting room--decorated in a Milan-meets-Pacific Rim style, with a panoramic view of the Santa Monica Mountains--was dominated by two huge Robert Rauschenberg collages that address Sweeney’s desire for a West Coast identity.

“If you look at the Rauschenbergs, it’s Los Angeles, it’s the Marlboro Man, it’s the airport-theme restaurant,” marveled Sweeney. “It’s colorful, it speaks to L.A., and it speaks to our personality.”

Sweeney may seem an unlikely Medici. But he is an increasingly common one in an age when a new breed of curators-for-hire has strayed far from the rarefied confines of galleries and museums to choose art for everything from Hollywood movies (and the homes of their stars) to Vegas hotels.

These art consultants are expected to do far more than help corporate clients distinguish between Keith Haring and Andy Warhol. In an increasingly visual culture, the art they choose is expected to project an image of cutting-edge corporate creativity and imbue the offices of investment bankers, stock brokers, dot-commies and Hollywood agents with a certain worldly gravitas.

“What they want is not to be left behind,” said Lisa Austin, the art consultant who worked with Sweeney. “L.A. is a very sophisticated scene, and they want to be out there.”

Freelance art historians like Austin have become players in a niche industry--much like the professionals who teach dot-com millionaires in Silicon Valley which fork to use. Major auction houses even host sessions on art collecting for amateurs.

At one such affair at Sotheby’s recently, a standing-room-only crowd of 200 high-styled urban professionals sipped chardonnay and listened intently as bicoastal art consultant Barbara Guggenheim fast-forwarded a slide projector through a visual Cliffs Notes of contemporary art.

Guggenheim lamented first-time buyers who insist on brand-name artists but can’t afford significant works, so they buy lesser pieces--like Roy Lichtenstein’s waterlily series--which are “not as good.”

“These are probably the same people who like to drop names and be at the right parties and have the right car,” Guggenheim said. “They want to have a Renoir, a Lichtenstein, a Warhol--one of everything.”

A flurry of whispers erupted behind the wine glasses.

“I like the waterlilies,” puzzled an aspiring young collector, sotto voce, to a friend.

She drew several sympathetic glances.

Another attendee bumblingly compared fluctuating art valuations to the stock market. Guggenheim sighed with evident patience.

“Just don’t compare art to cars,” she admonished.

It’s no secret that art can be a commodity. Or that in status-roiled cities like Los Angeles, art reflects much more than simple aesthetics.

“Art has always been a status symbol, since the beginning of creating art,” said Elizabeth Urbanski, the vice president of the Assn. of Professional Art Advisors.

Powerful Italian Renaissance families like the Medicis “started collecting art once they got power,” she said. “Power has always been intertwined with the process of collecting.”

Today, “if you want to say you’re a creative company, you can say that through artwork,” Urbanski said.

For corporations, said Los Angeles art consultant Lora Schlesinger, art “reflects their own affluence and success. They usually want to telegraph that they are forward-looking, contemporary.”

But not too edgy.

Buying art for offices is “different than curating a show at MOCA,” she said. How different? Clients recently nixed a cinder-block sculpture by a young artist--too depressing. They ruled out an exuberant Los Angeles pastel cityscape with gleeful, nymph-like women taking to the freeway. The women were too . . . naked.

“If it has any derogatory or controversial matter, they’ll shy away from it,” said Joyce Hunsaker, the founding partner of Hunsaker/Schlesinger Fine Art.

Especially “nudes or anything provocative sexually,” Hunsaker said. “They’re afraid of what clients will say or how it will reflect on them.”

Another job for the consultants is unloading bad art that clients already bought.

“One thing we’ll suggest, if they’ve bought bad art, is that they have an employee garage sale,” Schlesinger said. “Often they just have to dump it.”

Not literally. Clients donate the art to a hospital or university, or let employees hang it in private offices.

Clients are often so eager to learn about art that they remain fixtures on the wine-and-cheese gallery circuit long after collections are hung.

That’s a far cry from 18 years ago, when Michelle Isenberg began consulting for Los Angeles corporations. In those days, tastes were conservative and parochial, she said.

Lawyers at one firm told her that if the art “doesn’t look like something, we don’t want to see it,” Isenberg said. “They wouldn’t even look at abstract art.”

Nowadays, “the buyer is pushing the envelope,” she said. “They’re no longer just looking at landscapes and seascapes. The artwork is radically different, more sophisticated, more conceptual.”

Sometimes clients demand a little too much from the art, “and I tell them, ‘That’s not art, that’s advertising,’ ” Austin said.

Attorney Sweeney didn’t want advertising. But he did want to telegraph a forward-minded West Coast vibe.

“Southern California is much more free-thinking, free-flowing,” said Sweeney, whose specialties include entertainment law and helping employers avoid discrimination lawsuits.

“When auto design companies think about what’s going to appeal to the next generation, they come to Southern California, where people are thinking about that already and doing the designing here,” Sweeney said, unabashedly invoking the verboten car comparison.

His consultant, Austin, is a Miami-based expert who has assembled art for the firm’s Pittsburgh headquarters as well as for clients ranging from Gannett Corp. to the Pennsylvania Convention Center.

“I told her, ‘It doesn’t really matter if we bring in a group of students from the Guggenheim who like it,’ ” Sweeney said. “We wanted to make a statement, that we are different in a positive way.”

Austin had drawings and paintings shipped from New York, Chicago and Oregon. Austin loved an abstract by a Mexican painter, but, “We said, ‘No way,’ ” Sweeney recalled.

When she unveiled the Rauschenbergs, “We said ‘That’s it,’ ” he said.

Freelance art curating can be lucrative. In some cases, consultants keep as much as 20% of the purchase price. But there are hazards.

Guggenheim was sued for $5 million in 1989 by Sylvester Stallone, who claimed he had been misguided into buying a $1.8-million Bouguereau that a rival consultant suggested had been inexpertly restored. Guggenheim hired Bert Fields to represent her (they later wed) and the lawsuit was dismissed.

At Sotheby’s, Guggenheim mentioned working for an action movie hero who “viewed his life as repeating the classics” and collected massive Rodin sculptures and multiple renderings of Hercules.

“Larger-than-life art,” Guggenheim said, “appealed to his sensibility and how he viewed the world.”

For Guggenheim, who went to the flea market every Sunday with inveterate collector Andy Warhol, such choices are a Rorschach test.

“There’s no mistake that people collect what they do,” she pronounced.

One client--”a flaming redhead with a tremendous temper, very successful”--liked violent Baroque paintings. A battle scene of a stabbed Roman general with his intestines spilling out dominated her dining room.

Then there was the dentist who bought a painting by a young Haitian American artist, Jean-Michel Basquiat, for $3,000.

“After six months he said, ‘You know, Barbara, I don’t really like my Basquiat. I’d like to sell it,’ ” she recalled.

Guggenheim told him the painting was not worth what he paid. He said that’s OK, he’d take $2,000.

No, she explained, it’s worth $100,000.

“He said, ‘I love my Basquiat,’ ” Guggenheim recalled, kept it another year and sold it--for $200,000.