COLLECTING CONTEMPORARY

COLLECTING CONTEMPORARY

The business of buying and selling art is really like no other, as we all know. Even the basic commercial nomenclature gets tweaked so that a word like buying is rendered as investing, with its overtones not just of "profit turning" but of something more noble and supportive of "improvement." It doesn't come as a total surprise, then, that in Adam Lindemann's Collecting Contemporary there are numerous references to the Dalai Lama and none to, say, Zig Ziglar-even if this is a book about how the business of art goes about getting done. Still, the book helpfully breaks down the various categories of the art world and offers entertaining (enlightening?) conversations with dealers, collectors, auction-house professionals, and curators. Artforum contributing editor David Rimanelli contributes his own brand of sage advice on why critics do and don't matter. Oddly, the only thing missing here is the artist. Lindemann, a major collector himself, downplays the importance of potential buyers meeting the artists: "Whether the artist is polite, polished, or tortured, after the cocktails are over, you are living with the art, not the artist." Hmmmm. -ERIC BANKS