I recently saw a retrospective of Richard Prince’s work entitled Spiritual America at the Guggenheim in New York. The show successfully displays all of Prince’s series’ from his 1970s rephotography (appropriation photography) pieces to his Girlfriends series to his muscle car hoods to his images of nurses and the Marlboro man and his large paintings of the Checks series. When I was done winding my way through the jokes and cartoons and pop culture images appropriated by Prince into his artwork I felt that I had a good sense of how the pieces and series’ built upon each other over time and also of how American pop culture has not changed a whole lot since the 70s. Perhaps Nascar is bigger now than muscle cars and biker chicks but isn’t the concept the same?

The name of the exhibition, Spiritual America, was two physical things: Prince’s East Village gallery as well as the name of his appropriation artwork after Gary Gross’ provocative photograph of a young Brooke Shields. It also is the notion, seen through Prince’s work, of the deification of pop culture icons in America such as the Marlboro man and our cultural interests in the ideal (the cowboy for example) and the less ideal, baser elements of our culture like pornography and the biker chicks. All told Prince looks at our American popular culture with an eye towards comedy as well as critique while manipulating and re-using photographic images, comics, jokes and quotes.

Perhaps the most interesting part of viewing this exhibition was watching the children visiting the museum with their parents, staring in awe at both the topless biker chicks of Prince’s Girlfriends series and his Marlboro men. It is hard to imagine that these children understood what they were seeing, and many of my co-visitors were shocked that parents would even bring their children to such an exhibit. Maybe that is the point — growing up we all saw many of these images as part of our quotidien life, but until Richard Prince began re-positioning these images and dissecting their cultural meanings by placing them behind glass and in frames rather than in the pages of magazines we didn’t realize how culturally significant they really were. I am still not sure I would bring a child to the exhibit, but it makes for an interesting point.

For details or to see the on-line exhibition go to www.guggenheim.org. The exhibition runs through January 9, 2008.

The National Academy Museum and School of Fine Arts has been bringing exhibitions to New York City since 1825 when it was founded as the National Academy of Design. Located on the Upper East Side between the Cooper Hewitt and the Guggenheim the National Academy is a wonderful small museum housed in a beautiful townhouse and one that you should visit on your next trip up Museum Mile (Fifth Avenue uptown). The institution designates “Academicians” who are professional artists elected by their peers to become members. A look at the list of Academicians, past and present, is impressive in that so many of our great American artists appear. The Museum presents exhibitions of American art of all genres from its permanent collection spanning the Nineteenth Century to the present. Every Spring the Museum presents its annual exhibition which is a group show of works by contemporary Academicians; other times Academicians curate shows from the permanent collection. www.nationalacademy.org

I am often asked by clients and prospective clients how art consultants work with interior designers and “how that works”. The best answer to that question is that everything depends upon what each client wants.

There are some designers who love to work with art consultants and would prefer to outsource the art purchasing component of their projects than to struggle through the vast art world about which they are not experts. In this situation the designer will often hire the consultant and tell the consultant what the works of art should convey. In these cases the consultant may never meet the client at all, or the art consultant and designer may work hand-in-hand with each working directly with the client.

Some clients, true art collectors, understand that decorating and art collecting are two different things. Oftentimes an art consultant will choose a work of art with a client with no involvement on the part of the designer. Similarly, art consultants are not normally involved with the layout and design scheme of a home or a specific room.

Other people who may be newer to art collecting but have established relationships with their interior designers wish to have their designers be more involved in the process of art buying or collecting. This client might ask, for example, that the art consultant meet with his/her interior designer to get a sense of the overall design scheme for the space or to get a better sense of the client’s taste. While these types of meetings can be helpful I have found time and time again that it is best for clients to go shopping for artwork and to visit galleries and art fairs with their art consultant or their designer but not both — it is difficult to have too many cooks in the kitchen, so to speak. The truth is that this can be a difficult situation if the designer feels that he/she could be making the art selections. It is important that the client understand that art collecting and decorating are two different processes and the professionals in each field approach purchasing works of art and placing them in a home (or in a collection) very differently.

There is a system that can work for each client and situation. The key is for the client to clearly identify the various service providers’ roles.

There are many art institutions around the U.S. providing excellent arts programming as well as support for local artists. Like traditional art schools, these institutions are often wonderful local resources for area art collectors, dealers, art students and artists themselves. From time to time I will point out such an institution in a post headed “Spotlight”. Here comes the first…

Located on Newbury Street in Boston is a wonderful art institution known as CoSo or Copley Society of Art. CoSo is a not-for-profit organization operating an art gallery featuring 15 to 20 annual art exhibitions and juried art competitions. CoSo has over 500 artist members from the New England area and offers classes, gallery talks and critique sessions. I have found their website to be a great resource to preview exhibitions and to find new artists and their work. I particularly enjoy the variety of work CoSo presents, from representational paintings to abstract sculpture and everything in between. www.copleysociety.org

An issue has come up a number of times recently which I think might be interesting to a number of you. The issue is the difference between art collecting and decorating your home with art. There are those in the art world who look down upon “decorating with art” as opposed to art collecting and there are those who buy artwork to decorate their homes and feel that they are, in a sense, collecting. As an art consultant I frequently come into contact with both sides. The reason I feel it is important to distinguish in which particular activity you are engaging is to appropriately set your spending and collecting goals.

First, what do those two concepts even mean? Decorating is one of my favorite activities, and decorating with art is even better. It allows you to use color and visual devices to make a physical and visual impact. Artwork can turn a boring space into something alive and interesting. Think of what a great, colorful contemporary sculpture can do (visually) for a drab office tower lobby. On the other hand, “collecting art” is a term of art to mean gathering a group of art objects together so that the body of work says more about the focus of the collection (geographical location, school of art, style of painting, etc.) than any individual piece ever could.

There is a difference between art collecting and simply amassing a group of artworks. Though the art collecting police will not come and get you, one cannot run around to galleries and art fairs and grab a number of random works of art and simply call it a collection, all because they were purchased by the same person. There is an art to collecting and a bit of a science as well. It is an intangible and learned activity that comes with connoisseurship, knowledge, expertise and experience. To look at a collection of art and read it, so to speak, is to see something new and compelling in the relationship between the artworks. A well edited-collection is not created in a day.

Many people are interested in living with beautiful paintings, drawings and sculptures, and the only thing that binds those objects together is the love of their owner. There is nothing wrong with purchasing a work of art because one loves the color or because it looks pretty in the living room. These buyers will come to galleries with fabric swatches in their coat pockets and tell the gallery director about their family room color scheme. That is an exercise in decorating with artwork rather than art collecting. The thing to keep in mind, if that is where you are, is that you probably do not want to be purchasing wildly expensive decorative objects simply because they are paintings or works of art. If you are looking for something red for your walls, for example, you can find many inexpensive (and pretty) paintings to fit the bill without blowing your budget on one fabulous red canvas. Leave the expensive stuff to the collectors unless you can really afford it and don’t mind the cost.

There are many art buyers who become art collectors over time as their purchases become more educated and edited and their knowledge of the artwork they buy and collect grows. The process of going from buyer to collector is one anyone can undertake and just requires an interest, some reading and the asking of lots of questions. These collectors will leave their fabric swatches in the dust and read a book or see a museum exhibition before making a purchase and adding to their collection.

Happy decorating and collecting.