I’m a contemporary art advisor.  As a contemporary art advisor, I was thinking about the type of art collectors that cross my path on a daily basis.  Also I scanned my own behavior as a contemporary art advisor and art collector throughout the years that I have been collecting art (13 to be more precise). My job, as a contemporary art advisor is to guide these different types of art collectors. As a contemporary art advisor I have seen the type person who values living with good art, and can make excellent purchases –usually with guidance-, but decisions are all determined by the size of his/her walls and aesthetically pleasing pieces that rarely push the envelope.  Of course, who do they call? They call a contemporary art advisor like me who likes to help them with their purchases. A lot of my clients fall in this category, and as long as they want to live with good art, even if they never rotate it and/or upgrade it (which rarely happens after they fall in love with contemporary art), as a contemporary art advisor I’m ok with that. 

As a contemporary art advisor, I also see what I call “hotshot collectors” who are intense and passionate people; extremely skilled and engaging.  They will go to great lengths to research the artists that are hot right now both emerging and mid-career and then call me to work with them as contemporary art advisor.  They go to all the art shows and art fairs, record lots of information, make careful purchases and usually develop great collections over time and thank me for being their contemporary art advisor. There is also the “ROI collector” who is the person that I have seen as a contemporary art advisor, look for art almost always exclusively expecting some sort of ROI of a piece of art regardless of how it looks or what’s their emotional connection with the artist. As a contemporary art advisor I try to explain to them my “caveat emptor rule” the contemporary art world has grown so much in the past five years, it is quite difficult to predict with certainty what the investment curve of a specific artists will look like in the future.  Also, blue chip artworks, don’t have an explosive upward curve, they already experienced that growth in the past and it is my duty as a contemporary art advisor to explain that. Finally, there is the “hedonist collector” and as a contemporary art advisor, I see that these collectors are always looking for intense visual pleasure regardless of the price point of the art piece or the artist background.