When Contemporary Art Evokes True Love

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Why do people buy contemporary art?

This is not such an obvious question to ask as the art world pauses for breath between the frenzy of the Frieze fair in London and the FIAC in Paris, which both recently closed, and New York’s auctions this month.

The world’s wealthiest individuals are spending increasing amounts of money on art. The French database Artprice said in a report published on Sept. 24 that auctions from July 2013 to the beginning of July 2014 had been “the best in the history of contemporary art in terms of auction turnover, price rises and record bids.” London’s Frieze Week sales in October were the highest-grossing yet, with Christie’s, Sotheby’s and Phillips pulling in a combined 216.7 million pounds, or about $349 million, including fees.

These days, it’s difficult to disentangle how much of this money is being spent by investors, speculators and status-seekers or by what dealers still like to call “true” collectors — buyers driven by a personal, connoisseurial passion for art.

An installation at the October Frieze Masters fair in Regent’s Park by the London dealer Helly Nahmad evoked that “true” collecting spirit. Set in 1968, the installation created the interior of a Paris apartment of a fictional Italian intellectual named Corrado N. It portrayed modest rooms in which original works by Pablo Picasso, Alberto Giacometti, Jean Dubuffet, Joan Miró and other modernist masters jostled for space with books, exhibition catalogs, piles of “Paris Match” and a black-and-white TV.

“That installation touched so many nerves in people,” said Michael Short, an art adviser based in Berlin. “You were looking at art in a living environment. Was that really a Giacometti next to the bed? It was the classic collector who bought art to keep, not to sell it three years later.”

The aim of the project was to “question the true meaning of collecting art,” Mr. Nahmad wrote in the catalog. But the installation was also meant as a vehicle for selling art. About 30 of the original works embedded in the installation were for sale, at prices that now would have been far beyond Mr. N’s reach. Since Frieze Masters closed on Oct. 19, Mr. Nahmad, who is part of a Monaco-based art dealing dynasty that keeps the majority of its works in the Geneva Freeport, declined to discuss sales.

The question of art collecting’s meaning could have also been the theme of “One Man’s Trash (Is Another Man’s Treasure),” an exhibition of selected contemporary works owned by the London-based Nigerian collector Theo Danjuma, 28, which were displayed in a rented Georgian house in Fitzroy Square, near Regent’s Park, throughout Frieze Week.

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