The Aficionado (interview in Das Magazin, June 11, 2005)
2000 artists show their work at the Art Basel. Who can keep it all straight? And what is it that makes art good in the first place? No one knows better than the collector Thomas Koerfer.
If you're, say, seven or eight years old and the first thing that meets your eye when you wake up in the morning is not some grubby kid's poster but a genuine Picasso, well, that has to leave some sort of trace, not only on your retina but in all kinds of other profound places, too. Such a heavy dose of masterpieces probably isn't the ideal start for a career as an artist: after all, who would dare pick up a brush in the face of the world's best painters? It took a few years to prove, however, that such illustrious models could not intimidate Thomas Koerfer, in fact that they could actually help him find his own images. So it was both a smart and a logical move to devote himself entirely to moving pictures by becoming a filmmaker, breathing life into such things as Keller's Green Henry and Walser's Assistant.
His father's extensive collection of paintings came in handy in other ways, too: after Koerfer Senior's death, the money brought in by the Mondrians and the Monets and the other icons of classical modernism sold at auction not only made Thomas Koerfer one of the richest men in Switzerland, it allowed him to embark on a career as a collector in his own right. Almost as an afterthought, he became a member of the board of Winterthur's photographic museum and Zurich's Kunsthalle, as well as a co-owner of the Quinnie cinema chain in Bern. And along the way he founded the Frenetic film distribution company, helping to bring quality motion pictures to Switzerland at long last.
His Zurich studio is full of the central works of contemporary art, pieces by Richard Prince, Jeff Koons, Larry Clark, Cindy Sherman, Nobuyoshi Araki, hanging, standing, leaning up against the wall - you could practically forget that there is a fortune collected here. And as for Koerfer himself, you would probably find the 61-year-old's picture next to the dictionary entry for the word "understatement", because you'd be hard pressed to find a less pretentious, more laid-back tour of such a high-calibre private exhibit. No doubt this is simply due to the fact that Koerfer is himself a laid-back and unpretentious individual, filled with an inner serenity and yet highly focused as he sits in his Eames rocking chair and talks about his passion.
Mr Koerfer, you collect individual works, not whole oeuvres, and you don't follow any particular system. As a collector, are you led by your emotions?
I wouldn't call what I do emotional. There are two components to looking at pictures. First there is second-guessing: why am I drawn to this picture? Then there is actual analysis: how is this picture made?
Are you able to make up your mind quickly?
Pretty quickly. With important pieces I sleep on it.
What is the longest you have ever given yourself? Half a year?
Oh no, you can't afford that on today's art market. You can ask to have something set aside for you, but you can't hem and haw about a work that long, the market is much too fast-paced for that these days. And so much time to think wouldn't help anyway; it might even stop me from collecting altogether, because the whole exercise would become less meaningful - and perhaps that wouldn't be so bad.
Does appreciation in value play a role in your decision-making?
No. I have found that pictures that move me in and of themselves are guaranteed to be valuable over the long run. For example, early on, twelve years ago, I started collecting Marlene Dumas' watercolours when they were still sitting in boxes under the table at the Art Basel. I just thought the work was terrific. And now she's getting these horrendous prices.
How do you have to get out of bed in order to go out and buy a piece? How should you feel?
The picture has to challenge you. I have noticed that pictures that overwhelm you at first are the interesting ones, because they keep the dialogue going. An encounter with vivid images can continue to resonate in my dreams. It's strange that a person can be seized by a desire and then use money to turn that desire into the wish to own a certain picture. In fact life is already sufficiently filled with encounters. So why this focus on pictures?
Do you take it as a good omen when a picture follows you into your dreams?
Yes. Take Marlene Dumas' "Blindfolded", a picture of a Palestinian fighter, where you don't know whether he is waiting to be shot, or if he is already dead. After seeing it in Belgium I had a nightmare in which a black man was walking through my room, and I woke up screaming. The next day I went to the gallery owner and said I thought it was a good picture and I would like it.
Art must have an effect.
I certainly think so. John Baldessari has done a nice piece called "I will not buy any more boring art". I think that if you are going to spend that much money then it has to be on something that stirs you, wakes you up, challenges you. I don't even see art that is pleasant and calming.
Art may not seek to please, or be agreeable?
I would go so far as to claim that agreeable art is not art at all.
Your father collected works of classical modernism. Is that why you religiously avoid the period?
I do feel that particular visual realm belongs more to my father. And I did want to concentrate fully on recent contemporary art. It has to do with my desire to find my own images, and not to live with those of my father. Some of those pictures were also too valuable for me to imagine living with them emotionally, or even to want to do so.
What has your collecting taught you about yourself?
I have discovered that I am often drawn to transgressive images, those which do not observe conventions. Also that I am a real stickler for quality, and that I am intrigued by the basics of human life, by our vulnerability, our desires, our sexuality - that, as far as I am concerned, character is expressed through sexuality. Art is able to represent human existence stripped to its essence by showing us the naked human body.
Do people show their true faces in the act of sex?
Well, "the act of sex" sounds a bit too trivial, but sex is probably one of the last forms of human expression to enjoy such a direct connection with nature. It might be the primary site of conflict between nature and culture. If one assumes that nature (or instinct) is repressed in a highly civilised society, then I think the conceptual dyad nature-culture is best preserved there, in the realm of sex.
Does art have to be a consciousness expander, like a drug?
It's nice when it works that way, but it isn't obligatory. Ultimately it's a luxury. And if it were a drug, then it would be addictive. And I would not be able to spend two months a year on an island in Greece, without a single picture anywhere in sight. I don't miss art when I'm there.
Does that mean that art is superfluous in beautiful surroundings?
Not only there, but also in an environment that is more in tune with nature.
So then one might at least suggest that consciousness expands art?
I hope so. But more than that, it is through conversations and encounters with other people that consciousness is expanded. For its part, art is a rather egotistical, solitary affair.
For the artist or for the viewer?
For both. The artist enjoys the privilege of expressing himself through his work in a concentrated fashion, which is often a very lonely business. For the viewer, meanwhile, the luxury takes the form of a personal dialogue.
Do you think art is always communication?
Yes. But I am biased, I grew up among Impressionists and Cubists. Pictures were taken for granted, and always considered a starting point for discovering the world. I do find it wonderful to seek out essential images in a world under bombardment with visual material. These essential images are the ones in which you can still find truths expressed. And there is no reason to be embarrassed about it; after all, the cave-dwellers made paintings on rock, so there seems to be a basic human need to reflect the world in the form of images.
What is the relationship between imagination and representation, between inner and outer realities?
There are people who look at my collection and say that they can tell it was assembled by one person, with one way of seeing. If you have the time to devote yourself to images, you develop a - well, "affection" is perhaps not the right word, but the idea that certain images are what you might call your own, although they were created by other people. I am myself a professional creator of images, a film-maker. And then there are the images made by the artists I collect, and I have noticed that the images I create are not so very different from theirs. Such images seem to suggest how I feel about being here, on this planet. And maybe that is why it is so exciting to live with images created by other people, images that either conflict with one's own or demonstrate similarities to them.
Are pictures like best friends?
It is a very personal relationship. Even when you give them away after years of being together - and there's nothing they can do about it, after all - they remain with you, if you have been fond of them. The only thing is, amazingly enough, all of a sudden you don't need them anymore.
You own over 600 pieces. What do you do with them in your everyday life?
They say that you're not a collector until you have a warehouse. I hang quite a lot of them, many I just leave around. I have things in drawers, and sometimes I send whole boxes to the warehouse for a few years, and look at them again with a new eye when I take them out.
Are you sometimes tired of looking?
That happens, but then I can just walk through here and sort of not see anything, as it were.
Does your attitude towards the pictures change?
Yes, my mood can change, and I can discover that I don't like a piece as much anymore, that I wasn't clear-headed or dispassionate enough when I bought it. This happens when you are directing a film, too: first you have to get right into a scene, get up very close to the actors, and then you have to zoom out to achieve a sort of aloofness, to find out whether you are on the right track.
Do you write off these purchases as mistakes?
Yes, and I do doubt myself a bit at such times. What could I have seen in them? But fortunately I have collected mostly top-quality works, so I could always find a buyer for them.
How do you tell the difference between a good artist and a very good artist?
A very good artist is able to create an oeuvre, a life's work. He has inner strength and an intellectual reservoir of images, often coupled with a fine reasoning ability, so that over the course of his career a tension emerges between his early work and his current work. This kind of artist often consciously creates groups of works. Like Man Ray in the thirties, or Warhol in the sixties; today there's Cindy Sherman or Richard Prince, who are able to unite coherent research and expression with an unending supply of surprises and innovations. And then there are artists who are suddenly good, but who go out like fireworks or disappear from the market. The market creates too much hype and then abandons them in no man's land.
Can you make a star out of an artist?
No, you can't make an artist good. The art market has tried time and again to push certain artists or groups of artists, by way of auctions, for instance, but over the long run it doesn't work.
Nobody has ever got to the top without deserving it?
No. At most the market has overvalued weaker works by top artists, and it's a shame that they are in circulation.
Don't some artists manage to become the flavour of the month via flawless marketing?
There are some who use their own marketing as part of their work, like Jeff Koons. The way he staged himself and Cicciolina was doubtless part of a marketing strategy, but of course he doesn't pretend otherwise. These days you can't create a great artist with marketing. Oh no, wait, I've thought of someone: Christo and his wife, that powerhouse. Although in their case too it's all part of the business at hand, like the ten-year production time for their installations or the endless sketches - and not all of them necessarily by them. But without the marketing drive we wouldn't get their work, either. Other artists wouldn't even dream of expending all of that energy, they would say, what do you mean, I'm not crazy!
Does art still have anything to with craft, with technique?
I certainly think so. With photographers it involves framing the image, lighting it, and ensuring the quality of the print. As for painters, I don't know of any really good ones who work dilettantishly. Contemporary artists work in the context of the entire history of art. They are familiar with the art of the twentieth century. They know exactly what they are doing. Mastering one's technique is still the basic prerequisite for expressing oneself precisely.
Are there any geniuses left?
Only if we redefine the concept. We would have to say that a genius is someone who has grasped the interfaces of his time, who can name them and reveal them in the right medium. What such a genius is not, however, is a messy-haired person wandering around his lonely studio; instead he is a wonderful hybrid of an analyst and a craftsman, a highly gifted artist able to express himself in a unique way.
Do an artist's good intentions count for anything?
Difficult question. They used to count for more, because of a particular reception of artistic production. Twenty-five years ago, when works of art were expected to be socially relevant. Artists too used to expect more from themselves. There were artists during the Vietnam War who took the machinery of destruction as their subject.
Actually at the moment the visual arts are remarkably quiet on the subject of the war in Iraq. An uncanny mood of detachment has set in: the war is taking place far away, sometimes on TV, but hardly ever in art and culture. And while it may be permissible to produce without particular intentions, at certain historical moments it is a shame.
Why is it that events like the war in Iraq are leaving artists cold?
I think they are just so fed up with this government and feel that this sort of conservative establishment is so removed from their reality that they don't even want to try to confront it. Perhaps, too, artistic expression has become more profoundly individualised. All the same, there used to be this phoney Marxist conception of the artist's duty to become socially active. I don't think that art must necessarily fulfil this requirement in its approach.
Are there still trends in art?
A few years ago the buzz was that painting was experiencing a renaissance. But I don't think any trends have come of it. Rather there has been a give-and-take among various forms of visual expression, with film influencing photography and photography influencing painting and painting in turn influencing film or video. It's been a lively exchange and has produced an art that is centred in the present. And - although it sounds banal - it is an art that is also somehow democratic. It is situated in such a way as to affect people. Art is no longer the distant preoccupation of a rarefied intelligentsia, and that is why the museums are enjoying such popularity.
Is a picture that is understood better than one that is not understood?
No, secrets can actually be quite important. A work of art that reveals its meaning or its power too quickly is uninteresting. It might not even be a good work of art.
What about if it remains a riddle for ever and ever?
Well yes, there are those crucial pieces like Duchamp's "Large Glass", where people are struggling with an interpretation to this day. That has to be correct, and valuable as well.
How important is the originality of an artwork, the uniqueness of its conception?
Very important. I think it is true originality that is the mark of a very good artist. From our vantage point we can ask how it is possible to express oneself in a new way after two or three millennia of artistic production. In the case of photography, for example, a really young art that's been going for just 160 years, the originality of its expressions has yet to be exhausted. And by mixing new techniques artists can enjoy a great freedom.
What piece most recently knocked your socks off?
"Smashed Oranges" by the Belgian artist Luc Tuymans, and funnily enough it was his conservative painting style that surprised me the most. The subject is a Belgian carnival custom in which people throw oranges at one another. The orange colour in the painting derives from the palette of an Impressionist like Bonnard, while at the same time the piece is a frightening image of decay. It is a very classical picture with a classical motif, but it has been given a new twist.
After your father's death, his collection was auctioned off by Christie's in New York. How did it feel when a small Van Gogh self-portrait went for more than 71 million dollars?
Well of course you think that's an awful lot of money. But actually, if it is really such an incredibly vital piece, whether it fetches that price or only half as much is just a detail. It sounds arrogant, but when I think about how much money our society spends on things that are only halfway useful...
... such as 21 million francs for a new tram stop at the Zurich railway station.
Yes, or when I think what certain kinds of transportation cost, like airplanes, that will be scrapped in ten years. Then it does seem legitimate that extraordinary works of art get placed in these sorts of price ranges. And the art market is merciless, after all: A scarce commodity (like Van Gogh's self-portraits, above all the good ones) simply does produce an effect like this. And when I think about the capital consumed by certain businesspeople through their mismanagement of their companies, and when I consider that this very amount is contained within such a picture, and even increased, then I think that prices like these are indeed appropriate in the context of a certain capitalist structure.
Nevertheless, the art market does represent a sort of hyper-capitalism: it produces added value without any actual work being done.
I would in fact talk about genuine added value in this context, since some artists fetch these high prices because they have created a life's work. Which doesn't mean that individual pictures are thus ennobled, but rather that they are backed up by being part of an oeuvre. Of course exaggerations and excesses do occur. And yet the art market overall has demonstrated great stability over the past two decades.
Is there no recession in sight?
On the contrary, there is more buying going on. All the same, the art market does now make a stricter distinction between what is really good and what is inferior. Weaker works by very strong artists are downgraded, and rightly so.
So the money isn't drying up?
Of course it is the moneyed set that can afford to buy expensive art. And they're the ones who are disappointed by the stock markets. It's no longer terribly sexy to own shares in certain companies; it used to be that being a shareholder in a corporation would connect you with it. The result is that people now really want to invest in valuable things, and contemporary art has become a very stable material value with great growth potential.
Is part of your pleasure as a collector the sense of triumph you get from knowing you have bet on the right horse?
Not for me, but no doubt for some. There are as many different types of collector as there are different types of artist.
Do you never enjoy the feeling that you can see something that others can't?
Sure I enjoy seeing something in a work that others haven't seen. Also that these works don't depreciate, despite the fact that the presence of a group of speculators rapidly reselling acquisitions has made the art market more nervous. But I don't think they are making intelligent buys, just going after names because they don't have the eye for it. They are creating false hype and an unpleasant atmosphere, which the artists themselves are realising more and more, to their horror.
Tell us the highest amount you have ever spent on a work.
No, no, no!
Do you refuse yourself things every now and then?
Yes of course, after all sometimes it's difficult to grasp the fact that a picture, two metres square, painted by a living artist, has suddenly joined the million-dollar club. It is sort of beyond one's own reality.
Do you ever have anything like a bad conscience when you spend an extravagant amount?
No, I don't have any moralising sense of having been decadent or improper. There are collectors, of course, who are willing to pay high prices although they bear no relation to a piece's actual quality or to market pricing as a whole. And sometimes a price is just too high for me: because I simply don't have that kind of money, or am unwilling to spend it. I know that it is a privilege to be able to spend so much on art, but I think my film career gives my life a good balance, as do my other social commitments, so that I don't need to renounce my collecting on moral grounds.
Is the Art Basel important to you?
It allows me to get a good overview of the current market. It is no longer a place to make discoveries. It's important because it allows me to get together with gallery owners. The Art Basel has perhaps become globalised, like the art market itself. In the whole world there are six galleries for established artists, and all of these galleries exhibit their artists at the Art Basel. That's how things get mainstreamed. But it's great that the fair features such high-quality stuff.
Do you like vernissages?
No, I only go if I have to, or out of solidarity with the artist. Although actually premieres do have one advantage: after working for a long time on something, an artist is able to present it to the public. There are stupid vernissages and smart vernissages, and there are vernissages that are in reality an indirect way to subsidise the catering industry, completely useless.
Is there anything like a coherent Swiss art scene?
There is a concentrated scene that is very perceptive, very well informed. You even find it at symposia on difficult theoretical concepts.
To what extent are Swiss artists involved in the global art scene?
Some important Swiss artists are well represented on the international market. But fortunately you can no longer tell they are Swiss. That would be the wrong approach anyway, trying to establish a national style.
Who has the most say in the art business, the artists, the collectors, the gallery owners, the critics or the curators?
There is the commercial art market on the one hand, where the big galleries work closely with those artists who hold the power. And then there is the exhibition market, where you find the creative people, the really good curators and museums, the ones that have a profound effect on the shows and thus perhaps enjoy a certain power, albeit associated with great professional know-how.
Part of your collection was destroyed in a fire.
There was a real inferno in one room, which left several pictures totally ruined. Actually it made for quite a useful separation process, it afforded proof that all of this is very much of this world and that it is possible to live on quite well without it.
Do you own one piece that you would absolutely want to save?
There are a few, but I don't have one favourite picture.
What can visual art do that other media like theatre or film can't?
Visual art is fixed, while a film disappears, frame by frame, the moment you project it. As for a play, it lasts an hour and a half, unless it's by Marthaler, in which case it's four hours. An artwork, on the other hand, remains available as a pivot, one you can always go back to and look at again, which makes it more vulnerable, because you can see certain flaws it may have. Over the long run you can't be deceived by a work of art, and that is its advantage.
How would your life be without all of these pictures?
More desolate. Maybe I would take more photographs myself, but without any artistic ambitions. Perhaps I would have more time for my films. That would be a good thing, because up until now I have been able to immerse myself in others' visual realities without feeling any withdrawal symptoms as regards filmmaking.
The pictures are just too nourishing?
Picture are wonderful. They are very enriching and inspiring, but they are not the be-all and the end-all for our life on this earth.
How important is the sheer desire to possess? How wonderful is it to possess these things?
If you're smart enough you realise that your possessions possess you in their turn. And that collecting has a neurotic aspect. I find it boring when collectors found their own private museums or try to establish a memorial to themselves in the form of their collections, it's part of the old aristocratic mentality. I think a collection ought to be dismantled after the collector's death. Let my children decide what to do with mine. I find it wonderful to think of my pictures hanging in other places, migrating to other parts of the world and to other families, the idea that art remains fleeting despite its being something solid.
Are you going to the Art Basel this year with the firm intention of buying something?
No, on the contrary! I am going with the intention of buying as little as possible. But it'll be hard.
Thomas Koerfer's erotic collection can be viewed in the album Stripped Bare - The Body Revealed in Contemporary Art (Merrell).