Up for Bid at Scope Hamptons: Collector Mentorship

When fairgoers bid at the Scope Hamptons auction, they won’t be raising their paddles for a painting by Damien Hirst or Takashi Murakami. They’ll be bidding on something potentially far more valuable: wisdom.Today, Scope Hamptons opens its first Collector Mentorship Auction, where young art collectors from the Whitney Contemporaries, the Guggenheim Museum’s Young Collectors Council, the Core Club, and the Soho House, among others, can bid on the opportunity to spend time with seasoned collectors including Beth Rudin DeWoody, Warhol collaborator Bob Colacello, Enrique Norten, Jed Walentas, and Brooklyn Museum director Arnold Lehman.The silent auction will begin at tonight’s private preview reception and will continue throughout the weekend. Bids will start at $500 and will go up in $100 increments. Why bid on advice, rather than art? In today’s hyperactive art market, a little guidance can be an enticing prospect.“Collectors today have to be better informed and have a sense of their own enthusiasm,” Mr. Lehman, who, in addition to running the Brooklyn Museum, maintains an extensive private collection of contemporary work by artists such as Terrence Koh, Jenny Holzer, and Kehinde Wiley, said. “The marketplace has become so huge, so global, and filled with so many artists of quality, dealers of significance, and publications that have to be read. The collector’s world is quite a full one if you approach it with a real passion.”For museum-affiliated groups, the auction is an opportunity to personalize the kind of private collector visits they host as part of their regular programming. “We’ve done this for our members throughout the year,” the Guggenheim Young Collectors Council’s development coordinator, Daisy Nam, said. “A lot of collectors have this huge collection and they feel a responsibility to share it. Because what’s the point of having it for no one besides yourself?”Though considered “established” by the Scope auction, Nancy Seltzer, whose collection focuses on contemporary Japanese artists, began collecting just four years ago. Ms. Seltzer said she relied on a mentor relationship with Whitney Museum council member Susan Hancock to start the process, and said the prospect of beginning a collection without a guide was daunting.“The most difficult thing is that they’re faced with so much material and many conflicting ideas,” Ms. Seltzer, who now counts John Currin and Tracy Emin among her artists, said of the emerging collector’s plight. “There’s far too much out there, and the only way one can truly collect well is to spend a lot of time looking and, when the time is right, to make that leap of faith and buy the first piece. There are no mistakes. You can always sell it.”While that may be the case, for many young collectors who lack the war chest or financial flexibility of their seasoned counterparts, the current economic climate can boost the appeal of a more modest, longer-term investment in information.The founder of the art-focused networking Web site, Artlog.com, Manish Vora, said his fellow art enthusiasts are reticent to make significant purchases because of their unstable financial prospects. “The challenge is that for the 20-something crowd, a lot of my friends are working in the market. Everyone is worrying about their jobs, so I’m not sure how many people are going to be willing to pull the trigger right now,” Mr. Vora said.Even so, Mr. Vora — who quit his job as a Citigroup investment banker to start Artlog — found that there was significant interest in the auction. So much so that Artlog and Soho House will send a chartered bus of interested bidders to the fair on Saturday. “The Scope people are really banking on young people who aren’t major collectors coming out on this day, which is really the core of our audience. Most of our events are for people in their 20s and 30s who aren’t major collectors — yet.”Those pre-patrons are a ripe lot for the Scope brand, which, while now in its seventh year, is still a relative newcomer trying to join the ranks of elite fairs such as Art Basel and Art Basel Miami Beach, the Armory Show, and the Frieze Art Fair. With the Collector Mentorship Auction, it is pitching itself to the next generation of collectors and art enthusiasts who can secure its future. “Scope has a pretty rich history of building emerging contemporary young collector constituency,” the president of Scope, Alexis Hubshman, said. “For this, we reached out to the managers of the young collector population. We tried to be a little bit more deliberate.”More pressing, though, is not the concern of brand recognition, but of ego. Mr. Hubshman fretted last week that the bids for certain big-name collectors would far exceed those who are equally equipped to impart advice, but possess a less public persona. “There’s a little bit of politics involved,” he said. “Is a bid diminishing? Is it too much? I’m just scared about the one collector who doesn’t get a bid.”

Up for Bid at Scope Hamptons: Collector Mentorship

Up for Bid at Scope Hamptons: Collector Mentorship

More from the New York Sun

Trump and Mamdani To Parley at Gracie Mansion Ahead of UN General Assembly Meeting

House Democrats Begin To Believe in a ‘Blue Tsunami’ as Senate Polls Show Tight Races in Traditionally Red, Swing States

The Best Place To Get Away From Detroit Is Detroit

New California Law Aims To Prevent Trump Allies From Deploying Guardsmen Into State

Angelina Jolie’s ‘Without Blood’ Fights On, Largely Unseen

Trump Arch To Act as Drone Warehouse, Military Installation

The Human Brain Is Actually Two Separate Organs, Stanford Study Finds

What’s Weird and Wonderful?

More from the New York Sun

Trump and Mamdani To Parley at Gracie Mansion Ahead of UN General Assembly Meeting

House Democrats Begin To Believe in a ‘Blue Tsunami’ as Senate Polls Show Tight Races in Traditionally Red, Swing States

The Best Place To Get Away From Detroit Is Detroit

New California Law Aims To Prevent Trump Allies From Deploying Guardsmen Into State

Angelina Jolie’s ‘Without Blood’ Fights On, Largely Unseen

Trump Arch To Act as Drone Warehouse, Military Installation

The Human Brain Is Actually Two Separate Organs, Stanford Study Finds

What’s Weird and Wonderful?