Three Must-Have Art Books

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Here are three books that I believe are indispensable additions to the contemporary collector’s library.

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Philosopher Jean Baudrillard once said: “What you really collect is always yourself”—a phrase that acts as a very good opener to an extremely good book: Owning Art: The Contemporary Art Collector’s Handbook (CultureShock Media). This should be the first buy for anyone wanting to launch themselves on the choppy seas and sometimes treacherous depths of collecting contemporary art in a period when, to put it mildly, contemporary art is so hot, chased after by so many people, that it presents so many traps for the neophyte.

What marks this collecting primer by art critic Louisa Buck and collector Judith Greer is that it is not only crisply informative but also well and often very entertainingly written by two experts who are genuine insiders in the often bewildering international world of contemporary art.

Starting with the basic questions—why do collectors collect and why do they collect contemporary art—the authors have gathered insight from some of the most interesting and thoughtful collectors, gallerists, museum directors and art advisers.

In the course of the book, they take you through not only the “why” and “what” but also the “how” of the art world, explaining the way dealers and auction houses operate, how finances are arranged and even the best way to pack using bubble wrap so that it doesn’t leave tiny rings on your sculpture (that advice comes from the head conservationist at the Tate London).

There’s an over-riding horse’s-mouth sensation about this excellent handbook, and no contemporary art collector should be without it, however knowledgeable they may feel. There is always something more to learn about collecting, and here, clearly set out, is all the information you will ever need to form a collection—apart, that is, from knowing yourself and cultivating your own taste.

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A book of a different cast is The Font Project, an artist’s book by Gavin Turk, published by the venerable Fine Art Society to coincide with an exhibition of the same name in their New Gallery.

The idea is simple and laudable: Marcel Duchamp’s “Urinal” fountain, first shown in the Cabaret Voltaire in l9l7, is the starting point for Turk’s series of fonts, each a porcelain receptacle set on a plinth. Each is separately named and destined for a different museum that acquires and shows contemporary art.

As the introduction says, “Turk is offering each of the named museums first refusal to purchase their personalised fonts, so presenting them with once-in-a-lifetime opportunities to have their collections baptised in a unique union of the spiritual and commercial.” The book then goes on to list the museums Turk feels would be appropriate recipients.

Making the point that “museums are latter-day cathedrals in our post-Christian, post-industrial world,” Turk believes that one of his fonts installed in the nave of Tate Modern or the transept of the Reina Sofia in Madrid could also act as a reminder that “many of our hallowed art institutions haven’t really got a pot to piss in.”

A section of black-and-white silhouettes of art that Turk presumably regards as “fonts” (including Tatlin’s l929 Tower and Yves Klein’s Blue Sponge) reduces all art to fonts—of a sort.

This is an engaging and interesting limited-edition book by an artist and deserves to be in the library of the contemporary collector.

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Another essential art book for your shelves, this one an expansion of a museum catalogue, is Large Field Array by 2002 Turner Prize winner Keith Tyson. As the preface puts it “Keith Tyson’s Large Field Array is something beyond the merely unusual.”