Extreme Art

Gregory Crewdson Dale Chihuly Mark Rothko Constantin Brancusi Morris Louis Jeff Koons Jackson Pollock Mark Fox

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Artists can often be found wandering around Robert Chaney’s 12,000-square-foot home in Houston, tapping the walls to test their strength and clambering up ladders to string up gauzy materials. Chaney, a venture capitalist, has commissioned half a dozen sculpture installations since he and his wife, Jereann, moved in three years ago. They own some 500 examples of post-1990 art, most of them relatively low maintenance: paintings by Lisa Sanditz and Corinne Wasmuht, photos by Gregory Crewdson and Nan Goldin. “But if you want to be a major player in contemporary art and build a world-class cutting-edge collection,” Robert says, “you have to buy installation art.”

So he and Jereann fly in artists, usually from New York, to fill rooms with white walls up to 24 feet tall. E. V. Day has strung monofilaments across the living-room ceiling and a master-bedroom corner, as supports for her ghostly resin-coated fragments of women’s clothing. In the living room, Diana Cooper fastened innumerable bits of acetate, vinyl and foam core to the floor and a wall to create Hidden Tracks Sabotage the Random. Andrea Cohen stacked branches and Styrofoam into a refrigerator-size assemblage, After Snow Landscape, near Tara Conley’s 24-foot-long fabric tendrils, titled All the God I Can Get.

Not only are these works costly and difficult to bring in and hang, but they also require vigilant supervision once installed. The Chaneys change their ventilation-system filters monthly to minimize the dust that settles in hard-to-reach crannies and have taught their daughter Holland, age 13, and her friends to keep clear of fragile surfaces. Even the family dachshund, Sam, has been art-trained: He was suitably scolded for chewing on some clear-acetate cubes scattered at the foot of Cooper’s piece. (The artist graciously supplied replacement parts, thus insuring the sculpture’s integrity.)

The Chaneys are part of a small but growing group of collectors who favor what could be called “commitment art”: works that are intimidatingly huge or delicate, especially heavy or treacherous to live with. “There’s a very aggressive and passionate pool of collectors who embrace the spectacular effects of ambitious, demanding installations—the ones requiring vast amounts of preparation, rigging and upkeep,” says Robert Manley, the head of Christie’s postwar and contemporary art department in New York.

Commitment art, frankly, indicates status: It shows that the owner can afford the shipping and maintenance, not to mention the space—and the means to customize the space—needed to accommodate art with diva demands. Of course, that’s been true for centuries. Renaissance aristocrats imported ivory and ostrich shells at great expense for their Wunderkammern, the czars inlaid amber on palace walls and American moguls like William Randolph Hearst and Armand Hammer had entire wings of European buildings dismantled, carried off and reassembled under daunting conditions. Today thorny logistics of transport and mounting can sometimes push total costs into eight figures, especially for contemporary art.

At Sotheby’s New York last November, Larry Gagosian, reportedly on behalf of the Ukrainian oligarch Victor Pinchuk, paid $23.6 million for Jeff Koons’s 2006 Hanging Heart (Magenta/Gold), a 3,500-pound, nine-foot-tall hunk of glossy steel. Just getting it to the preview from Europe cost more than $100,000—an “enormous amount of money, but not much compared to what it sold for,” says Alexander Rotter, the head of Sotheby’s contemporary art department in New York. He arranged for the heart to be hauled on a flatbed truck from JFK airport in the middle of the night, to avoid stop-and-go traffic; the wooden shipping crate hung over the sides of the vehicle. A gallery wall was razed so that the piece could be rolled into the showroom, where carpenters cut a hole in the ceiling, clamped the heart’s suspension ribbons to a steel beam and then rebuilt the wall to meet fire codes. If Pinchuk is the lucky owner, he will need to not only consult a structural engineer but also engage a dedicated cleaning staff. “The steel attracts dust. It should be wiped off daily with a tissue or very soft cloth,” Rotter says. At least, he adds with a laugh, “it’s flexible”—that is, the ribbons can be extended with chains to suit ceilings up to 50 feet high.