Commitment art is also attracting buyers with long-standing tastes for blue-chip paintings. Harry and Mary Margaret (“Hunk” and “Moo”) Anderson, who have spent decades stocking a 1960s ranch house in northern California with canvases by the likes of Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko and Morris Louis, have been branching out into seemingly ephemeral 21st-century sculpture. In the past year, they have bought two five-foot-wide clusters of taped-together paper cutouts by the Manhattan sculptor Mark Fox. The artist spent hours at the house pinning one artwork to a wall and wiring the other together over a sawhorse.“Certainly they’re a challenge from an installation point of view, but the fragility is part of the appeal,” explains Jason Linetzky, the Andersons’ collection manager, who photographed Fox’s every move on-site. The works, Linetzky adds, “are so special, unique and important the Andersons were willing to take the extra steps.”

The Chaneys have enlisted TYart, a Houston art-installation outfit, to document the arduous, hours-long process of installing their major pieces—information that’s essential when the sculptures are moved. (The Andrea Cohen and Diana Cooper works were de-installed in 2007 and 2008, respectively.) The couple rotate their collection, displaying only a quarter of it at a time in their house while loaning out the rest to such institutions as Houston’s Museum of Fine Arts and Cleveland’s MOCA.

Art buyers are going to ever more drastic lengths to take home, put up and move around treasures, reports William Stender, who owns the New Jersey art-installation service 10-31 Industries. He travels worldwide devising pedestals and brackets for everything from Buddha statues to chunks of terra-cotta buildings. Last year, for a surgeon in the Midwest, Stender led a 10-man team that spent a day maneuvering a thousand-pound slab of Roman mosaic, depicting Triton terrorizing a sea nymph, onto a support network of wall bolts and cleats, a wooden pedestal and a steel floor plate. The living-room sofa conceals the reinforcements. “When I’ve done my job well, no one sees it, no one knows the forethought that went into it,” Stender says.

Fortunately the mosaic fit into the surgeon’s apartment-building elevator. Plenty of commitment art is too large or heavy for elevators, says Graham Enser, the managing director of Cadogan Tate’s fine-art division. The London-based company routinely arranges for apartment windows to be temporarily removed so that artworks can be craned up building façades or lowered from rooftops—maneuvers that can cost tens of thousands of dollars. “We’ve even helicoptered pieces onto balconies,” Enser says.

To shore up interior walls for these imposing objects, says Tom Zoufaly, the head of Art Installation Design, in New York, and the go-to consultant for the Lauder family, collectors should slip sheets of 5/8-inch plywood behind their drywall. Zoufaly has torn up wooden flooring as well, to sneak steel I beams below a 6,000-pound stone fireplace mantel carved by Brancusi. “As long as the collector’s willing to tolerate what might be a temporary mess,” he says, “there’s hardly anything that can’t be mounted safely now, anywhere you want.”

Insurance brokers are likewise becoming comfortable with commitment art. “Collectors in these niche areas, who are passionately focused on sometimes quirky objects, develop a lot of expertise,” says Katja Zigerlig, the director of fine art insurance for AIG Private Client Group. “They have a lot of awareness about the additional care, research and expense that’s needed, and we can complement that with advice on the technical details of maintenance, transit protocols, installation or customs issues.” (Among other insurers that commitment-art collectors recommend are the AXA Group, Chubb Group, Huntington T. Block Insurance Agency and Wells Fargo Insurance Services.) Claims are most likely to arise, Zigerlig adds, when pieces are handled or moved.