Maria Chang/Courtesy Ooyala

Damien Hirst Pablo Picasso Tim Hawkinson Donald Judd Takashi Murakami Gabriel Orozco Franz Ackermann Rene Magritte

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One seldom hears of a collector who isn’t interested in creating a foundation or a private museum. You prefer to give your works to established museums. Why?

There are many narcissistic collectors who value their fiefdoms over the larger civic entity that made their wealth possible. My family emigrated from Romania, and I’m a great believer in public institutions, in giving back as much as possible. I grew up in New York, and I remember going to the Museum of Modern Art and seeing Picassos and Magrittes and Carl Andre and contemporary art for the first time. What if those things weren’t there?

What makes a museum collection more valuable than a private one that’s open to the public?

Most private collections are too fragmented to be meaningful. Everybody has the same crappy Damien Hirst, and all the same stupid pieces, and one or two or three or five Richard Princes. It’s all the same garbage. The living part of museums is the curatorial aspect; people making selections and comparisons and whittling down the collection.

How many works do you own?

Probably about five or six hundred. I’ve given away two hundred in the past year. I’m hoping to give away another hundred this year.

How did you start collecting?

I spent a lot of time in New York in 1994 because my dad was ill. At some point I started wandering downtown, around a couple of art galleries. There was one particular work that just got me at the time, and I bought it.

What was it?

It was a little painting, markings on an old piece of blackboard, made by a Russian artist named Yuri Kuper, who hasn’t had any real career to speak of. He emigrated from Russia and designed stage sets for the Paris Opéra. For some reason that opened the floodgates.

How so?

I just went crazy. I spent a few months buying death-obsessed Russian art from the early 1990s. Then I started thinking, "I don’t really like this stuff," so I began buying colorful Latin American paintings. Then I started going to galleries in Los Angeles, something I’d never done before.

What were you buying?

I found Jorge Pardo and Franz Ackermann at Garage; Raymond Pettibon, Lari Pittman, John Currin and Elizabeth Peyton at Regen. I collected Chris Finley and Kurt Kauper at Acme; Jim Hodges and Frances Stark at Marc Foxx; Martin Kersels at Dan Bernier; Yoshitomo Nara, Takashi Murakami and Kim Dingle at Blum & Poe; Tim Hawkinson at Ace. And I’ve collected Gabriel Orozco from the beginning.

Has your taste changed much over the years?

I’m less interested in what other people think is interesting. I was particularly fond of what I’ll call the return to beauty as exemplified by the younger painters like Peyton and Peter Doig — work that now looks pointless and pretty. Then I began thinking and talking and learning and reading. When I started reading, everything changed.

Reading magazines?

Magazines, French philosophy, Jean Baudrillard, Arthur Danto. I read Michael Fried, Donald Judd, working my way up chronologically as far as I could. The more I read, the less I became interested in what I had been collecting.

Which younger artists attract you now?

There’s a film artist named Nathalie Djurberg whom I’ve been collecting for a few years. I really love her work.

In the past few months, the art market has changed drastically. How is the new economic reality affecting how you see — and buy — art?

Art lives in many dimensions simultaneously, and the market is only one. We’re entering a time of connoisseurship, where every work has to justify itself to the art that came before it. Collecting is going to be a lot more fun for people like me. "Conversation with Dean Valentine" originally appeared in the January 2009 issue of Art+Auction. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Art+Auction's January 2009 Table of Contents.