EXCLUSIVE!
San Francisco’s Top 15 Collectors!

1.The Gettys
2.Pam and Dick Kramlich
3.Norah and Norman Stone
4.Doris and Donald Fisher
5.Charles Schwab
6.Dana and Jim Tananbaum
7.Lisa and John Pritzker
8.Eric Schmidt
9.Frances Bowes
10.Chara Schreyer
11.Rene di Rosa
12.Dede Wilsey
13.Trevor Traina
14.Danielle Steel
15.Robert Shimshak

Sophie Calle Hans Haacke Sophie Calle Christian Marclay Wins 2009 Larry Aldrich Award Despite Economic Woes, L.A. Museums Grew Their Collections in 2008 Chantal Akerman The Greenroom Street Art, Street Life

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The first case I worked on was domestic. The private investigator and I met at San Francisco International Airport. He showed me a photograph of a woman in her fifties and explained that she was flying in from New York for a high school reunion. We were to see if she met anyone at the airport, and then tail her to the hotel for follow-up.

As instructed, I wore an oversize plain sweatshirt and stuffed my hair into a baseball cap. I carried an empty suitcase and waited at baggage claim for my subject. I saw her embrace a man, and their arms lingered around each other’s waists as they waited for her luggage. I documented everything with my cell-phone camera.

Strange as it may sound, this exercise in subterfuge was performed as preparation for a body of work I had just begun. As an artist, I had long been interested in ideas about surveillance. These ideas were already familiar to the artworld — take, for example, Hans Haacke’s photographs of Manhattan Real Estate Holdings, Sophie Calle’s performances, or Merry Alpern’s trips into the dressing rooms of department stores, among many others — but I wanted to turn them on those who survey the artworld itself. Collectors seemed to me obvious as subjects: there is a natural distance between art collectors and artists — we are on two different sides of the same market — and I liked the idea of exchanging roles. I wanted to collect the images of people who collect other people’s images.

I spent nearly a month calling and emailing private investigators in search of one who would train me in their trade; few responded. Eventually, I found a willing mentor and, from January through March 2007, I trained with a private investigator in Los Angeles and San Francisco. I wanted to learn surveillance from an expert, from someone whose livelihood depended on the most precise of all forms of documentation. And I did: I learned how to do surveillance on foot and in cars, within the limits of the law. I worked on cases that ranged from garden-variety domestic investigation to those dealing with corporate theft. The PI I worked for had a replica of the Maltese Falcon above his fireplace. He had a briefcase with a camera built into it, so that when it was set on a table or floor in a restaurant, it could record the goings-on of, say, the table next to you. He never referred to people as "targets," like in movies, but as "subjects," to underscore the neutrality of his observations.

While we were camped outside the high school reunion subject’s hotel, I asked the PI about the ethical issues surrounding surveillance. What is the responsibility of the observer? What happens if the husband of this woman goes into a mad rage and kills his wife? Have we contributed to the crime? "Don’t go there," he warned. "We’re observers, and observation is neutral. We only document what is viewable from a public space."

I also had concerns regarding my legal responsibility. I called a friend who is an attorney and teaches a class on art and law, and asked her what my chances were of being litigated over my artwork. She thought my work was within the boundaries of the law, and specifically cited the dismissed case of Philip-Lorca diCorcia, who was sued by someone who objected on religious grounds to having been photographed without permission.

After three months of training, I incorporated the surveillance tactics I’d learned into my art practice. I hired two of my students from the San Francisco Art Institute, and we formed a team. We took our cars to the PI’s house and he "pimped" them out, giving us sunshades for the windshields and teaching us how to use black cloth and double-sided Velcro to make curtains (he called this the "poor man’s tinted windows"). For about $75, we outfitted the cars right down to the obligatory piss bottle. (Going undercover involves consuming incredible amounts of caffeine.)

The PI and I wrote a basic training manual for my team, and he spent a day with us following our first subject: an art collector from San Francisco. I had composed a list of 15 art collectors in the Bay Area to observe, ranging from billionaires with blue-chip collections to people with smaller collections who were known around town.