These days the couple has a comfortable routine. In summer they retreat to the fashionable beach town of Punta del Este, Uruguay, where they have a compound formed of two adjacent houses (similar to their Buenos Aires arrangement), which they rented to Ralph Lauren last year. Buenos Aires is their home base for the high social season, and they make a long visit to family in Germany in August and September.

From any and all of these locales, Dudu pursues yet another sideline: publishing. With her friend Jean-Louis Larivière, her partner in Ediciones Larivière, she has produced a number of successful picture books. Their tome on the sprawling ranches of Argentina, Estancias Argentinas (co-published with Abbeville Press), has sold 40,000 copies so far, and a new edition is due out this year.

Dudu claims she is not focusing on collecting now. She has her plate full with myriad projects, such as helping to organize exhibitions of young Argentine painters abroad, like the one she curated at the Elisabethkirche in Berlin in 2004. "There’s no room for other art," she says, as if giving up the bottle was merely a matter of proximity to a liquor store.

In the next breath, though, she confides her plans to buy yet another apartment in her B.A. building. And she has just purchased a second seaside home in an even more remote Uruguayan town, because Punta del Este has become too crowded. How long before she fills these places with objects?

"She's Got to Have It" originally appeared in the July/August 2009 issue of Art+Auction. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Art+Auction's July/August 2009 Table of Contents.