[[[pull_quote]]] 

A few years back, Michael Hoeh e-mailed a well-known New York dealerinquiring about the work of an equally well-known artist. In return hereceived a message clearly meant for another gallery staffer, sent to him bymistake when the dealer hit Reply instead of Forward. It said, more or less, "I can't believe another newbie wants in on this artist."

"It was a real slap in the face," says Hoeh, a mutual-fund portfolio managerin New York. "The guy was unapologetic about it too." But at least it was aresponse. At the height of the boom, galleries tended to snub buddingcollectors like Hoeh. Despite these neophytes' active membership in youngcollectors groups at museums, their annual pilgrimages to art fairs in Baseland Miami and their mounting acquisitions, dealers reserved their attentionand their stock for the megaplayers: free-spending hedge-fund types,oligarchs and speculators.

All that changed last year. The bursting of the art world bubble has led toincreased access for 30- and 40-something aficionados. As galleries andauction houses claw their way out of an unpredictable and business-changingyear, they are accommodating young patrons as never before. "We've seen anumber of new people," says Alexandre Carel, the head of the First Opensales at Christie's New York. "And I'm hoping [they] will drive the market abit more in the future."

Many in the business welcome this shift in the art world’s center of gravity. "One thing that’s really noticeable for me, having participated in some of the fairs since the crash of AIG and Lehman Brothers, is that the speculator is gone," says the New York dealer Jack Shainman. "We used to have to be so guarded, so careful — especially at art fairs. We were trying to be savvy enough that we weren’t selling to someone who was going to turn around and flip it at an auction house. It’s back to the real collector now. It’s not so much about the money investment as it is about the art. And that’s kind of reassuring."

Neal Meltzer, a private art dealer in New York and a former Christie’s vice president, has also noted the revival of connoisseurship. "Serious collectors felt forced out of the market because of how high the prices moved. But many of them are back," he says.

The change in buyers’ attitude has been accompanied by a change in their sources of capital. The emerging-economy billionaires who dominated the market during the boom have largely withdrawn, as have those who made, and then lost, fortunes in real estate. In their place, says Meltzer, are "a number of individuals in finance who benefited during the credit crisis. Now they’re enjoying a buffet of deals — opportunities with less competition."

Galleries and auction houses confirm that most art buyers are still from the finance industry. But they are also seeing new-media and creative types. "People are coming to the market who not only made money in the financial world but in the Internet world as well," says Carel, of Christie’s, himself a beginning collector.

One of these Web-wealthy collectors is Steve Rosenblum, the Paris-based founder of Pixmania.com, Europe’s answer to Amazon.com. He and his wife, Chiara, started collecting in 2002, focusing on a crop of international emerging artists. Like other relatively recent entrants, they have upped their buying in the past year, going after works by more-recognizable names, such as Christian Boltanski and Christoph Büchel, and items previously unavailable to them in terms of price and access, including a massive Christopher Wool painting, which they bought last June at the Art Basel booth of New York’s Luhring Augustine gallery.

"It’s undeniable that the market change has affected my collecting," says Jeremy E. Steinke, a story editor and consultant to leading filmmakers, who primarily acquires work by young artists such as Paul Chan and Kalup Linzy. "But I collected more last year than I did in the five years before the boom."

Having run out of space to display his collection in his sizable Brooklyn brownstone, Steinke lends artworks to friends, rather than relegate them to storage. Hoeh, who has expanded his focus from black-and-white photography to include conceptual works, is faced with a similar space crunch in his downtown Manhattan loft. To remedy the situation, he has placed some of his 1,000 works — including pieces by Spencer Finch, Nan Goldin, Vik Muniz and Wolfgang Tillmans — in storage but has also lent pieces to institutions like the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Tokyo and the Contemporary Art Galleries at the University of Connecticuts Storrs campus.

Steinke and Hoeh are typical of their generation in their commitment to art and art makers, and to keeping pieces in public view. "Aside from buying those works on their wish list that they didn’t have access to or lost in bidding wars, these collectors are really interested in commissions and special, unique works," says David Maupin, of New York’s Lehmann Maupin gallery. "It’s about having that experience with the artist and not just with the gallery. It’s different than past generations, and different from the sort of normal art-fair transactions."

Auctioneers and dealers want a role in shaping this generation of aficionados’ tastes. The former have been ramping up efforts to attract new blood into their salesrooms by making the process less forbidding, overcoming the perception that, as one collector put it, "the gallery is a relationship; the auction house is the battle." To that end, the houses have introduced user-friendly tech tools, such as iPhone apps that alert clients when their favorite artists’ works are coming up for sale. They’ve started inviting a larger number of younger collectors to their cocktail parties and meet-and-greets and have continued to mount more-specialized moderately priced sales. Since 2005, Phillips de Pury & Company has been offering relatively lower estimated works at its entry-level Saturdays@Phillips sales, held four times per year. Those sales are even less expensive now and have been aptly renamed No Reserve. Other houses have also launched events targeted to appeal to emerging contemporary-art buyers. Nearly five years ago, Christie’s began its First Open sales of less-expensive works by younger artists; at the session last September, prices ranged from $2,250, for a Martin Eder drawing, to $242,000, for a Roni Horn sculpture, with the one outlier being a coveted 1964 Warhol Flowers silkscreen that brought just over $1 million.

For their part, dealers are turning to social networking and smart phone-friendly tools to draw young collectors. Maupin, who sends images, films and exhibition walkthroughs to clients via e-mail, claims this has been crucial in helping the gallery to maintain and enlarge its mainly international clientele through the recession and plans to add such features as artist interviews and studio visits to the Web site. The Chelsea dealer Daniel Cooney has been putting works by emerging artists from his stable, like photographers Dan Estabrook and Francesca Romeo, up at the online auctioneer iGavel.com, where prices start at just $200, hoping to hook new clients. One he landed was the New York architect John Spencer, who, since buying from Cooney’s online inventory, has gone on to purchase some 50 works by some 30 artists in the past 18 months.

"There’s an online presence that had to happen," says Cassie Rosenthal, the codirector of Goff + Rosenthal gallery, in New York. "Facebook, Twitter — we’ve had so much more traffic as a result of having that profile. It reaches out to more people, and the kind of people who are coming in and buying." Rosenthal argues that cultivating neophytes is the key to galleries’ future success, especially for smaller spaces, which have lost clients as collectors trim their lists of dealers. "It’s a lot easier to bring newer blood on and have more control of that relationship than it is to try to lure back a collector who wasn’t necessarily committed to you in the first place," she says. "They aren’t entering at the same kind of price points that new collectors once were, but it’s about getting them on board with your program and getting them really supportive of an artist."

Other initiatives for attracting clients are more old-school. Cooney and fellow New York dealers Paul Amador, Brian Clamp, Michael Foley and Sasha Wolf have joined forces to produce Project 5, a series of $2,500 limited-edition photo portfolios and related salon-style gatherings. Goff + Rosenthal gallery is planning to host evenings in which established collectors offer advice to those just breaking in. Aware that people are looking to forge deeper relationships with fewer galleries, dealers are also being more transparent about back stock and availability — and more flexible in pricing, with even major names like Larry Gagosian offering 25 to 40 percent discounts as well as innovative financing.

"The honesty, the forthcomingness, giving you options, payment plans, the discounts, even bringing [art] to your house themselves — I’ve seen it all pulled out in the last year," Steinke says. "There’s no way they can maintain that tailored service if the art world starts booming again. But I like to think that they will try."

"Changing of the Garde" originally appeared in the January 2010 issue of Art+Auction. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Art+Auction's January 2010 Table of Contents.