If Your Management Consultant Tells You the Art Market Will be Fine, Do You Keep Buying?

Bloomberg runs a mini-profile/interview with Roland Berger, the German management consultant, on his art collecting habits and opinions of the future. Though he insists he only buys young artists when they’re prices are low–doesn’t everyone?–Berger is sanguine about the fate of the Art market this Autumn:

“Art has become a global market,” Berger said [ . . . ]. “A new tier of collectors has stabilized the market. Just because the financial markets collapse today doesn’t mean art prices will drop tomorrow — at least not for good-quality art.” [ . . . ] [H]e expects the art market to ride out the current financial turmoil as wealthy Russians, Indians and Chinese buoy sales.

(More after the jump)

As the second-biggest management consultancy in Germany after the U.S. firm McKinsey & Co., Roland Berger Strategy Consultants has clients including Deutsche Telekom AG, Deutsche Lufthansa AG, Deutsche Bank AG, Daimler AG and Siemens AG. The walls of the Munich headquarters are adorned with mostly abstract works spanning the 1960s to today, by artists such as Rupprecht Geiger, Guenther Foerg, Markus Luepertz, Jannis Kounellis and Julian Schnabel.

Berger said competition for top-quality art is stiff, meaning prices are unlikely to fall far. [ . . . ] Art hangs on the walls of company offices in 30 countries. Berger said the firm matches the art with the region — so Chinese art is in China, South American in South America. [ . . . ] He also set up a corporate collection that now comprises about 800 works, displayed in the company’s offices worldwide. He declined to disclose how much the company spends on art each year, though he said the budget is flexible. Artists whose work Berger is currently interested in include Daniel Richter, Andreas Hofer and Christopher Wool, he said.

“Sometimes an artwork can lose its impact on you,” he said. “Then the inner relationship is lost and I sell it.”

Roland Berger Sees Russians, Chinese Averting Art Market Crash (Bloomberg)