David Colman has an odd piece on collector Adam Lindemann in The New York Times. Are we to conclude that Lindemann is lugubrious or that buying art ahead of the artist making his reputation is fun? Here’s Colman on the glum side, read the rest of the story for the joys of getting in early:
He also hired the British starchitect David Adjaye to build an avant-garde seven-story black concrete town house (quietly concealed, Lex Luthor-style, behind the unassuming late-19th-century facade of an Upper East Side carriage house) and stocked it with enough treasures to make an auction-house rep weak in the knees. The big bad boys of contemporary art are all well represented: Richard Prince, Maurizio Cattelan, as well as Messrs. Hirst and Koons, of course. (The granddad of them all, Andy Warhol, is there, too.)
The most blatantly blue chip of these are in the grand ground-floor gallery: one of Mr. Prince’s “joke” diptychs; a kitschy carved wood pig by Mr. Koons. But in the living room upstairs, levity gives way to gravity. There is a mammoth blue-green canvas by Mr. Hirst depicting cancer cells; a painting of a punkish gang by Mr. Prince; and a life-size, lifelike sculpture by Mr. Cattelan of a 1970s female artist who committed suicide.
“I like a dark thread in art,” Mr. Lindemann said. “There are those people who think, ‘I put things on the wall to make me happy.’ That’s not how I think about it.”
A Collector Bets on the Dark Side (New York Times)