Martin Margulies is one of South Florida’s massive art buyers. Indeed, ArtBasel owes its Miami Beach outpost to the presence of large-scale, public-facing contemporary art collectors like Margulies, the Rubells, Norman Braman, the de la Cruzs and the Cisneros.
This morning the New York Times focuses on Margulies from the angle of how Margulies supposedly eschews the art market. The paper’s headline writers also don’t seem to have kept up on the fact that the Contemporary art market has cooled substantially in the last two years.
Nonetheless, the profile tells us some interesting things like his Margulies own rules for how much to spend on any given work and that he bought the Giovanni Anselmo piece pictured above at auction in London:
And while he goes to auctions because “they tell me what I can afford,” Mr. Margulies said his budget is usually in the $200,000 range per piece and he can spend no more than $3 million on a single work, which is low for prime lots these days.
We also learn that this supposedly anti-market collector isn’t thinking about keeping his private collection in perpetuity in vanity museum or planning to donate it to another institution:
Instead, he will sell his collection to help provide for his four grown children and to benefit the underprivileged. “A lot of people like to see their names on buildings,” he said. “I don’t care. We’re so insignificant in many ways.” “What would I do with $50 million? Buy more art,” he continued. “But the problem is, you can’t replace what I have sold.”
In a Red-Hot Art Market, the Collector Martin Margulies Stays Cool (The New York Times)
