The Job of the Collector
In the history of art, there are very few artists who are as celebrated and admired as Vincent van Gogh. We all know Vincent’s story and about his brother Theo, but it was only recently that we learned about Jo van Gogh-Bonger, the wife of Theo and the sister-in-law of the famous painter. It was Jo, who worked tirelessly for decades to open the world’s eyes to the brilliance of Vincent’s work and it is her who we have to thank for making sure Vincent’s genius was not lost into obscurity. The New York Times Magazine published an in depth article about Jo and described her in the following way:
She was small in stature and riddled with self-doubt, had no background in art or business and faced an art world that was a thoroughly male preserve.
She was married to Theo for little over a year when Vincent died and then Theo died just six months later. It is extraordinary what she had to overcome both in the world around her but also within herself to achieve what she did with Vincent’s work. It amazes me how her story is only now being told.
As I begin my journey as a collector of NFT art, there is so much I can learn from how she navigated and won over the art world, especially when nobody thought Vincent’s work was worth anything. The critics really did not like his paintings and they were very derisive:
Another early critic found Vincent’s landscapes “without depth, without atmosphere, without light, the unmixed colors set beside each other without mutually harmonizing,” and complained that the artist was painting out of a desire to be “modern, bizarre, childlike.”
It’s good to remember that people will reject anything new for the sake of it being new and dismiss it as being “childlike”. This is true not only for NFTs, but also for cryptocurrency. It’s a double whammy of ridicule from the current art and financial establishments. NFTs and crypto are so bizarre and different that it’s hard for them to not laugh out loud. But this is the path that all new ideas have trodden, it is part and parcel to what it means to bring about ground-breaking change.
But what struck me most as I read Jo’s story is how she completely changed the way people looked at art. When Jo entered the art world, people separated the art from the artist and they complained heavily when Jo would push this way of thinking on them. But she was incredibly persistent and very smart, so she was able to eventually change their minds:
Time and again, critics at first resisted the idea of looking at Vincent’s life and work as one, then gave in to it. When they looked at the paintings, they saw not just the art but Vincent, toiling and suffering, cutting off his ear, clawing at the act of creation. They fused art and artist. They saw what Jo van Gogh-Bonger wanted them to see.
She was lucky in her timing because the art world was beginning to change and be more open to Vincent’s work, but she also had been gifted with all the letters that Vincent had written to Theo, which she used to help tell Vincent’s story.
She pressed an envelope full of Vincent’s letters on Veth, encouraging him to use them, as she had, as a means to illuminate the paintings. She didn’t try to come across like an art critic but instead poured her heart out to the man, trying to guide him toward the shift in thinking that she felt was needed to perceive a new mode of artistic expression.
It’s hard to think about Vincent van Gogh without thinking about his life. It’s hard to think about any artist without thinking about their life and Jo is the one that changed that for the entire art world.
“…And her achievement informs our image to this day of what an artist should do: be an individual; suffer for art, if need be.” It takes some effort today to realize that people did not always see artists that way. “When I was studying art history, I was told to unthink that notion of the starving artist in the garret,” Gordenker says. “It doesn’t work for the early modern period, when someone like Rembrandt was a master working with apprentices and had many wealthy clients. In a sense Jo helped shape the image that is still with us.”
The idea of the starving artist, suffering for their art, came from Jo. And as the quote highlights, this was not always the case, especially if you look at the time of Rembrandt. In some ways we are returning to the Dutch golden age, with modern day artists like Jeff Koons who has an army of artists working for him, selling to extremely wealthy clients, who buy his art for millions of dollars.
But now we also have artists like Beeple, who are also selling their NFT art for millions of dollars to the crypto wealthy. This is a very recent phenomenon, like less than a year go recent. Beeple talked about this sudden transition to NFTs in his interview with Kevin Rose on the podcast “Modern Finance”. He said that before NFTs, he had never sold one single piece of art. He gave it all away and he became famous for them, but he never made any money off of them. He was paid as a designer, where he would produce work based on a client’s specifications, but he was never paid for his art, the “shit” he made just because he wanted to make it.
NFTs changed all of that. They brought a whole world of digital art, which had long been considered worthless from an artistic perspective, and created an international market where people could buy them. And guess what, we found out very quickly that there were a lot of people who wanted to buy them and not just buy them, but buy them for a lot of money. When you live in a world that is largely driven by money, the price you put on something often dictates its worth. Because there was no real way to put a price on digital art, it was never considered to be of any value, but NFTs allowed you to put a price tag on it, authenticate it, put it into a smart contract and make money selling it not just once but in perpetuity. When that price sky rocketed, everybody took notice and suddenly what was worthless became priceless.
In this new world of NFTs, where so much is changing on almost a daily basis and everything is so complex not just from an artistic standpoint but also from a technology standpoint, you need someone looking out for the artist’s best interest. You need someone to be their advocate and truly support them in every way because at the very beginning, a creative endeavor is an incredibly fragile thing. You need somebody who can see an artist’s worth maybe even before they can see it themselves. You need somebody who can truly connect with what the artist is doing, then set out to open the eyes of the world to the beauty that the artist is creating.
This is what I believe is the job of the collector. The collector needs to take on the role that Jo did for Vincent, be the artist’s champion in a world where there is so much doubt both from the outside and from within. I do not think a collector’s job is one of an investment banker, trying to build a portfolio that will be worth more in the future than it is today, though I do think it is part of being a collector because you want the world to value the artist at the proper price. But I believe that the collector needs to be a friend, a confidant, an understanding ear, an honest opinion, and they need to ensure that the artist has a safe space for all of this. Smart contracts and crypto currency have provided the means for an artist to get the financial reward they deserve and crypto from a larger perspective is allowing the market for their art to be the entire world instead of just those who use the US dollar or those who live in their city or country.
As I reflect on those letters that Jo had in her possession, the letters between her husband Theo and his brother Vincent, I think the modern equivalent of those letters is Twitter. I have been blown away by the NFT community and how strong it is and I have seen it almost entirely on Twitter. I know Twitter has gotten a lot of criticism lately, but Twitter has been a truly transformative technology for the NFT community and I believe it will be a crucial part in making NFTs a long-term success. It is a public record of all the correspondences between artists, collectors, and the general public. Anybody can read them and anybody can join a conversation. Many in the NFT community created a Twitter account only a couple months ago, so it is a fresh new community that is just forming. And these tweets from the NFT community are what collectors can use, just like Jo’s envelope of Vincent’s letters, to convince people to see what they see in all the artists they love.
