Privacy and Collecting

6 January 2022

In today’s digital world, privacy is a contentious topic - how do online platforms help collectors navigate the potentially contradictory desire to maintain privacy and reveal their collections to the public?

Jo Lawson-Tancred

Jo Lawson-Tancred writes about art and the art market for Apollo Magazine, The Financial Times, and The Economist's 1843 magazine, among others. She is also a data scientist, having completed her MSc in Data Science.

Many lovers of the arts bemoan the great hordes of museum-quality masterpieces hidden away by secretive collectors in dark warehouses like the Geneva Freeport. This is not always the case, some collectors harbour more megalomaniacal desires and name whole museums after themselves, with the happy side effect that the public is given a chance to enjoy their treasures too.

Reasons for remaining covert likely say something about the intentions of a collector. ‘Those that are more connected to the object itself might want to work only with very prestigious museums for the purpose of cultural heritage. And they might choose to lend anonymously’, says Marcela Correa, head of projects and partnerships at Vastari, a members-only online portal that connects collectors with museum curators.

By contrast, ‘collectors more interested in investing may want to go public and lend to as many museums as possible’, she adds, in the hopes that featuring in exhibitions and catalogues will boost a work's value. Alternatively, they might watch and wait, analysing the market to forecast an optimum time to go public.

Vastari allows communication between curators and collectors to remain anonymous at first. ‘We wanted collectors to safely just let museums know what they could lend’, says Correa. The only information required straight-up is the location of a work for estimating shipping costs. Museum professionals aren’t either allowed to snoop around the collection that a work of interest belongs to. These measures, which allow collectors’ control over how much to reveal, have produced a global network of otherwise unthinkable connections.

Collectors on the down low may also be wary of taxation, suggests Evrim Oralkan, who co-founded the online Collecteurs platform with his wife Jessica. ‘It’s an asset so they may not want to disclose it to the authorities’ he says. And anyway, making a work famous isn’t the only way to curry interest. ‘You always hear about these paintings that have been dug up from some cellar after decades and everybody wants to see it’, says Jessica.

‘I think privacy is important but that doesn’t necessarily mean the artwork needs to be hidden’, says Evrim. Collecteurs runs the online Museum of Private Collections, which invites collectors to publish their works either privately, for the community or publicly and to take part in curated digital exhibitions. For the most wary, there is even an option to encrypt details about the works, keeping these secret from the platform itself. Most collectors chose not to hide.

When it comes to selling too, there can be good reasons to fly under the radar and opt for a private sale, such as when a collector plans to flip a work. According to Evrim, sterner art dealers are on the lookout for buyers who ‘are in it for profit and not for the art’. This is partly why these commodities can be so hard to reach, reputation matters and access to some artists is only granted with time by galleries hoping to control the flux of their work going on the market. For them, any collector who resells right away is, in a sense, competition. ‘A collector might be seen to be losing confidence in an artist if they are selling,’ adds Jessica.

An alternative model is presented by the comparatively transparent NFTs, Evrim points out. In these volatile marketplaces flipping works is normal, with no middle man getting precious about shifts in supply and demand. We shouldn’t necessarily hold our breaths yet, however, that this will signal widespread change. ‘We are talking about a world that definitely doesn’t develop at the same speed as technology,’ says Correa. ‘The solutions to make your collection more public safely are all there and easy to use but both museums and collectors function in an old-fashioned, very physical way and don’t feel an urgency to change.’ Jessica agrees, ‘it takes a long time. At the beginning we had a lot of personal conversations with collectors wanting to know who we are.’

Correa is optimistic about blockchain’s other applications, such as storing provenance records and condition reports for insurance. ‘Our big hope is that technology is not just for the market and to make art public, but for privacy and safety too.’ Nonetheless, one of the biggest impacts of NFTs is its separation of ownership from the object by making it less about physically holding something than about wielding irrefutable proof that it's yours. The resulting clout is, surely, buoyed by the object’s popularity. As younger collectors become more and more enthused by the possibilities, old attitudes to privacy might be on the way out.