Issue link: https://read.dmtmag.com/i/518559
180 CULTURED t comes as quite a surprise when Lisa Schiff, one of the art world's most prominent advisors, puts it out there that "any collector who is dedicated to doing this can be a good collector without an advisor." So why hire her? Because, she says, being a collector, is a full-time job and few people have the time for it. "You hire an advisor when you have a life outside of the art world because in order to stay on top of it 100 percent, it's what you are doing all day long." That's why almost two dozen top collectors —from Bridgitt Evans and Candy Barasch to a clutch of Hollywood figures—hire the bi-coastal advisor and her team of eight to not only oversee the development and care of their art holdings, but also share their enthusiasm. "It's a full-service company," says Barasch, who serves on the board of the SculptureCenter in New York and plans to give much of her collection away one day to the Whitney. "It's not just saying, 'you should buy this' or 'you should own that.' I'm having an installation here today and someone from her office is here overseeing it. They oversee my entire catalogue. They deal with shipping. It's nice to know that it's being taken care of. Lisa is in the trenches all the time and she has her finger on the pulse for me to see the landscape of art." Schiff—the daughter of a housewife (and former Miss Oklahoma) and a doctor who researches liver disease—grew up in Miami. She studied art history through undergraduate and graduate school before segueing to the commercial art world, first at a second-market gallery in New York and then doing a stint at an auction house. Then, about 12 years ago, a collector approached her about taking her around to some galleries. A month later that collector brought back a friend. Both are still clients. An art fair fixture ("I don't know anyone who travels more than her," says Barasch), Schiff has now branched out into philanthropy (co-founding, with Evans, the non-profit Visionary Initiatives in Art, two years ago) and curating. Earlier this year, she co-curated a 37-artist exhibit at Galerie Max Hetzler in Berlin and Paris titled "Open Source: Art at the Eclipse of Capitalism," which looked at how economic, environmental and technological changes are reshaping art. Here, we talk to the refreshingly frank advisor about how she shapes her clients' collections, "evening sale-only" collectors and scratching the curatorial itch. People complain about homogeneity among collectors today. Is that true? Everyone is really different. I have one collector who is incredibly interested in spirituality, so we look to artists who deal with the metaphysical, though it's not always overt. We just did a big James Turrell installation. We've bought Trisha Donnelly. We're looking at Matthew Barney. I have another collector who really wants to collect only 10 artists ever and we are at six now—Christopher Wool, Rudolf Stingel, Louise Lawler, Glenn Ligon, R. H. Quaytman and Albert Oehlen—and we go very deep with those artists. And I have another client who won't buy an artist who doesn't have 10 years of real practice under his belt. Is herd thinking an issue though? Yeah, that to me is the only frustrating thing, because there are a flock of collectors who just can't see beyond the dollar bill—and they don't need to make money from art. But I think it clouds their judgment of what their real potential is. What potential do you mean? I don't blame people for being into the market. Art is really fucking expensive. You don't want to spend a million dollars and see it go to zero. These aren't people who are necessarily selling work. They want to know they have a quality investment. I think what some collectors don't understand is that their collection can become so important that the provenance of the artwork they own that maybe wouldn't go into an evening sale at Phillips will also be heightened. Rules of How power player art advisor Lisa Schiff artfully shapes some of the world's greatest private collections. BY DEGEN PENER I