An elite group of no more than 10-20 collectors have begun over the past 3-4 years to visit art fairs abroad, acquire works by international artists and attempt to position their collection beyond national borders.
Especially in recent years, as the real estate and the stock exchange boom had stopped, many turned to contemporary art for short-term or long-term investment. Quite a few of these buyers prefer direct contact to artists, making bulk purchases at heavy discounts in the studio. Aware of the risks of siding with contemporary art, they diversify their selections, and acquire groups of works that are difficult to bring on common denominator within a harmonious collection, yet guarantee a balanced future. [..] Strictly speaking these acquisitions make up no collections (if the latter is understood as a coherent entity), yet may become one by slimming down.
Lawyers and brokers, media figures and top managers seem to share a strong penchant for getting to know the person whose works they collect and for establishing a contact they often deem “friendly”. In my experience the artists share this “friendship” less enthusiastically, yet play the role happily for obvious reasons. [..] [Collectors] build up a network of artist acquaintances parallel to their private and business relations, and often spend increasing amounts of time in this new niche of their life. Collecting in this role is a medicine for the thirst of new human relations, often (seemingly) less rational than the world of business, and less conventional than the family circle. Without stretching the point, one may say that quite a few actors of the scene collect friends rather than art.
In the Western world normally unthinkable due to excessive prices, several Hungarian collectors have been able over the past two decades to amass Hungarian works spanning the whole of the 20th century.
In terms of media, painting predominates. Other traditional forms (graphics, sculpture) are much less popular, but their position is improving. Photography, new media, installation, object art, other ephemeral, site-specific, and mixed media works are still lagging behind, but likewise spreading. In recent years, the elite layer of collectors has definitely realised the importance of diversifying the media they collect.
The influence of galleries on collectors is also on the rise. In the first phase following the fall of the Wall, collectors were – for reasons lying at hand – very individualistic, often secretive in their approach, as well as financially stronger and faster than the young galleries. Most collectors were unwilling to pay a “gallery price”, and we can still find artists and buyers negotiating in a double prices system (where atelier prices grossly undercut the gallery price level), yet this is now receding.
Some collections tell immediately, at first look the decisive impact of the gallery standing behind them, while in other cases the collector retains the right of selection stronger, yet accepts the dictate of the market: purchases have to be carried out increasingly by way of a gallery. This motivates more and more artists to ally with galleries, which, in turn, forces a growing circle of collectors to frequent the galleries and art dealers. The system of collecting becomes more and more institutional in Hungary.
The sales made at the fair could just as well take place in the galleries at some other time; the fair exerts no clearly identifiable impact on collecting. International fairs, in contrast, have a rapidly growing effect on the Hungarian scene.
A surprisingly large number of new galleries (launched since 2000) have been quite successful in building up their clientele, and luring away buyers from senior galleries. Non-profit galleries have an increasingly important say in the game. As collectors become experienced, they realise that curators working at these institutions, and artists exhibiting there, often have prophetic power. What appears as a peripheral new phenomenon in the arts scene, perhaps in one of the non-profit “gate-keeper galleries”, may within a year or two have ascended to higher status.
Among the museums, the Ludwig Museum in Budapest takes a central position, yet its co-operation with collectors is brand new and still fairly weak, rather symbolic. Both the previous (founding) and the current director can be judged as mistrustful of private engagement in art, although in the past year or two there have been gestures of familiarising between the museum administration and private collectors. [..] Neither the Hungarian National Gallery nor the Municipal Gallery (the two other important public collections of modern and contemporary art in the capital) can boast closer ties with collectors. To put it bluntly, most collectors do not even know that both of these museums have a permanent exhibition of post-World War II art, and that their collections include some seminal works. In return, most curators and chief administrators working at these (and other) museums in Hungary are prone to similar ignorance.
Art magazines seldom provide food for thought to private collectors.
Although many [collectors] increasingly fear the “three evils” of publicity – the tax office, burglary and public envy – there is still regular coverage of art collecting by a few specialised art writers.
With a few exceptions (such as the Kassák Museum), larger public institutions rarely show private collections. For the Ludwig Museum, showing a private collection is entirely out of question. True, the international scope of this museum’s own collection has no peer among the private holdings in the country (with the sole exception of the Somlói–Spengler Collection, which attempts to catch up with international trends of collecting).
Over one hundred private collections of contemporary art in Hungary.
Collectors increasingly get to know each other. Recently a communication agency has set up a platform for their regular meetings, as well as a webs-site for interaction, while a few collectors go further and jointly fund art prizes, visits abroad and, vice versa, invitations of international art experts to Hungary.
Among the company collections, that of Raiffeisen Bank is the most solid, while among he company-funded prizes Strabag Award dominated the scene for over a decade, with the brand new Aviva Prize now poised for taking it over. In most corporate projects, however, the domination of the marketing aims can not be overlooked.
As elsewhere in the world, artists themselves are avid collectors in Hungary. Some of these collections (e.g. that of László Fehér, Tamás Konok, István Haraszty, Ákos Matzon) have become known through numerous exhibitions, yet there are dozens more. Most artists build their holdings by way of exchange, and this opens the way to international works, too, that would otherwise be difficult to obtain. A few artists (for instance Imre Bak) became known for that as early as in the 1970s, with museums borrowing foreign works from them; and it still holds that artist collectors are at the forefront of international collecting in the country.
Spurred by Dóra Maurer, the Open Structures Art Society (whose members range from István Nádler to Katalin Hetey) regularly stages exhibitions both in Hungary and abroad, based on their joint collection and documentation archive, which is an outstanding testimony of geometric creation in Hungary and the world over the past decades.
The Mobile MADI Museum is the collection of a group of artists.
The private holdings of Lóránd Hegyi or the late Éva Körner and Ottó Mezei are examples of collections put together by art historians, and the list goes on.
Those Hungarian artists who do have some recognition abroad (typically neo-conceptual mid-career figures, such as Róza El-Hassan, Attila Csörgő, or the Kis Varsó duo) are under-represented in Hungarian collections. In contrast, the most sought-after local artists (e.g. Imre Bukta, László feLugossy) have limited reference abroad.
!! Among the collectors, only those have a chance of making a name abroad who mix Hungarian positions with international art. Some of these people live abroad (e.g. Gábor Hunya in Vienna, András Szöllősi-Nagy in Paris), while recently a few businessmen based in Hungary have also begun buying internationally (e.g. László Gerő, Ferenc Karvalits, Béla Horváth). The taste of this narrow elite is similar to the choices of new collectors elsewhere in Eastern Europe: they try to lift their respective local artists onto a higher echelon of international recognition by buying blue-chip foreign artists from respected galleries.