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Paris dealers like to circulate the story of a customer who ordered two Matisses by phone. When the dealer asked whether the client would like to look at the paintings, the voice at the other end thundered, "When I buy 100 shares of Royal Dutch, I don't go and look at the oil wells." Manhattan's Edith Halpert, whose Downtown Gallery deals exclusively with top American art, reports that a Texan once rushed up to her at a party, said he had been hearing great things about American art. and drawled, "Honey, I want you to make me up an American collection." Other collectors—people who will settle for third-or fourth-rate paintings just so long as they carry the accepted signatures —are known as "stamp collectors" to the trade. A common saying among dealers: "He's a collector with a very good ear."
The Van Gogh Syndrome. The U.S. collector has long been a strange mixture of boldness and timidity. Half a century ago, he did not dare to venture beyond the safe and pleasant landscapes of the French Barbizon school. But once jolted, he was willing to take extraordinary risks, and he began buying up the French impressionists more avidly than even the French. Today, he is gambling as never before, not only on abstract art. which has doubled and tripled and quadrupled in price, but on everything from sculpture welded out of junk to paintings made of torn burlap.
U.S. museums—notably Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art—have conditioned a whole generation to accept the avant-garde without the long period customarily allotted for the gestation of art. They exhibit new artists not only for their achievement, but also because of their promise. There seems to be, says Henry Geldzahler, a curatorial assistant at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, a fear "of passing someone up, of not discovering someone who should be discovered. It's the Van Gogh syndrome. The museum directors are going to make sure that no ears are cut off in the 1960s."
Art for Money's Sake. There is no doubt that the general public today is better informed about art than any public before it. But unhappily, knowledge and taste—or even the desire for status —are not the only reasons for the present buying spree. What bothers most people in the field is that art has become a major form of investment, looked upon by many collectors exactly as a broker looks upon a portfolio of stock. Last week a new tip sheet appeared on the market full of exclamation points, red lettering and screaming capitals that are typical of the new commercialism. HOW TO MAKE SUPER-PROFITS IN THE ART MARKET NOW, it cried. "Your possible rewards are so unlimited that it might be more accurate to say that the risk you take is the risk of becoming RICH!"