spotlight || art
The Art of the Advisor A collector’s best friend, Kati Lovaas is the ultimate art advisor. | BY KAREN S. SCHNEIDER
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ere’s the thing about working in an industry where a million-dollar masterpiece can look an awful lot like a squiggle of paint on a piece of paper: People are apt to say things like, “I have a third-grader who did something as good as that.” To them, art advisor Kati Lovaas offers the same advice every time: “Great. Let’s put it up!” And so they do. Right next to, oh, say, the six-figure Takashi Murakami. Or the seven-figure Peter Doig. And why not? “Contemporary art is like the wild, wild West,” says Lovaas.“There are no rules.” Not written ones, anyway. Even a world-class collector — the kind who keeps Lovaas on retainer so she can fly on a moment’s notice to Berlin to check out the latest Neil Rausch opening — can mix in his kid’s scribbles. As long as it’s her best scribbles. “I don’t care if you’re Picasso or Warhol or an emerging artist like Nate Lowman. In any show, there’s a huge difference between one work and another,” says Lovaas. “There is good, better and best. And that’s what I do. I find the best.” Actually, that’s just one thing she does. For the handful of clients willing to drop at least $100,000 a year on the modern and contemporary art she specializes in, Lovaas, an independent art advisor who works from her home in Wayzata, also negotiates the best price for it. She helps install it. She develops it — and other finds — into a coherent collection. She can give a collector a public presence, or just the opposite: make sure no one at the office or the club or anywhere else knows you own the most important Murakami on the market. If you like, she can snag you a Kanye West ticket. (“He’s a big collector,” she explains). Or get you VIP access to Art Basel Miami Beach. In a world where a long line of collectors clamors to acquire a limited number of important pieces, Lovaas’s most powerful asset is access. “It’s not about who’s first in line or who has the most money. You can offer more than the asking price. It doesn’t matter,” she explains. “For very desirable pieces or artists, galleries won’t sell to an unknown collector. But I can circumvent that. If I stand behind a collector, it makes a difference.” She is, in the words of David Petersen, who owns a contemporaryart gallery a few blocks from the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, “the real deal” — and a unique presence in Minnesota: a locally based advisor with a national clientele and an international presence. The
220 Artful Living
| Autumn 2013