(Originally published in TLOMA Today, December 2008)

What a half-century it’s been for the corporate art collection?! In less than fifty years the concept of corporate art buying and the collection that comes as a result have evolved from vestigial bump, to appended limbs that many companies have learned to put to good use, to the present-day phenomenon which is all but wings that carry small and large companies alike and serve a long list of management functions. It is almost as though art has grown into a complex and important extension of an organization’s structure and indeed its entire identity. Isn’t it ironic that in such economic times the greatest benefit to corporate may be culture itself?

The corporate art collection and its guardian the art consultant at nearly fifty years old are finally being given the acknowledgement that they deserve. Originally conceived as a means for banks to convey their wealth, strength globosity in the 1960’s, corporate collecting and collections themselves have matured into a commodity worth exponentially more today in marketing and PR dollars than the sum of a collection’s cash value

While it has taken almost five decades and an incredible amount of work and communicating to convince institutions to spend that single percent for public space art, those who have experienced the effect have never looked back. They have also wanted to keep this all a secret.

Until quite recently the collecting, curating, and enjoyment of contemporary art seemed to be reserved either for the very rich or major corporate players in the world’s art markets. A strange but welcome trend has become to emerge in the art world in the fifth decade of the corporate art collection – the small business collector.

Events and trends in luxury spending and investing continue to change the demographics of who collects contemporary art. As a result, small business, healthcare (both elective and the lifesaving sort) and most notably the legal professions make up a small, powerful, and growing minority consumer group.

With patronage and sponsorship as PR the corporate collector has become almost as important a facet of an organization’s identity as its name, logo brand or image. Some critics are suspicious of industry’s motivations for stepping in where governments once lent support. The art world, however, is delighted.

One of the best examples of this is the Deutsche Bank Collection. It is curated expressly to be confrontational, challenging, and provocative by its nature and only art with clear racist or sexist overtones is excluded from the committee for consideration. Even the topic of Deutsche Bank’s alleged involvement and participation in the holocaust is accepted if not encouraged as a subject in its acquired and installed pieces. Deutsche Bank was linked to the Nazi party as early as 1998 and was forced to admit that it financed the construction of Auschwitz concentration camp; in the decade since the company has embraced art that confronts these issues with the goal of seeming conciliatory and cathartic with monumental PR success, making it the topic of many an art history case study in the years since.

The future looks properly installed and well-lit too. Whereas the largest consumers of art were once a very few large banks and publicly traded corporate entities, today’s buyers are young and eager to have the same competitive edge for their law firms, PR companies and other small privately held companies. As governments make new cuts and banks go belly up, a new generation of small to mid-sized businesses are taking on the art world gamble, and not only surviving, but thriving.

Antonio Arch

Fine Art at Work: The Past, Present and Future of the Corporate Art Collection