Phin Jennings speaks to art advisor and podcaster Benjamin Godsill ahead of Art Basel Miami Beach to find out how he is preparing for the week ahead.
It’s lucky that Benjamin Godsill talks quickly. I’m speaking with him on the Monday of the week between the contemporary art sales at New York auction houses and Art Basel Miami Beach. He doesn’t have long to talk.
“At last count we’re looking through something like 450 PDFs, and each of those has between 8 and 40 artworks,” he explains. That’s somewhere between 3,600 and 18,000 artworks. Before the fair and its satellites open, Godsill — who splits his time between chopping it up about art and its markets with Vanity Fair’s cultural correspondent Nate Freeman on their podcast Nota Bene and running New York-based advisory firm Curatorial Services — hopes to have sifted through them all.
Art Advisor is a great title to give yourself if you are independently wealthy, attracted to the glamour of the art world and don’t really want a job. Search the title on Instagram and you’ll quickly see what I mean. If you happen to be in Miami this week, you’ll encounter plenty of examples IRL.
Godsill operates differently; after ten years at museums and auction houses, he now works with a few clients who pay him a retainer to be their eyes, ears and, sometimes, brains. “I’m not just a guy they know that offers them art […] I like getting into people’s heads, knowing them and what drives them, he tells me”. In other words, he is one of few advisors who actually advises. For a time-poor collector who wants to cut through the noise of the art market, his advice is invaluable.
The cocktail party effect is the phenomenon that allows us to focus on one voice in a crowded and noisy room, filtering out others, even when they’re louder — a kind of selective hearing. If Godsill’s doing his job properly, his clients will experience something similar in the big cocktail party that is the art world. “Me and my clients are hyper focused on the things that we’re interested in,” he says.
As such, his interest in talking about art world trends is limited. When I ask him about how Frieze London and Art Basel Paris, which took up consecutive weeks in October, compare, he agrees with the consensus that the vibe was better at the latter, but doesn’t consider it a particularly salient conversation: “Trying to tell meta stories about the world of art, what people are making and showing, based on what are basically commercial trade fairs is a bit of a fool’s errand.”
What’s important for him is that his clients tune in less to the pendulum-swing of the broader market and more to the specific focus of their own collection. “These things are so constantly in flux, you need to have a vision and see that vision through.”
It’s a simple maxim that good collectors, advisors, gallerists and curators live by. Some call it buying with your eyes, rather than your ears. It sounds like a simple task but, as we know, the art market can be loud, and it tends to crescendo during fairs: “it’s very easy to get this casino feeling at an art fair […] It’s very easy to decide to want to acquire just because there’s the feeling that money’s being spent and I think the fairs do an excellent job of cultivating that feeling,” he says.
Does that mean that a collector should navigate a fair with complete tunnel vision? Not quite; Godsill still encourages serendipitous encounters. After all, a preview PDF will never convey the experience of standing in front of an artwork. “Fairs provide a platform for actually experiencing art in real life, and oftentimes that’s quite different to what you might see on a screen,” he says.
It’s important that such diversions truly are happy accidents, rather than cases of following the herd to the next big thing. It feels good when the artists who you collect blow up in the market, “it’s a great assuager of the ego, it makes you feel like you’re on the right track,” he says, but it’s not what makes a great collector.
Nor is it, despite how it might seem in the short term, a particularly smart investment strategy. “The only collectors who have ever really made money in the art market are those who had insane visions and stuck to them and oftentimes bought stuff that, in the moment, other people didn’t value at all,” says Godsill. He cites Peggy Guggenheim as a collector whose unwavering commitment to an esoteric set of interests made her collection special.
How many of these collectors are there? In Godsill’s orbit, there are enough to keep him busy. In a market that’s often driven by ego and speculation, he seems to have found an enclave. “Perhaps I’m living in a fantasy world,” he jokes. Maybe so — but it’s not always a glamorous one. After half an hour of talking, I leave him to get back to the pile of PDF’s that need seeing to before Miami.
Words by Phin Jennings
