The art of business
With corporate curators taking more risks in their purchasing policy, staff around the City are being exposed to more cutting edge art than ever before.
An excitable group of schoolboys snakes along one of the corridors of Deutsche Bank’s Winchester House offices in the heart of the City. They bob around a lithograph of a giraffe, standing on tiptoe to get a good look, before scampering off down the corridor after their guide.
They couldn’t have arrived at a better time. Alistair Hicks, art adviser at Deutsche Bank, has just been explaining its ethos of breaking down the ivory tower mentality between companies and the outside world and making contact with the community through art. “I didn’t organise that you know,” he grins.
Whether it’s Tracey Emin’s neon sign saying “trust me” at international law firm Simmons & Simmons, Soo-Ja Kim’s Bottari Truck loaded with colourful silks that’s parked in Monsoon Accessorize’s head office or Simon Periton’s intricately cut vinyl elements that appear on the windows of the Channel 4 building, it’s almost impossible to make it to your desk these days without coming into contact with contemporary art in some shape or form.
How it gets there is down to the curators and art departments within organisations who bridge the gap between business and the art world. In the early days of corporate collections, their job was mainly concerned with buying and commissioning pieces to display a company’s taste and show off its wealth.
In these days of social responsibility, corporate curators are more concerned with creating attractive workplaces for employees and making inroads into the community with art tours and outreach programmes.
The reasoning behind the kind of art Deutsche Bank acquires is well-honed, as you might expect from the owner of the largest corporate art collection in the world. Aims such as buying contemporary works from young and unknown artists (but not for investment), and giving staff and visitors the opportunity to look at cutting-edge pieces without stepping foot in a gallery, come high on the list of priorities.
“For many people, there’s still a trepidation about going into galleries, because some of these places can feel pretty intimidating,” says Hicks.
Accessibility informs much of Deutsche Bank’s collection, which mainly consists of work on paper costing, on average, £1,000. These smaller pieces, which hang wherever there’s wall space throughout the building, are believed to be more accessible to staff, who might feel overwhelmed by larger works of art.
“They may hate what they see, but if they are interested, they could afford to buy similar pieces and our art department can help advise them on how to do that,” says Hicks.
Staff can find out more about featured artists by going on tours organised by the company’s art department. They can also take part in a regular survey to assess opinion on the company’s collection — a process encouraged by Arts & Business, a national charity that encourages links between the art world and the corporate sector.
But with a collection geared towards younger, more cutting-edge artists, surely you can’t please all of the people all of the time? Hicks maintains that corporate sector curators should never forget that the art is being bought for a working environment.
But with a collection geared towards younger, more cutting-edge artists, surely you can’t please all of the people all of the time? Hicks maintains that corporate sector curators should never forget that the art is being bought for a working environment.
“There are problems with, say, strongly feminist work being interpreted as sexist. But that’s fine because we’re here to explain the intention and that’s part of our job. If people from our workforce think something is sexist and that’s that, then we’ll take it down. There is a process for doing it, and we’d take it up to a committee and decide, but it’s very rare and has happened only once.”
Colin Tweedy, chief executive of Arts & Business, agrees that there has to be an element of “buy in” from employees, especially when a company is acquiring cutting-edge pieces, and recalls the rather speedy sell-off of a collection when one company’s taste was a tad too contemporary for the new owner.
“Tube Investments [TI Group PLC] had the most wonderful contemporary collection bought from the Royal College of Art. But when the company was bought by Smiths Group, the whole collection was sold for a song. The TI Group loved it but Smiths thought ‘What’s this got to do with us? We’re an electrical company, we don’t need this sort of stuff.’
“I think that if companies are going to buy very cutting edge art, they must have buy-in from their employees and colleagues, rather than it being one person’s personal agenda.” From an artist’s perspective, corporate collections provide an opportunity to explore different environments rather than create pieces for the “white boxes” that are today’s museums, according to Tweedy.
“I would argue that a lot of contemporary art is being made purely for museums. It’s not being made for real people at all,” he says.
Perhaps not, but art has always been made for the rich. Whenever there’s been money there’s been art.
“People have always wanted to display their wealth, show their tastes, but also support art,” says Tweedy.
So whereas once artists relied on rich patrons within the church or powerful families such as the Medicis of Florence, today they find support from big business. As industry progressed, wealthy industrialists in the 18th and 19th centuries, such as the Tate or Walker families, bought art for their homes rather than their offices and factories before donating it to the state or endowing it to a gallery. But it wasn’t until the 1960s and, to a much greater extent, the 1970s that businesses started to grace the workplace with art and design.
“David Rockefeller, who was chairman of Chase Manhattan Bank in New York in the mid-1960s, amassed not only a huge corporate collection for Chase Manhattan, but also housed it in the New York offices. Today, there are rooms which are virtually listed because the art in them is considered as important as the art in New York’s Museum of Modern Art,” says Tweedy.
But the 1970s also heralded a lot of bad press when it came to corporate art. In those early years many businesses were unsophisticated in their tastes and attitudes. Banks, for instance, would buy safe, traditional pieces to help convey a trustworthy image.
“Many curators and artists would have run a mile rather than be tainted with business patronage. There was a mood in the air that was anti-establishment, especially when it came to conceptual work,” says Hicks.
“Deutsche Bank’s policy is not to commission. It was part of the original concept that we didn’t want to interfere with the artistic process which probably comes out of that sensitive 1970s thinking, when commerce was a completely dirty word among a lot of artists and particularly curators.”
Despite the inroads that have been made over the years, there remains a residual distrust within the art world when it comes to companies buying art, says Tweedy.
“Any snobbery about corporate collections from within the art world lacks all reality because I can take people around business environments where the art is as stunning as anything you’d see in a gallery, and in fact far more coherent.”
It could, according to Hicks, have something to do with organisations who continue to take the easy option when commissioning for their offices. “There are an awful lot of companies commissioning work that is actually anti-art and does a disservice to art,” he says.
Tweedy suggests that there’s a natural conservatism in the corporate sector in this country, but it is a tendency that’s changing.
“Inevitably the art people select is often the art they’re comfortable with. Some businesses are challenging, such as Deutsche Bank because it’s a German bank. It has an ethos of taking risks, while the British traditionally are far more about views from the City or views of the Thames, but that’s something we’re now moving away from.”
When it comes to changing perceptions, Deutsche Bank has gone further than most, even showing work from artists who are critical of the business world.
“Our German curators have shown Hans Haacke around our collection although he had made a work attacking the bank in particular and a great deal of his work was about the corrupt influence of the commercial world on the art world.
“The bank knows it has to take the rough with the smooth. If you embrace artists with a critical point of view, it is difficult to exclude ones who are attacking you,” says Hicks.
Back in the spacious reception area of Winchester House following a tour of the corporate collection, the big-scale works by well-known artists that greet you when you first step inside the bank suddenly seem out of place in comparison. In fact, they are pretty much what you’d expect from an organisation looking to impress.
Anish Kapoor’s stainless steel sculpture reflects Damien Hirst’s Biotin-Malemide, as well as the besuited employees hurrying by. There’s also James Rosenquist’s The Swimmer in the EconoMist, a 90ft-wide brightly coloured vision of the 21st century that can leave the viewer feeling a tad insignificant. Beside it, Tony Cragg’s Secretions sculpture is an enormous organic shape constructed out of plastic dice.
Hicks explains the ethos of the collection can’t be applied to the art in the reception area, which is seen as a lead-in rather than representative and was paid for out of the building’s budget rather than the art one. Still, it’s a reminder that when it comes to corporate art, some things never change.
