Making all the mistakes with creator and collector Jeffrey Magid

Welcome to S1 E4 with author, creator, gambler, and collector Jeffrey Magid.

I recently met Jeff as his Instagram videos popped up on my phone. I was impressed not only with how generous he came across, but also how unusual it was for a collector to be so open. I knew we'd have a great conversation and I was right!

In this episode we discuss how reciprocity and friendship inform Jeff's collecting. He tells us about all the mistakes he's made as a collector, and he shares some truly mindblowing stories of experiences accumulated along his collecting journey. You can follow him on instagram and on tiktok.

Slater Bradley

Henry Taylor

Francis Bacon 

Sanya Kantarovsky

Eduard Vouillard

TEFAF

Marion Maneker’s podcast with Inigo Philbrick

The Palace at 4 am by Alberto Giacometti

The Vanguard Council at the Metropolitan Museum of Art

Hannah Howe

Massimo Bottura

Ileana Sonnabend

Carroll Dunham

Inigo Philbrick

Ellie Reines of 56 Henry Gallery

John Finkel

KGB Bar

Francesco Clemente

Ricardo Kudelmas’ Auroras

This episode is brought to you by SeeSaw - the best way to learn about gallery exhibitions in five cities: New York, Los Angeles, London, Paris, and Berlin. Pick your shows, map your route, and take off! 

(the art map app, not the elementary school app!) 

Download SeeSaw here.

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Transcript

[00:00:00] Lisa Cooley: Welcome to Oko, a podcast for collectors and other art lovers. I'm Lisa Cooley, your host. I have 25 years experience working in this field, and I wanna share it with you. For our first season. I'm taking you on a tour through the power centers of the art world. We're talking to artists, journalists, gallerists, critics, auctioneers, curators, collectors, and art fair directors about what defines the art world right now and how we got to this moment today.

[00:00:29] Lisa Cooley: I'm talking with collector Jeff Magid

[00:00:36] Lisa Cooley: welcome Jeff. 

[00:00:37] Jeffrey Magid: Thanks for having me. 

[00:00:38] Lisa Cooley: Thanks for being here. I would love for you to introduce yourself. 

[00:00:42] Jeffrey Magid: Sure. My name is Jeff Magid. I am as it relates to art, I'm a art lover and collector, and recently video maker and storyteller. It's a new venture. 

[00:00:54] Jeffrey Magid: And, I've done a bunch of other things. I'm a writer. I'm a gambler. And I've done a lot of things in music and songwriting and yeah, I'm excited to be here. In the short while you've had this show.

[00:01:03] Jeffrey Magid: I'm already a fan, so thanks for including me. 

[00:01:05] Lisa Cooley: Amazing. Thank you so much. Actually, that's how I first noticed you as you came through my feed. And I remember, that the first thing I thought is oh, this guy is trying to do the same thing that I'm trying to do with Oko.

[00:01:18] Lisa Cooley: But then , you also said that you didn't come from money. And then that also caught my eye because I don't, and I just think it's very unusual in the art world. And I just thought you'd be a really interesting person. And so I DMed you. 

[00:01:31] Jeffrey Magid: Thanks for the nice words, and thanks for including me.

[00:01:34] Lisa Cooley: Tell me where you're from. 

[00:01:36] Jeffrey Magid: So I was born in Boston and I grew up mostly in Cambridge, Massachusetts. And , my parents were not together at the time of my birth, but they're both academics. My mother was a philosophy professor and my father was a professor of economics.

[00:01:50] Jeffrey Magid: And then when he left the academic world he spent a while doing other things, including a long period of time as a taxi driver in Boston. 

[00:01:57] Jeffrey Magid: Yeah. But I feel like it's definitely a mission of mine, and maybe of yours too, to help the world of art reach more and more people that aren't from art backgrounds and get more people involved. So my background I think of maybe as a funny use case in relation to inclusivity in art because in any other world I am tremendously lucky in my background. I grew up a highly educated white male in a major city. Both of my parents have PhDs. And really, I had, and also I had a great upbringing with, loving family and so on. Really, I got absolutely nothing to to complain about. 

[00:02:35] Jeffrey Magid: And and yet I never encountered the art world in any capacity. I had never met anyone who was a working artist, nevermind gallerist or art collector or curator. And to be honest, it didn't really cross my mind much that such a world even existed.

[00:02:53] Jeffrey Magid: So yeah, that's my background as it relates to art. 

[00:02:56] Lisa Cooley: Then how did you come to art then? 

[00:02:58] Jeffrey Magid: I'd say basically by accident, I always found art interesting. I've been, and I had been to museums but I don't think I had ever been to a commercial gallery. And I basically, I just got very lucky in the music world.

[00:03:10] Jeffrey Magid: I met a guy who was DJing and he was the first art related friend I had. He was a successful contemporary artist and we just became friends in a natural way. But also I just thought it was really exciting to know. I could tell he was part of a world that I didn't even quite, and as I got to know him, I realized it was a world that I hadn't really wrapped my head around at all or really thought about, because he was just a few years older than me and it's not that I didn't understand that art existed, but when I thought of art, I would've thought of Picasso or Van Gogh, or people that are dead.

[00:03:44] Jeffrey Magid: What was so interesting to me wasn't just the art that this guy was making, but that he was part of some whole world of people, a lot of whom were young and very much alive and it was, even more interestingly, it was a lot of people's jobs.

[00:03:57] Jeffrey Magid: I don't think I quite realized that. I knew they're artists. I'm sure I realized that people like Van Gogh was an artist, but no one liked his art and then never sold anything. And then later he's a legend. But I didn't realize there were people who were living legends, and living like living legends.

[00:04:11] Jeffrey Magid: This was a fascinating thing to me, that there was this whole world of really successful people where their jobs and their lives were this art world, I didn't think I'd ever heard that term before. And he was very nice. The guy's name is Slater Bradley. Thank you Slater. If you hear this, I owe him a lot of a lot of thanks.

[00:04:27] Jeffrey Magid: And also I believe in thanking the people . It's really tempting, I think to, you can see this in music and everything else, everyone like makes it and then they're like, yeah, and I did this all by myself.

[00:04:36] Jeffrey Magid: No one helped me. No one. And you're like, wait, but didn't I put you on my first album? And you're like, yeah someone else would've put me on there for I'm that good. I, that's never been my feeling. I want to appreciate the people that helped me along the way. And the first one was Slater Bradley.

[00:04:48] Jeffrey Magid: So appreciate you Slater. He was really nice to welcome me, someone who didn't really have anything to do with the art world and brought me to stuff. And then he was part of an all artist poker game. So he invited me to the all artist poker game in the studio of Dirk Skrebber.

[00:05:03] Jeffrey Magid: Thank you Dirk for welcoming to your poker, being a friend and also really nicely. I would ask them all. I would go to their poker game. We'd play poker for like really was like we'd win and lose $3. It wasn't exactly high stakes poker, but it was a real mutual they all love poker. And I had just a random bit of my backstory.

[00:05:22] Jeffrey Magid: An undergraduate and I owed $126,000 to student loans for Brown University for being so nice as to give me a degree for only 126 and a half thousand dollars. And I was looking forward to a life of student debt like so much of the world. And I was lucky that I had a skill for playing games.

[00:05:40] Jeffrey Magid: And so I paid my student loans back by playing online poker. Which I guess made me coming out of college, a professional poker player, although I wasn't professional in any other sense other than just I was in my dorm room playing cards on the internet.

[00:05:51] Jeffrey Magid: But because of that, when I met these artists, we had a fun exchange because I was just thinking, wow, I had never known a real artist, but they, lovers of poker also thought, we've never known a professional poker player. So it was fun, we'd ask each other questions and they were really nice and humoring my questions about how art worked and also introducing me to other to other artists.

[00:06:13] Jeffrey Magid: So that was really how I got an entry into this kind of hard to crack world. 

[00:06:19] Lisa Cooley: And then so how did you go from that to collecting art? 

[00:06:22] Jeffrey Magid: I guess I'd say it never even occurred to me that I could be an art collector and I still don't think of myself as an art collector, which is strange.

[00:06:30] Jeffrey Magid: It's partly another reason why I started making my own videos and stories is because I feel like art is a part of my life and I'm at this point a part of art, in my own way, but I never thought of my role as being just an accumulator of objects. There's nothing wrong with, loving objects and doing that.

[00:06:52] Jeffrey Magid: But I never thought, oh, this will be my role. I'll accumulate lots of things and then brag about them, or whatever else like that, that just didn't cross my mind but I'd say the guys in the poker game were nice enough to welcome me to their studios and encouraged me bit by bit to take a little bit of cash and buy a small thing here or there.

[00:07:05] Jeffrey Magid: So I bought bits from the people that I met. And then when I moved to LA about 12 or 13 years ago they introduced me to the guys who have a poker game of artists in LA. So I met a whole other group of people and I met my first art gallery owner Jeff Poe of Blum and Poe Gallery.

[00:07:22] Jeffrey Magid: And he was the representing gallerist of several of the people in the poker game, including my first art friend. So that was where I bought my first artwork from a gallery. 

[00:07:32] Lisa Cooley: What was your first work? 

[00:07:33] Jeffrey Magid: It was a painting by Henry Taylor. That's still a big part of my life today. 

[00:07:38] Lisa Cooley: I think I've seen a video on your is it just Instagram or is it Instagram and TikTok or where is it?

[00:07:45] Jeffrey Magid: Oh, yeah baby. It's where, it's Wherever movies are shown. All platforms, 

[00:07:49] Lisa Cooley: Wherever you get your podcast. 

[00:07:50] Jeffrey Magid: Yeah, exactly. 

[00:07:52] Lisa Cooley: You did make a video about it. Okay I'll direct people to your video. We don't have to go so, so in depth into it unless you want to.

[00:07:58] Jeffrey Magid: I'll just say, maybe, 'cause it's just a minute long video or two. But I'll say a couple things about it, which is, in retrospect it was a really crazy thing to have done I was just thinking about that. I'm glad I made the leap, but only by being really I dunno if crazy is the right word, but being 

[00:08:18] Lisa Cooley: Comfortable with risk?

[00:08:19] Jeffrey Magid: Very comfortable with risk, even risk that I couldn't risk. So I was very lucky that I thought I could find my way stubbornly asking questions and walking into rooms that I wasn't necessarily even welcome in.

[00:08:34] Jeffrey Magid: And I've got very lucky that served me well thus far. But not only would I not recommend it to everyone, I hope to make a different kind of world of art. Because basically, I bought an artwork for a price that really I couldn't afford.

[00:08:50] Jeffrey Magid: And that shouldn't be the only way to get into art. It was my way. But , it shouldn't be the only way. 

[00:08:56] Lisa Cooley: Did you just pay for it over time, or how did they worked with you on it somehow? Like you guys just found a solution, you found a way forward. You were like, "I wanna buy," this is what I got.

[00:09:05] Lisa Cooley: And you guys figured it out somehow. 

[00:09:07] Jeffrey Magid: No, I didn't even know any of that was possible. Oh. What happened was I walked through the show with my first gallery friend. He was very nice enough to walk me through. But also it was at a time where this artist, Henry Taylor, who's now, recognized by many museums, I think as, one of the great artists alive.

[00:09:23] Jeffrey Magid: I'm biased because I like him and I like his art, but think he's one of the great, 

[00:09:26] Lisa Cooley: He's so likable also. 

[00:09:27] Lisa Cooley: He's just so likable and charismatic and generous and yeah, I haven't met anybody who isn't like Henry Taylor. 

[00:09:34] Jeffrey Magid: What a guy. And maybe that's what attracted me at first is also even his art is really sincere, welcoming.

[00:09:42] Jeffrey Magid: And empathetic. 

[00:09:43] Lisa Cooley: Empathetic, absolutely. That you took the word I was about to say. Yeah. 

[00:09:47] Jeffrey Magid: And so I didn't understand. There were fewer art advisors at the time by a lot, but there's still art advisors and people that might have given advice, but I didn't know any of them.

[00:09:56] Jeffrey Magid: I didn't really have a mentor. The couple people I knew were artists. I didn't really have anyone to ask. And truthfully, especially at the time, no one really would've wanted to advise me as a business venture because I didn't have enough money. I wouldn't be a worthwhile client to anyone because I could barely afford to buy the one painting, so no one was looking to be my art advisor. 'cause by art standards I was a nobody. But also I was neither, a movie star who just got into art, nor someone from a billionaire dynasty. I wouldn't have even seemed future valuable to anybody.

[00:10:26] Jeffrey Magid: But one thing I realized that I did have was, at the time Henry Taylor wasn't a super hot selling artist. So actually the shows weren't completely selling out. 

[00:10:36] Lisa Cooley: And this was like about what time period? 

[00:10:37] Jeffrey Magid: This was 2012 and 13. 

[00:10:39] Lisa Cooley: Okay. 

[00:10:39] Jeffrey Magid: Wild thing is, I think the show was in 2013 that I bought a painting. But even years later, three or four years later, a friend who also had never been part of the art world, saw my painting and said, oh, I'd really like to buy a painting by the artist.

[00:10:50] Jeffrey Magid: And I said, oh, the art world is tough. Just so you know. He said, no, I'm gonna email the gallery and just see what's available. And I said, okay, but just so you know, it's whatever. And he wrote them and he said, Hey I saw a friend's Henry Taylor, what do you have for sale? And they sent him an email with 12 different things available.

[00:11:04] Jeffrey Magid: So even years later, there was still time where one could buy a great painting by this artist who since has become a super eminent I 

[00:11:13] Lisa Cooley: think it's fair to call him a blue chip artist. Yeah, I think it's an outdated term, but I think it's helpful for people.

[00:11:19] Lisa Cooley: It's still a shorthand that people have for someone who, whose career is minted by years and years of consensus and achievement and 

[00:11:27] Yes. 

[00:11:27] Lisa Cooley: But the other thing I wanna say about that is I think Henry makes a lot of work too. Yeah. I have collectors who I've been working with for 20 years, and they just still don't fully understand the idea that one artist may make 12 paintings a year, or I'm thinking about Leslie Vance or like Julian Nguyen, or, I'm trying to think who else off the top of my head.

[00:11:43] Lisa Cooley: But then there are other artists that work in totally different ways that can produce, they can work very fast and it's just the way that they work. So I think that's probably part of the thing too with Henry. 

[00:11:52] Jeffrey Magid: Yes. 

[00:11:52] Lisa Cooley: Yeah, and 

[00:11:52] Jeffrey Magid: also sometimes I think to myself, huh, I've done a lot now in art and when I started I didn't have connections. I didn't have an art degree. I didn't have family, I didn't have inherited wealth. What do I have? What am I bringing to the table here? Yeah, but when I realized, what attributes have let me go along this way, I realized the two things that I have in my corner are I'm incredibly hardworking as a student.

[00:12:17] Jeffrey Magid: I really wanna learn. And like actually it's funny, in my in my life as a professional gambler, which is maybe for a different podcast, but in my earlier life as a as a gambler, I always remember the story that this person who I looked up to talked about meeting one of the super OGs, the Triple OGs as they call him, really someone who's a legend of of the gambling world.

[00:12:36] Jeffrey Magid: In fact, he actually wrote the book called Gambler. He's one of the old school legends of Vegas gambling. And this guy I know who's really a, more of a math-based gambler. Met this legend and he said, I want any advice you have. And the guy said, oh, I'll tell you the secret to winning at sports betting.

[00:12:52] Jeffrey Magid: He said, yeah, what is it? And he said, outwork the other guy. And really, in a weird way, I realized in art especially, it's served me really well because I'm willing to do any amount of study, but also just hustle, legwork, whatever. And I realized in art, if you're listening to this and you're wondering, how do I fit in?

[00:13:12] Jeffrey Magid: Just know that actually there's tremendous opportunity in all areas, fields and job descriptions of art, especially for people that are driven because for whatever reason, there are a lot of amazing things about the world of art. But I would not say it's the field most filled with extremely driven, hardworking people.

[00:13:35] Jeffrey Magid: And in fact, that leads to a lot of opportunities. And I've noticed in the collecting world, for example, all the time it'll come up where I'll meet someone and they'll say, whoa, that's so cool. You did that a couple years ago. I'm just learning about that now. And they'd say, how'd you know about it?

[00:13:48] Jeffrey Magid: And I'd say. I've looked it up. And they're like, I never thought of doing that. I'm like, come on man. You know what I'm saying? This is really because they're just not used to, like, trying. Like a lot of people just don't try that hard.

[00:14:00] Jeffrey Magid: So I really do think to be really good at something or be one of the best at something, it really helps to actually love that thing because a lot of what it takes to be really good at something is to be driven to better yourself and to learn more information, to find out more.

[00:14:13] Jeffrey Magid: And that's hard to do if you just can't stand the topic. But what's amazing about art is on the one hand, it really rewards you, the more you learn. On the other hand, it's fun, it's art. You know what I'm saying? So I've done a ton of work learning, but none of it ever felt like work because I love, and actually what made me do, it wasn't to outwork the other guy or find the best opportunity or be the most knowledgeable about new field.

[00:14:34] Jeffrey Magid: I just loved it. Yeah. I'm like just going and I love is the wrong word, even I just, I'm reading about something and then I look up and it's six hours later and I'm reading about the same thing because I enjoy it. 

[00:14:42] Lisa Cooley: That's just activate your hyperfocus. Yes. Yeah. But it's interesting, 

[00:14:46] Jeffrey Magid: And what's interesting about it, it's one of the few things where it's really an intersection of not just creativity, art form, culture, but all things, politics, social class the way society structured, it's 

[00:14:57] Lisa Cooley: everything. 

[00:14:57] Lisa Cooley: Art is about everything. There's always a history of something. Law touches everything. And art is also about everything.

[00:15:03] Lisa Cooley: There's art about football, about, I was actually, I said football, but I was thinking soccer food, like boogers. I can think of artwork about everything boogers right now. But not only is there artwork 

[00:15:14] Jeffrey Magid: about everything, I guess what I mean is even the, mechanics of the working of the world of art are also about everything.

[00:15:20] Jeffrey Magid: Yes. That kind of like getting involved in art or for example, for me, I'm not a maker of painting and sculpture I'm just a learner. But even my life as a, whatever you want to call it, has made me cross paths with every aspect of society. How social class and economics and law and criminality and power structures and gender and patriarchy and all of these things are at play, not just in the artwork, but even in how they're distributed, sold, owned, is really an intersection of everything. And I think that's what makes it so fascinating even who gets to be involved in the world of art is a fascinating topic that is an intersection of all parts of culture, I think partly why I wanted to do this podcast but also make art based media is that it's sad, man, when you look, I know people are just doing their best, but when you look, especially at a lot of the people that, I'm just gonna say it right now 'cause it's might as well just be do it, whatever.

[00:16:17] Jeffrey Magid: A lot of people like do things like go on a panel about art and then don't say anything. 

[00:16:22] Lisa Cooley: Don't say anything. I know. 

[00:16:23] Jeffrey Magid: And man, if you wanted to play it close to the vest, just don't go on the panel. But for me, I'm gonna go on and I'm gonna talk my, can I swear on here? Yes. I'm gonna talk my please.

[00:16:31] Jeffrey Magid: I'm gonna talk my stuff no matter what. Otherwise I wouldn't come on, so to me it'd be sad if you would go watch some collector profile from the Frieze company and they're like, I like collecting because I enjoy it and I love, it's just come on man. It's 

[00:16:44] Lisa Cooley: just too anodyne and not, 

[00:16:45] Jeffrey Magid: It's just, say something of substance! 

[00:16:47] Jeffrey Magid: I have crossed paths with all kinds of, people in this world. Everything from, I'm talking about everything high, low, criminals, scammers, warlords, arms, dealers, whatever, it's all right here. Yeah. And if you're gonna speak on it, I feel like it's important to speak with with substance or not at all. 

[00:17:05] Lisa Cooley: Yes. Okay. So on that note like I said, when I first came across you I knew your name as a collector, but then when I first saw this video I saw something kindred in what you were trying to do.

[00:17:19] Lisa Cooley: I think the first video I saw it was like "Art collector walks into Art Basel Miami Beach." And I was like, oh, that's actually a helpful thing to see for people that aren't used to it. That, don't understand.

[00:17:30] Lisa Cooley: This is a thing. It's a trade show. You can walk into it. You can buy a ticket, anybody can buy a ticket. I would love to hear you talk more about your motivation for that, because I think that's also maybe something that we share and oh, you did a little bit earlier, but maybe there's more you can say 

[00:17:44] Jeffrey Magid: yeah, to be honest, and I was thinking this about even right before we went on air, whatever you wanna call it.

[00:17:49] Jeffrey Magid: Yeah. We were talking about the kind of customs and of the music world and art world and, which are more friendly and things like that. And I started to realize, 'cause I wasn't really a big consumer of social media content and still I, until I started making it, and now I'm fascinated by it and I've been watching the ways people do social media, and what I realized is that, so many of the customs or how quote unquote everyone does something, is just the way that everyone got used to doing it.

[00:18:14] Jeffrey Magid: And that's not to criticize. In fact, what I was gonna say is, myself included. So for example, sure. There's a way that people now are making fun of the sort of like blogger voice where people say, come with me as we go to try the new Mexican restaurant at the right, whatever. And you think, why did they all talk how they all have the same voice?

[00:18:28] Jeffrey Magid: Or in the way there's a YouTube voice where people say, Hey guys, we are here with the, whatever. Why did they say, I'll say, Hey guys, but you're like, I guess they just, you, that's what you do with YouTube is you do a Hey guys. Yeah. But and but myself included, I started to, I thought, okay, I'm gonna make videos about art.

[00:18:41] Jeffrey Magid: And I immediately started, the voice started coming out of me that's someone else's voice. But yeah, so I'd say that, initially I'm still learning what to do with art media. And I'd say at first my thought was, I'm going to Art Basel.

[00:18:55] Jeffrey Magid: Let me show a bit of the behind the scenes about how it works. And I made four videos. Three of them were different behind the scenes things with guests. One was interviewing an artist, one, was behind the scenes at a museum, and so on. And then one was just me talking where I just went on a rant about something.

[00:19:14] Jeffrey Magid: And everyone I talked to said the same thing. They said, that was cool. And I, and at first I thought. Oh, you know what? I'm a 40-year-old man making TikTok videos. This is gonna be humiliating. Everyone's gonna laugh at me and throw throw things at me and never, whatever.

[00:19:33] Jeffrey Magid: But I just decided the hell with that. I'm gonna just do it anyway. I'd say I've often been a overthinker and even too self-conscious to just put things out, I've made music and overthought it for years and never released it and so on.

[00:19:46] Jeffrey Magid: It's a hard thing to do, so I just figured, you know what? I'm just gonna humiliate myself and just make some stupid stuff and just the hell with it. But I figured, at least to have it be self-respecting in some way, you've gotta have guests, you've gotta have, whatever.

[00:19:58] Jeffrey Magid: I'll interview this artist who has this great show at ICA Miami, and I thought for sure some people will be like, Hey, could you see this guy? What an embarrassment, whatever, whatever. But what I wasn't prepared for was no one seemed to say, Hey, have you lost your mind? You've humiliated yourself and damaged your reputation forever. Which I thought was a possibility. But what people immediately said to me was, that was nice. Nice job. That's cool. But you know what? I didn't really like the other ones. I only liked the one where you talk, 

[00:20:25] Jeffrey Magid: and I realized almost immediately there was something that I was noticing about art media. There's not a lot of art media anyway. There's not, but even what there is mostly, is it all, is very dry. 

[00:20:39] Lisa Cooley: Very dry. And it's, this is it's cloaked and like a heavy cloth and everything is like a little lugubrious and just yeah.

[00:20:47] Lisa Cooley: Nice word. Overly like serious. And like maybe it's got some dust on it. It needs to be blow the dust off the top of it. Yeah. 

[00:20:55] Jeffrey Magid: Agree. And it's also all very academic so that Yeah. Academic, and it all feels like something you'd be assigned to watch and you'd be like, oh man, do I have to watch this?

[00:21:05] Jeffrey Magid: And I've mostly been that I'm a pretty self-motivated learner, so it's, for me, I can, I remember being in school and they're like, watch this thing. And it's someone like, we're going to show. I'm like, 

[00:21:12] Lisa Cooley: exactly. 

[00:21:13] Jeffrey Magid: So I'm like, ah, next, whatever. But I realized that part of that is just because it's not personality driven.

[00:21:18] Jeffrey Magid: But if you think about it, like a lot of the best media and every other form is personality driven, and a lot of my heroes, I love, I. Hunter Thompson, for example. And a lot of what he did was, he just put himself in the story because the story about the Kentucky Derby is a little boring, but a story from a maniac reporter in the bathtub, frantically writing Kentucky Derby story while high on acid, hours before it's due. That's interesting. 'cause it's got his personality in it. Yeah. So I guess I've just been bringing a little bit of my own personality to it, and that's been fun.

[00:21:47] Lisa Cooley: But also, this is the thing that I think people frequently forget about, is my experience of the art world is through personalities. The way that we're talking about talking is how I talk about art all the time with my, with my friends, with artists.

[00:22:02] Lisa Cooley: It's people driven. And I love people and I love talking about art and I, this is the register that I talk about art in most frequently. And I think that's the case for most people that function in the art world. Whether it's a job or you're making art or you're a fan.

[00:22:19] Lisa Cooley: They don't suddenly switch register to the voice of Artforum or to the voice of the New Inquiry. That's important for academia, but , this is not academia. There is urgency an immediacy to how most art gets talked about and discussed and experienced, and it's usually very sensory.

[00:22:41] Lisa Cooley: 'cause you're in front of an object, you're responding to it usually you have a body response to it, whether you think wow, that's a lot bigger than it looked in the picture, or the colors, you can see them more clearly. And so I think that yes, this is the way to talk about art for our time, but I also think that it reflects much more the immediacy of experiencing an art object.

[00:23:02] Lisa Cooley: Yeah. Okay, so you just came back from TEFAF, and another thing that I noticed is you're collecting old masters. 

[00:23:09] Jeffrey Magid: Yeah. 

[00:23:10] Lisa Cooley: A little bit. 

[00:23:10] Jeffrey Magid: I've started. 

[00:23:11] Lisa Cooley: Tell me. 

[00:23:11] Jeffrey Magid: Oh yeah. I feel like I scared some people because a gallery director who I like and is a friend just send me a thing saying, Hey, normally she would just whatsApp me the art Basel Hong Kong preview PDF. Yeah. But this one, she sent me a long note before, Hey, I know maybe you're just only collecting old masters now. Would you still like to see our Art Basel preview? I'm like, whoa, it almost feels like such a departure that I think it scared people that I quit the rest of 

[00:23:35] Right.

[00:23:35] The rest of contemporary art. 

[00:23:36] Jeffrey Magid: But I haven't quit the rest of contemporary art. Don't worry. But yeah, I've started a year or so ago getting really interested in learning about art from the 15 and 16 hundreds. And I think before that I'd say anyone would, describe me in art as a buyer of very contemporary art. And I started with very contemporary art really for very functional reasons. I started because who I met and knew were artists. And so I was buying from their new shows.

[00:24:04] Jeffrey Magid: And they were the ones who were giving me advice. For example, . I met Henry Taylor in his show. I asked him who he thought was really good, he said, Noah Davis. So I bought a Noah Davis and so on. And even some of the artists that I like now are informed by what got me excited in 2013.

[00:24:19] Jeffrey Magid: Even things that I couldn't afford. So for example, I love, I dunno why I'm just thinking of this, but maybe the hottest artist in that exact moment. Asked a couple other artists and they were like, man, Joe Bradley is so good. I'm like, oh, I think so too. I really liked Joe Bradley, but , it was totally inaccessible to me. 'cause of the demand and price point and 

[00:24:35] Lisa Cooley: also frequently the scale, like scale often scale's been an issue. Yeah. You have to have space for those. 

[00:24:40] Jeffrey Magid: Now he continues to be, both Joe Bradley and Henry Taylor, all these artists were good in 2013 and are good, even better in 20 24.

[00:24:47] Jeffrey Magid: Not to like date them or whatever, I want to, what's the word? Put proper respect and admiration on the people. I really want to give credit where credit's due to the artists I really love. I wanna also really talk genuinely about what I love and mean it, and so I already said how much I love Henry Taylor's work, but yes, Joe Bradley, I saw his, a show of his, I loved it.

[00:25:06] Jeffrey Magid: I couldn't come close to either affording or even being considered important enough to get offered one from his show in in 2013 or 14. But almost 10 years later, I came to own a painting that I really like, but it's informed by, I bought it in 2022, but I 

[00:25:23] Lisa Cooley: But you bought it with your mind in 2013!

[00:25:24] Jeffrey Magid: I bought in my mind, exactly what I mean. You know what I'm saying? So so it stays on that journey. 

[00:25:28] Jeffrey Magid: Yeah so I was buying things very contemporary and from current shows, but it was also for two other reasons.

[00:25:33] Jeffrey Magid: One, I wanted to buy emerging art because that's all I could afford, 'cause basically people's early shows were comparatively less expensive. And that was good because I couldn't outbid someone for the greatest Picasso. But I could buy something from a brand new artist show at a low price point.

[00:25:49] Jeffrey Magid: But there was another reason too, which is that even in 20 12, 20 13, it was starting to change. But when I first got into the world of art, the hot thing wasn't to collect emerging art. The hot thing was the star living artist. 

[00:26:03] Jeffrey Magid: The conversation was about the kind of minted art stars, Jeff Koons and George Condo and whatever, and telling people, Hey, you wanted to buy from an artist. First show was not where everyone was looking. So I thought, perfect. 

[00:26:17] Jeffrey Magid: It might be, a decade of learning. And I still might not know more than the experts on what makes a great work of modern art. These are people that have lifetimes of expertise. But young artists and new art it's one, it's who my peers are, it's who I might meet, it's what I can afford.

[00:26:34] Jeffrey Magid: But also it's an area where there's less competition, and less attention. And even better, what I realize is that people have spent a lifetime learning about Monet's work, but an artist who's only had two shows, no one's a bigger expert than me, right?

[00:26:47] Jeffrey Magid: It just started, we're on all on even foot here, right? You, so I was like, let let me get in where I fit in here and and start where I can. And that's been great. And I wouldn't have changed a a thing about it. And I've had a great run, supporting early and collecting and sometimes, not solely, but along with other people discovering new talents. I never wanna be the one who's " I discovered so and so" or whatever. But what I realized is, starting especially around the pandemic, suddenly that's where everyone and their mother wanted to be. Everyone was trying to jump on the next thing, right? Not just people buying, but also every gallery, even the galleries that were previously only showing great historic works of art, were all competing with each other to show the next hottest artist, which is all great. In a way all that means is more artists can make a living. There's a lot of good things for the art ecosystem that happened. Yes. But it meant that all of a sudden, for me, I'm always just thinking, 'cause it's funny, I get asked this question as if it's something like, just based on my mood or something.

[00:27:39] Jeffrey Magid: But I have one mission or I guess I have several missions. One of them is to help make art more accessible to more kinds of people. One of them is to do what I can to support artists, art institutions, museums, and so on.

[00:27:53] Jeffrey Magid: It's been tremendously gratifying to, do those kinds of things. But then the third is I'm not a collector of young art, old art, white art, black art, women, art, man art, whatever.

[00:28:05] Jeffrey Magid: My goal is to find a way to buy and afford the best art in my eyes that I possibly can with the limited budget that I have. So what that means is. I gotta go where there are possibilities. So for example, the first artist that I really fell in love with was, when I met these artists and I went to the artist poker game.

[00:28:34] Jeffrey Magid: I was like, whoa, I could learn about art. So I took myself to MoMA. I don't think I'd ever been to MoMA. And I saw this Francis Bacon painting where he's with the figure under the umbrella and the meat and whatever, and I just stood in front of it for an hour or two.

[00:28:49] Jeffrey Magid: I had one of those experiences where I'm not sure I could put it into words. It was really a transcendent experience with art. And then I got the book of interviews with David Sylvester and Francis Bacon. And I still think about different things that both of them say and that set of interviews to this day it's a cliche, but I put that book down and I said, oh, this changed my life really did, changed my life.

[00:29:07] Jeffrey Magid: You know what I mean? So people are like, what do you think of Francis Bacon love it, but I can't afford it. You know what I'm saying? For me I'm gonna keep evolving based on not just what peaks my curiosity, what's available, what's interesting, but especially also where is there great art that I can afford, and so when everyone in the whole world started rushing emerging art everything became massively more expensive for some reasons that are justified and some honestly that are totally unjustified.

[00:29:32] Jeffrey Magid: Yeah. But in any case, it became much more difficult to buy really great art of the same quality, for the same types of budget. And so it made me start thinking and in a weird way, again, my art advisors were artists. So I started going back in time in a strange way, motivated by things that artists said to me and even things that artists, said, and it wasn't even to me, so I started looking back at time and thinking, wow, for the amount that this costs now for this artist that I like is a good artist, but they're really just getting started. And I think they're good, but should this cost this much money?

[00:30:07] Jeffrey Magid: And then I was thinking, you know what's crazy? I remember different things artists said to me but one that wasn't even said to me an artist I like a lot, Sanya Kantarovsky, sorry if I'm pronouncing your name wrong, Sanya

[00:30:17] Lisa Cooley: I'm pretty sure that's right. 

[00:30:18] Jeffrey Magid: Okay. Sanya oh, Sanya. Who I think is a really good painter I don't know him. I think we've met for five seconds after maybe shaking hands. But I own one of his paintings and I think he's a great artist, but we're not friends. And so it wasn't advice he gave to me, but he was in an interview, they asked him what does he think about the, this crazy world of red hot brand new artists?

[00:30:35] Jeffrey Magid: And he said something like, sorry if I'm misquoting you, but he said, these prices are crazy for the price of a lot of this art, you can buy a painting by Vouillard. And I thought, interesting. And I googled who  Vouillard was, 'cause I don't have any education in art, so I'm just learning bit by bit, Wikipedia by Wikipedia, . Yeah. So I didn't really know who  Vouillard was. And I looked and I said, damn. Sure enough, for the price of some artists that may be forgotten in five years, you can buy a painting by Eduard Vouillard, who's spectacular.

[00:31:04] Jeffrey Magid: And then I realized, man, there are a bunch of artists that I like that are really good, that are working today and early in their careers, their main influence is  Vouillard, and Bonnard. Yes. And yet their paintings cost more than  Vouillard and Bonnard. Yes. Which is crazy. Yes. You know what I mean? Absolutely crazy.

[00:31:22] Jeffrey Magid: And so on the advice of Mr. Kantarovsky who was not giving me advice in particular I went and bought what I think is a spectacular  Eduard Vouillard painting. And I've been going back in time, so it wasn't like, I just switched.

[00:31:36] Jeffrey Magid: I'm okay, I'm done with contemporary art. I'm into old masters now, but more just whispered by whisper, advice by advice. I've been looking back a bit in time and it got me all the way back to the to the 16 hundreds in part because there's just amazing art. 

[00:31:51] Lisa Cooley: They're amazing opportunities 

[00:31:53] Jeffrey Magid: and they're amazing opportunities.

[00:31:54] Lisa Cooley: So what you're telling me is that you're century agnostic and you're looking for magic at a price you can afford. 

[00:32:02] Jeffrey Magid: Exactly. I'm looking to basically to find great art that I can be able to buy. Yes. And also this is another sorry for the shots fired in advance, but I'm not into and I'm a little bored of self restricting collections. I don't want to be, people are like, oh, I thought you were a 1990s collector. I'm like, what? Since when do you have to be a collector of one particular thing you don't like 

[00:32:24] Lisa Cooley: I think people do that as just a way to manage the volume of information. So one thing you were saying is there is so much information to consume, and that's one of the reasons why I started Oko, is that I realized there's just no shortage of information. If anything, there is an ocean of information because each artist has their art historical story, their personal story, their market story.

[00:32:47] Lisa Cooley: And you multiply that times thousands of artists over every year of human existence. Yes. And there's just no shortage. So it is definitely a field that benefits people who can consume large amounts of information. And I think sometimes people just make those choices out of a desire to just simplify or to find meaning.

[00:33:08] Lisa Cooley: Yes. One of my favorite bands, Khruangbin, said they made a very specific focus to focus on like certain kinds. Like we are this kind of band, not a band that does all these other things. And and I it benefited them. They were able to do something new.

[00:33:22] Lisa Cooley: But likewise, I think that there are plenty of creative people who are omnivorous and it's also a field that rewards that kind of intellectual curiosity and risk-taking. Yes. So there you go. 

[00:33:36] Jeffrey Magid: And another thing, speaking of another book that totally changed my life.

[00:33:39] Jeffrey Magid: I love Oscar Wilde, the critic as artist. And I realized that if you think about a binary of art creation, there's the people or person that created the artwork and everyone else who observes, listens, watches consumes it. And I think that in the creative process, it's not your job to decide. You should get to create freely.

[00:34:01] Jeffrey Magid: And I see this even on both sides in art. When I'm making a stupid little video, I'm just trying to make it and put it out. I can't guess which one other people will like, right? Or which would be better. I'm just trying to do my best and release it. And that was what it was true in music too. 

[00:34:14] Jeffrey Magid: But on the other hand, I really do think. It is in some ways the responsibility of everyone else to sort, that it's our responsibility and especially, for example, a lot of what a good art advisor can do 

[00:34:23] Lisa Cooley: Yeah. 

[00:34:24] Jeffrey Magid: Is help you find, so for me, one of the problems is if you're like, Hey, yeah, I just, collect Swedish portraiture and here's my museum of Swedish portraiture.

[00:34:33] Jeffrey Magid: That's the opposite because you're not really sorting. To me, I'm not looking for 1620s art or 2020s art. I'm looking for great art. 

[00:34:40] Jeffrey Magid: You know what I mean? Yeah. And in a way all the dividing lines are arbitrary.

[00:34:44] Lisa Cooley: All arbitrary. 

[00:34:44] Jeffrey Magid: I think Henry Taylor's painting fits just as well in conversation with a painting from 1620 . And I hear that a lot from artists. They're like, don't put me in the black- portraiture- only category. Great. Don't put me in the whatever.

[00:34:55] Jeffrey Magid: You know what I'm saying? Like in the same way that Henry Taylor's work is saying lots of interesting things about race and racism in the US and many other things. But his greatness reverberates through the whole history of art.

[00:35:05] Jeffrey Magid: Not just in some category. 

[00:35:06] Lisa Cooley: It's multivalent. 

[00:35:07] Jeffrey Magid: Yes. Yeah. And so for me I see this a lot with even people that do no offense to these people, but actually this is a, a dis, but even the few people that do often collect across categories, they're like, oh yeah, that's so cool.

[00:35:19] Jeffrey Magid: You're interested in old masters and contemporary art. So am I. And I'm like where are the old masters? They're like, oh, they're in the old masters study. By themselves. Do you know what I'm saying? Nothing wrong with that, but that's not how I, 

[00:35:27] Lisa Cooley: that's you.

[00:35:28] Jeffrey Magid: That's not me. And also that's not even the way of looking at art that I'm espousing for lack of a better word. If you only have limited time and especially, and you don't have someone advising you or helping you, then I can see just being like, listen, I can only look at stuff that was made in the last 30 seconds and only by people that are over six foot five and whatever.

[00:35:44] Lisa Cooley: I think for some collectors they have a full-time job and family and just whatever other things. When I'm bringing on new clients and trying to do the education part with them, finding the time to go and walk around and see art is the number one commitment that is hard to get them to commit to, especially if they, I'm thinking of one client in particular, especially if they have young kids. It's just it's really, it's the time. There's like an information burden and a time burden, and I think people really easily get overwhelmed. But that's my job. Yes. To fix that. 

[00:36:18] Jeffrey Magid: And I think, I've never been an art advisor or really had one, so I'm, I'm curious your take on this, but for me , it's tremendously important to, and this is again a contrarian opinion, but I think that it's important if you're gonna be buying and living with art to trust and know what you like and just go with what you like.

[00:36:32] Jeffrey Magid: And a lot of the way that you can work with an advisor is they can help facilitate it's not just that either you know everything and then you know what your life, 

[00:36:41] Lisa Cooley: You're never gonna know everything. Ever. There's, that's impossible. 

[00:36:42] Jeffrey Magid: There's no way to know everything. 

[00:36:43] Jeffrey Magid: So it's okay to like whatever you like at each moment in time.

[00:36:46] Jeffrey Magid: And then next year you might like something different, but each point in your life you can like what you like, trust your gut and always be learning. Yeah. That's how I feel is like I'm always gonna go with what I like, but. What I like is changing as I learn. In fact, what I know about is changing as I learn.

[00:37:03] Jeffrey Magid: I wouldn't have said I liked Vouillard three years ago, right? Because I didn't really know anything about Vouillard. So it's like I'm always learning, but then I'm also always trusting what I like. And I think you can do both. And what I was gonna say, which is may be a little controversial, it's the same in music or anything else,

[00:37:14] Jeffrey Magid: I don't think you have to know. Someone might say to me or come to my house and say oh. I don't like that painting, and I'm not thinking you just don't know about it. So then you gotta, whatever. I think all levels of expertise can have valid opinions. Your opinion's always valid, and especially if because it's yours. It's yours. And if you're the one buying, for example, you should always be, even if you're thinking I just don't know enough, you should still be trusting your gut while you're working with an advisor, while you're learning. So if someone would say to me I gotta really restrict myself because I don't know anything, I'd say it's okay.

[00:37:46] Jeffrey Magid: You don't have to know it all to buy, to collect, to love, to, whatever. Yeah. And you can never know it all, actually one of the things that I've done, one of the things that's actually served me best, it's a very weird thing to do, but I've often, knowing absolutely nothing about an artist. Nothing. I didn't even know their name. And then 24 or 48 hours later, I bought an artwork. And in the meantime I've just been learning everything I can about it.

[00:38:11] Jeffrey Magid: But if even you have a little burst of time, or especially you and your advisor can learn a lot in a short time. Yeah. But it can be guided by what you like. You know what I'm saying? Or what speaks to you, it doesn't have to just be what's already established and successful.

[00:38:23] Lisa Cooley: Yeah. So can you quantify your, collection how many works you have 

[00:38:28] Jeffrey Magid: I guess on the one hand I want say substantive things and not just be holding back like, everyone, on the other hand, I don't want to be flexing on people or like bragging Yeah. Or making large amounts of money and expenditures seem trivial. So with that as a disclaimer, I'd say, I own a lot of art like more things that could count in the hundreds, if not the low thousands of artworks. Wow. And I'd say in terms of values things that are, when they do my insurance are things that are worth in the hundreds of dollars to things that are worth in the low millions.

[00:39:01] Jeffrey Magid: And everything in between. And some of the things that are the most valuable were purchased for much less. Yeah. And what was the other thing I was about to say? Oh, and also I have a lot of, I don't wanna say this to be, we wanna be respectful of all the artists, but there are a lot of things that I've bought that I'm not as into anymore, I think it's not all. I think that happens. Yeah. That happens. And and I guess when, sometimes when people say, oh, you own a lot of art, and they're picturing that I have a warehouse full of all masterpiece, Rothkos. I've been a risk taker and taken chances with people early , and some of those chances I look back and think, I'm glad I took that chance and others are not.

[00:39:41] Jeffrey Magid: And I think that's important to point out because one of, the things that, handicaps people early on is that for some reason more in art than in other things, people are scared to embarrass themselves or be wrong. I have things that I've bought that I look back and I'm even, I'm embarrassed to myself.

[00:39:54] Jeffrey Magid: I'm like, I can't believe I bought that. But 

[00:39:56] Lisa Cooley: I tell everybody, this is like you're alive and that's a good thing. And that means you're changing and your tastes are gonna change. Maybe you didn't like that song and you like it now. Maybe you hate raw onions now.

[00:40:06] Lisa Cooley: And it's fine. You're a dynamic being and you're going to change and that is okay. It's actually preferable because the other option is not being alive, which we do not want. Yes. 

[00:40:19] Jeffrey Magid: Yeah. But I think those conversations are, again, it's like in music, anyone would say, of course you're into some kind of music, then next year you're like, oh, I'm so embarrassed when I was a teenager, I liked that, whatever. But in art, what's so weird is that a bunch of things handicaps the growth of the buyer base. One very real one is the cost.

[00:40:34] Jeffrey Magid: 'cause it's a lot. It's one thing to stream, oh, I used to stream this on Spotify when I was a teenager. Now I don't, it's free. You know what I'm saying? Where for me, I have things that I bought because of some relationship thing, where someone said oh, you have to buy this and this to support our program to get offered that.

[00:40:49] Jeffrey Magid: Or they said just trust me, you gotta buy this. And then, and 

[00:40:52] Lisa Cooley: you shouldn't have trusted them. 

[00:40:53] Jeffrey Magid: And the thing is, if someone's Hey, trust me. Check out this band. They're experimental.

[00:40:58] Jeffrey Magid: That's one thing. But some of these things cost me $50,000. And some someone said, just trust me. And they don't even work with the artist anymore, a year later. And I'm like, huh.

[00:41:07] Lisa Cooley: I don't think I've ever said that to anybody ever. That's the kind of language that I just don't speak. Yes. I don't know why, but I, that's just not me. I would never, 

[00:41:14] Lisa Cooley: or they said, Hey, buy this and this is really important to help you get, offered that, 

[00:41:18] I also hate that 

[00:41:19] Jeffrey Magid: same 

[00:41:20] Lisa Cooley: personally. I don't know anybody who likes it.

[00:41:22] Lisa Cooley: I think there's gotta be a better way for galleries to achieve that aim. 

[00:41:26] Jeffrey Magid: Oh, yes. 

[00:41:26] Lisa Cooley: I don't know what it is, but I think it just breeds resentment among collectors. And I think that, it will come back to bite the galleries in the long run, but that's, maybe that's a whole other conversation.

[00:41:37] Jeffrey Magid: This is how prices is so relevant to things like with the difference between art and music or, art and film or whatever, right? I don't feel like this isn't talked about enough, but at the end of the day, Martin Scorsese movie or brand new experimental director movie, they both cost the same to go watch 'em.

[00:41:52] Jeffrey Magid: And it's gotten to be a lot , how much does it cost to see a movie now, like 20 bucks? But, definitely not 20,000, to see the movie. If it's $20 and I got $20 in my pocket, we don't have to talk about price.

[00:42:02] Jeffrey Magid: One of the jokes that I tell about the art world is that everyone else is so much all about the money, but then everyone wants to operate on an ecosystem where they charge 20,000 to 60,000. 80,000.

[00:42:12] Jeffrey Magid: Yeah. But then they're like this, gauche other person over here is always talking about the money. Yeah. Anyway, check out our pdf d the prices range from 80,000 to 2 million. You know what I mean? It's like what? And so that's a very obvious point. But what I was gonna say is I think, apropos of that all I'll say I think it's tough having a gallery.

[00:42:25] Jeffrey Magid: It's hard because, galleries have so much overhead. They have they have a lot of stresses and costs and some of it , they've had to build things like this into their business model. But in any other world, charging someone an exorbitant price or asking 'em to buy something they don't want.

[00:42:40] Jeffrey Magid: If you have to build that in your business model, you pretty quickly have to just find a different business model because there's no way to justify it. And the analogy I always think of is in lower Manhattan, there's a convenience store right next to me.

[00:42:51] Jeffrey Magid: Imagine walking in there, and I'm on the phone, I'm calling you, and I'm like, yeah, two two sparkling waters. And the guy goes to run my card and I'm like, wait, $76, 76, and he's yeah. I'm like, wait, the water costs $76? And he says yeah, I got this store.

[00:43:04] Jeffrey Magid: It's an expensive real estate in lower Manhattan. Plus like, why are you complaining? You can afford it. You live in New York, you can probably afford $70. But the point is the price is not even if I,

[00:43:14] Jeffrey Magid: Next 

[00:43:14] Lisa Cooley: time you're not gonna go back there and 

[00:43:15] Jeffrey Magid: also the price is not $70.

[00:43:17] Jeffrey Magid: You know what I'm saying? So at the end of the day, galleries can say, Hey, we have to charge so much because our overhead's so high. But if they're charging amounts that don't make any sense with the career value or market value of the work that they're offering, they're gonna have to find a different business model.

[00:43:33] Jeffrey Magid: Okay. 'cause it's so 

[00:43:33] Lisa Cooley: Let's just really clearly, talk about the fact that emerging art prices are way, way too high. Let's not talk around it. And I think that there are a couple of reasons why emerging contemporary art prices are so high. One is that during the pandemic everybody was sitting around and looking at their walls and thought okay, buying art is something that I can do. 

[00:43:55] Lisa Cooley: And there's a whole explosion of growth in the art market at that time. And people piled into emerging art. So on one hand you can say we have low supply and high demand. We're gonna raise the prices. But then this thing happened where people started looking around and looking at this person is charging. $30,000 for a painting at a first time show, and this person is charging $35,000, I guess I should charge like $32,000 and has this weird self-reinforcing effect, which is a valid, real way people price things. People price houses that way by looking around at the market.

[00:44:28] Lisa Cooley: But that becomes a problem when your reference points are overinflated and there's no one to adjust for that. Maybe you have something to add 

[00:44:36] Jeffrey Magid: whoa, so many. It's so many, right? Too many things. Okay. 

[00:44:38] Jeffrey Magid: It's hard to compare it to other worlds 'cause there's almost no other world where there's a fixed price that can't come down. So what's tricky, what people are forgetting is that, and this is happening a lot now, but I saw it happen even 10 years ago. One of my first friends who is an artist, I won't mention who he's a great artist, nothing negative to him. He was an artist who, this is in 2014 or something, got really hot in the market and he was showing at a big gallery. And his paintings were maybe $30,000. And then an artwork of his sold for say, $200,000 in an auction because two people really wanted it and they kept bidding each other.

[00:45:08] Jeffrey Magid: So then the gallery moved the prices to 200,000 and then his next show didn't sell well, and then he said to the gallery, Hey, can we just move them back down to 30? And they said, no, that's not really how it works. But 

[00:45:22] Lisa Cooley: it can be how it works. It can, that's it's, it should be how it works.

[00:45:25] Lisa Cooley: One of the most famous art dealers, Ivan Karp, would do that all the time and would resuscitate people's careers that way. That's how he got a lot of artists. So I think that this is another convention that you hear and there's a lot of inferring rules from other people's behavior and they're not rules.

[00:45:45] Jeffrey Magid: But the punchline of the story is that he said, Hey, can we lower the prices? And they said, no, I don't think so. And he said why do they have to be 200,000?

[00:45:53] Jeffrey Magid: And the owner of the gallery said, again, I wasn't here for this conversation. I was just told secondhand. Yeah. The gallery said. Look around you. You see how big the space is. We can't really stay in the business of selling $30,000 artwork. We gotta sell 200,000 dollar artwork to keep the lights on here because our overhead is so high.

[00:46:09] Jeffrey Magid: And the artist said, oh but it didn't sell for 200,000. They said, yep. And he said what can we try? How come, when's my next show? And they said, I don't know when you're gonna have a next show. Your work isn't selling well. 

[00:46:21] Lisa Cooley: Oh my God. Oh my god. 

[00:46:22] Jeffrey Magid: And he said what do you mean I'm not gonna have a next show.

[00:46:24] Jeffrey Magid: My name is still on the gallery roster. And the owner gallery said. Maybe we should take it off the gallery roster 

[00:46:30] Lisa Cooley: oh my God. What? 

[00:46:31] Jeffrey Magid: And they took him right off. So it's 

[00:46:33] Lisa Cooley: that's heartbreaking. 

[00:46:34] Jeffrey Magid: And he has not been represented by a major gallery since. And so it's important that artists know because some of this arms race for price is coming from artists and it's super understandable.

[00:46:46] Jeffrey Magid: It makes sense because the reality is being an artist is a really financially insecure profession. And so it's scary. And traditionally most people, even most artists we know of didn't get to be lifelong working artists. So it's such a cool thing to be an artist and get paid for your work, get recognized for your work.

[00:47:05] Lisa Cooley: Huge. 

[00:47:05] Jeffrey Magid: It's such an amazing thing. 

[00:47:06] Lisa Cooley: Life changing. Life changing. 

[00:47:07] Jeffrey Magid: All the people that are have it that way, I'm so happy for them. They deserve it, but everyone wants to hold onto this thing of oh, so and so is getting 200,000 for the whatever.

[00:47:15] Jeffrey Magid: But I don't think enough people know until they see it firsthand that the downside of that is you push your prices so high, they can't sell, the galleries will just spit you right out. 

[00:47:26] Lisa Cooley: Yeah. 

[00:47:26] Jeffrey Magid: And they don't have a minute for you when you're not selling well, for the most part, I'm gonna speak about every gallery, but a lot of galleries.

[00:47:32] Jeffrey Magid: And doesn't make them bad people. They're just like, look, we're trying to keep open. We have locations and four cities around the world and this much bill to pay each month. We've gotta push your prices up, especially if you want them pushed up. And then the first moment you're not selling, you're not gonna have a show.

[00:47:47] That's pretty brutal. 

[00:47:47] Jeffrey Magid: And I don't think artists understand that. They're just thinking, not all of them. Some people do. And there are artists who are also masterfully skilled business people, but a lot of the artists who are not primarily business people aren't getting told, if the world stays the same, where prices aren't allowed to come down because of some convention and you keep pushing your prices. If you ever push 'em to a moment, they don't sell. 

[00:48:07] Lisa Cooley: I actually think that most of the artists I work with are terrified of raising their prices. Not all of them, but most of them because they know, they may not know such a brutal end game you just described.

[00:48:18] Lisa Cooley: Yeah. But they know that it's frowned upon to to lower prices, but lowering prices can increase demand, it can create new demand. So it's a strategic mistake if you are not able to have that conversation with your artist or with your gallerist. But that's even a bigger problem because sometimes speaking with candor , artists and galleries having a really candid conversation is sometimes in short supply.

[00:48:42] Jeffrey Magid: Some of the question for me is always I don't know if the, artist is really the intended audience of this podcast. 

[00:48:46] Lisa Cooley: No, it's not. But I think artists do listen to it.

[00:48:48] Jeffrey Magid: Okay, good. Because I was gonna say, it's one thing if you're just like, Hey, I put out my new song. I hope everyone streams it. But if you're making stuff that's for sale for high prices, are you thinking about what sort of person might buy it?

[00:48:58] Jeffrey Magid: And who do you want to include? And are you really thinking about the obvious fact that each level that prices increase, people get excluded and you get to a really high level, you exclude almost everyone.

[00:49:09] Jeffrey Magid: Yes. But on the positive way, if you can make art that's not just inclusive in terms of the subject matter but also in terms of your accessibility to entry to buy a work, even if it's an editioned work, a print or something like that. But also, I'm thinking of an artist who I really like , an eminent artist who shows with an eminent gallery and a well-capitalized gallery.

[00:49:27] Jeffrey Magid: And his art. He is amazing. I own a painting of his, he's an amazing artist. And his paintings routinely, I don't mean just occasionally, routinely resell in the market for something like 150,000. And he opened a show where all the paintings, which are of similar scale and quality to the ones that routinely sell for 150,000, where everything was more like 500,000 

[00:49:52] Jeffrey Magid: and then the gallery says it's really not selling as well as we thought. And I'm thinking like yeah. I were that person, I'd be thinking, not just let's lower my prices, but also think of all the new people I could get excited if I just priced the work in line with how it would sell.

[00:50:05] Jeffrey Magid: Not only would it sell better, but also you can include all these people, some younger people, some less wealthy people. Yeah. Still have to be reasonably wealthy to buy something for 150,000. Sure. But still, there are way more people that buy in 150,000 than at 500,000. Yes. 

[00:50:17] Jeffrey Magid: So it's worth remembering who can be included at each level no matter what you do. Yes. And on the collecting level, I feel like often people buy something partly for investment for 3 million thinking, oh, maybe I'll sell it for 6 million. But they're thinking about how few people are buying art for 6 million.

[00:50:32] Lisa Cooley: Yes. Okay. You told me one time that you made all the mistakes you can make when you're collecting art. Can you tell me about a few of them? 

[00:50:42] Jeffrey Magid: Yeah, I think we've talked about a couple of them.

[00:50:47] Jeffrey Magid: I did a lot of trusting everyone, and that's done well for me and badly. But I'd say that, some of the mistakes I made, were not listening to myself enough. There've been times where I really got caught up in a hype, a trend someone else's taste, not my own.

[00:51:03] Jeffrey Magid: I've done a lot of that. 

[00:51:04] Jeffrey Magid: And so especially in moments where the art market is really hot, then they're just elaborate things that people feel they have to do to be considered worthy of getting to buy an artwork. And I've done all of them, all the things.

[00:51:19] Jeffrey Magid: And some of them were justifiable. And relevant, and I would do them again and other things, I wish I could go back and give myself the advice of not to do them. 

[00:51:33] Lisa Cooley: What would you tell yourself not to do? 

[00:51:35] Jeffrey Magid: The really rookie sucker mistake that I've made before is, and galleries do this reasonably often, they say, Hey, we see you're interested in this show coming up, this artist.

[00:51:45] Jeffrey Magid: We'll have a show next year, but it's our most in demand thing, as and of course, some of the great collectors of the world. I don't know if you've heard of Mr. And Mrs. So and so and 

[00:51:54] Lisa Cooley: Oh my God, somebody said that to you? 

[00:51:56] Jeffrey Magid: All that whatever are interested, of course the top people in the world are interested, but if you buy this from this show and this and support the program and buy this, we'll offer you that.

[00:52:09] Jeffrey Magid: And then several times I bought the things and then they said, oh. 

[00:52:13] Lisa Cooley: Wah wah 

[00:52:14] Jeffrey Magid: We were so sure that we would've worked it out. But then of course, something changed at the last minute. And yeah I've made that mistake. 

[00:52:20] Jeffrey Magid: Another mistake I've made, is because I was so happy to be there. That was a lot of my approach, I'm just happy to be here. 

[00:52:25] Lisa Cooley: Totally. 

[00:52:26] Jeffrey Magid: So that I wasn't firm enough, with people. I've let people appropos of that story, really go back on their word in ways that were totally self-serving. And because I just felt lucky to even be included, I didn't say, Hey, no, that wasn't, our agreement. 

[00:52:40] Jeffrey Magid: I didn't understand a lot of the ways that these things work and even the reality that art can be a deep truth and the greatness of art can be unquestionable, but all of the conventions of art, even the pricing and who gets offered what are all just made up. And I didn't quite get that, so I guess that's not a mistake, it's more of of lack of understanding.

[00:53:02] Jeffrey Magid: It took me years to get just how arbitrary a lot of things were. 

[00:53:06] Lisa Cooley: Yeah. 

[00:53:06] Jeffrey Magid: And the mistake of not looking more and doing my own research that is a mistake that a lot of people make, or maybe the biggest mistake I made was how do I say it?

[00:53:17] Jeffrey Magid: There's no winning, there's no end. There's only your own taste and love. 

[00:53:22] Lisa Cooley: There's no winning. I love that. 

[00:53:24] Jeffrey Magid: And there's no end. There are two separate things happening in art. Always. There's the artwork and the real understanding, study, appreciation of it. And then there's some elaborate game of access, status, reputation, flexing who has what 

[00:53:40] Lisa Cooley: and they're really separate, aren't they? 

[00:53:41] Jeffrey Magid: And they're separate and they're running on parallel paths. 

[00:53:43] Lisa Cooley: Absolutely. 

[00:53:43] Jeffrey Magid: And I've been I hope more independent of mind than most along the way, but I've even fallen victim to thinking in retrospect, why'd I do that? Other than I felt so lucky to have been finally given that access. I felt like I had to take it 

[00:53:56] Jeffrey Magid: actually this is another mistake I've made, , forgetting that context is all transient. So for example in a show. It might seem like this is such a great opportunity. Everyone's talking about this show and this painting is so important because it's in the show in this moment and people want it, but three years later, none of that will exist. 

[00:54:14] Lisa Cooley: Yeah. 

[00:54:14] Jeffrey Magid: Just be on your wall. I remember someone saying on Marion Maneker's podcast, shout out Marion Maneker.

[00:54:19] Lisa Cooley: Yes. 

[00:54:19] Jeffrey Magid: I don't know why he doesn't still do it, but he had a great podcast. But he was interviewing a guy who works at Christie's about the David Rockefeller auction. And people said, oh, I'm so interested in the David Rockefeller sale because of the provenance.

[00:54:30] Jeffrey Magid: And he said, remember the moment you place the winning bid, it'll no longer be a Rockefeller Picasso, it'll be a Schwartz, Picasso. Do you know what I mean? And at the end of the day, it's a mistake I made that in the show, it feels like, oh, whoa, this is a Gagosian x, Y, Z.

[00:54:47] Lisa Cooley: Yeah. 

[00:54:47] Jeffrey Magid: But then a second later it's just an X, Y, Z 

[00:54:50] Lisa Cooley: or likewise during the pandemic there'd be an emerging artist and they would have eight, 500 person waiting list, which is bonkers 

[00:54:57] Lisa Cooley: when I had my gallery, the most we ever have is like 150 people. And it sounds like it's so much, but it goes away because a lot of those people can only buy when the work is $20,000 when the artist is an emerging artist. But, I've talked to some artists who are like, it, like really stresses them out.

[00:55:15] Lisa Cooley: I'm like, don't worry. Yes. You're only on the first level of this video game. Yeah, there's a next level to go up to and that won't be there. And you'll have new challenges. And the urgency and all that context and all of that social pressure is highly mutable for sure.

[00:55:32] Lisa Cooley: So how do you find out about new artists? 

[00:55:34] Jeffrey Magid: Instagram really for sure. 

[00:55:36] Lisa Cooley: That's the main way? 

[00:55:36] Jeffrey Magid: That's a main way. Okay. Definitely word of mouth. I haven't really had that conscious of strategies. I've just followed my heart, my obsession, and my learning.

[00:55:45] Jeffrey Magid: But this is one way where I've had a conscious strategy. Darren Romanelli, who. Shout out Darren, if you're listening, he's a collector and all around arts guy, designer, in LA. He used to host a pancake breakfast and he had his art up and it was art social event but in the daytime.

[00:56:01] Jeffrey Magid: And it was one of the first ones I'd ever gone to in LA And I remember I met someone and she said, oh, I'm an art advisor. And I said, oh, that's cool. I just bought my first three artworks and she said, oh, tell me what did you buy? I said I'll tell you exactly.

[00:56:13] Jeffrey Magid: She said, yeah, tell me which artist. So I said, first I bought a painting by Henry Taylor. Then I bought a painting by Jonas Wood and then a work by Sterling Ruby. And she asked me all about them or whatever. And then I said, what about you? What kind of stuff are you into? 

[00:56:23] Jeffrey Magid: I said what do you advise? What are you most into right now? And she said, oh, I'm an art advisor, so that's what you'd pay me to find out. And I said, whoa, joking or not. She said, no, I don't really just give that out for free. And I thought, whoa. Whoa.

[00:56:36] Jeffrey Magid: Fuck. First of all, I'm like, I just, what you just asked me what but I realized, and I was my first encounter with how close to the vest, so many people play it. 

[00:56:44] Lisa Cooley: Yeah. 

[00:56:45] Jeffrey Magid: And I made a conscious strategic decision, not play it close to the vest and do the exact opposite to like really be actively sharing. So 

[00:56:53] Lisa Cooley: I have a problem with that because my personality is to not gate keep anything. Yes. And then I, my entire career in the art world has had a lot of masking those impulses 'cause frequently it doesn't feel safe or people judge you but that's one of the reasons why I love not having a gallery now 'cause I don't have to do that.

[00:57:12] Lisa Cooley: Yeah. But I have had that same feeling where I just get excited about something and I wanna talk about it, and then there's a moment in my head of oh wait, I shouldn't be sharing that. Which is just messed up. I don't like that, but, 

[00:57:24] Jeffrey Magid: and I feel hopefully, with your podcast being a good example, that can change.

[00:57:28] Jeffrey Magid: Yeah. So I'd say that most everyone knows you can find stuff on Instagram. I would say here, I can make this flex. I would say I have about as good intel as anyone.

[00:57:38] Jeffrey Magid: At least in my corners in the whole art market, I'm as plugged in as almost anyone. And there's one reason and one reason why. I get good info, because I share good info. 

[00:57:48] Jeffrey Magid: And that was a conscious effort. So for example, I have two friends they're the two people I know who are really smart, plugged in and knowledgeable about art in London.

[00:57:58] Jeffrey Magid: Two guys, and they're good friends. And they are chatting and sharing with their close friends. I remember I saw one of them at an Art Fair and and we're friends, but we would chat. He'd say Hey, what have you seen? I'd tell, we all would share anyway.

[00:58:09] Jeffrey Magid: You know what I'm saying? Yeah. But I thought about it and I was like, you know what, let's try this. . Waddaya you say, we make a group chat, the three of us, and I'll tell you what I see in New York and LA that's really good. And you tell me what in London.

[00:58:22] Jeffrey Magid: And he said, yeah, great. Let me ask the other guy. He asked him and he said, yeah, that's great. And we've had this group chat going for probably since 2019. 

[00:58:30] Lisa Cooley: Amazing. 

[00:58:30] Jeffrey Magid: I've learned so much. 

[00:58:32] Lisa Cooley: That's gold. 

[00:58:32] Jeffrey Magid: So much from them. I've learned, but also I've been exposed to all kinds of things.

[00:58:36] Jeffrey Magid: And the reason why they're willing to share so much is because I share so much with them. You know what I mean? So it's been a conscious strategy give and then maybe you'll receive, 

[00:58:45] Lisa Cooley: It's like a free set of Ginzu Knives. It's a cognitive bias of human beings: reciprocity.

[00:58:50] Lisa Cooley: You share something, people wanna share it back. And that definitely is part of my thinking of doing Oko. And at the same time you sometimes have some bad situations where people don't act with so much reciprocity and then it just makes you a little gun shy.

[00:59:06] Lisa Cooley: So 

[00:59:07] Jeffrey Magid: for me, I feel like my approach to all these things in the giving, 

[00:59:09] Lisa Cooley: but I'm trying to get over that. 

[00:59:11] Jeffrey Magid: I think it's as simple as this. I give and even, and I trust but then the people who never give back just 

[00:59:19] Lisa Cooley: cut 'em out. 

[00:59:19] Jeffrey Magid: I stop giving. 

[00:59:20] Lisa Cooley: Yeah. That's right. 

[00:59:21] Jeffrey Magid: That's it. You know what I'm saying?

[00:59:22] Jeffrey Magid: And the people, hopefully they see quickly , I went to TEFAF with my friend who lives in Amsterdam. And same thing. We've known each other now for, six or eight years.

[00:59:30] Jeffrey Magid: We just met totally random. And it's funny 'cause it's almost like a romantic relationship, even though we're just friends. He was like, where did we meet? He looked back in our Instagram DM history and was like, wow, we've known each other for six years. It's a sweet we have a sweet person friendship.

[00:59:40] Jeffrey Magid: Then there's 

[00:59:40] Lisa Cooley: this o overlay of friendship and connection and sharing that literally makes you live longer. 

[00:59:45] Jeffrey Magid: Yes. He'll just send me and be like, Hey, what do you think the this painting? And if I was like, I'm sorry man, I'm gonna have to charge you for that.

[00:59:51] Jeffrey Magid: I just give this out. And I, I've learned a lot from him and I hope he's learned something from me. 

[00:59:55] Lisa Cooley: Fascinating. Okay, so you have a project you're working on in Mexico City, 

[00:59:59] Jeffrey Magid: correct? 

[01:00:00] Lisa Cooley: Tell me. 

[01:00:01] Jeffrey Magid: It's a building in the neighborhood of Condessa. And it'll be a public nonprofit art collection space with a new show each year. 

[01:00:10] Lisa Cooley: One show a year. 

[01:00:11] Jeffrey Magid: Yeah. 

[01:00:11] Lisa Cooley: To start. That's fair. That's fair. 

[01:00:13] Jeffrey Magid: 'cause guys, it's not a large organization. By not large, it's just me. Yeah. And the collection we have to draw from is just mine.

[01:00:19] Jeffrey Magid: So each year we'll have a new show starting this February. If you're in town in Mexico City and you're listening please come visit starting February, but also it'll be up throughout the year. And then by the next February there'll be a new show.

[01:00:30] Jeffrey Magid: And I think starting the second year, each year we'll have a featured artist and invite an artist to do something in this space. Initially I resisted that model and even resisted calling it a foundation, 'cause in the games of access of art, any model immediately people just abuse it and run into the ground.

[01:00:46] Jeffrey Magid: So all of a sudden everyone had their own foundation that they using to get clout and access for themselves. Yeah. And then also everyone was happening to being like, that's interesting. This year we're doing a collaboration with an artist who happens to be the hottest market artist at the moment.

[01:00:58] Jeffrey Magid: I invited them for a collaboration where I happened to get to acquire art for my 

[01:01:02] Lisa Cooley: get access to it. Yep. 

[01:01:03] Jeffrey Magid: So I think the first year it'll just be art that I own. Arranged, I'm gonna say curated because for all the curators out there, I'm not, I don't thank myself a curator, nor would I pretend to be.

[01:01:13] Jeffrey Magid: And I have admiration and respect for all of the real curators out there. Yeah. But it'll be it'll be arranged and organized by yours, truly. And and then by the second year, I think we'll have some invite guest curators and also have a collaboration with an artist, which might just be one artist who is elderly.

[01:01:31] Jeffrey Magid: And I've admired my whole life to come do one sculpture. Amazing. Or it could be, you know what I'm saying? Anything in between. It'll be one featured featured them. 

[01:01:38] Lisa Cooley: And you have a relationship with the Met also? 

[01:01:41] Jeffrey Magid: That's true. Yeah. 

[01:01:42] Lisa Cooley: Tell me about that. 

[01:01:43] Jeffrey Magid: I, weirdly, I've, in my short life of art, done a bunch of things with a bunch of different museums, partly based on where I was living.

[01:01:50] Jeffrey Magid: So definitely wanted, 

[01:01:53] Lisa Cooley: You should say that you just moved to New York, from Los Angeles. Yeah. Yeah, 

[01:01:56] Jeffrey Magid: exactly. And I spent a lot of the last 10 years in LA so I started doing stuff with the hammer Museum. And I've been on committees at LA moca been donor to LACMA as well.

[01:02:08] Jeffrey Magid: Been on a bunch of different things. I was on briefly on the board of ICA Miami. It was a wonderful institution, so I wanna also give love to all the all the great things out there. But partly my friend Hannah Howe, who's a great museum person and friend, I knew her initially from the Hammer Museum.

[01:02:24] Jeffrey Magid: And then she was at MoMA PS one and encouraged me to be a donor of MoMA PS one. So I was, and then she took her current role at the Met. Since then we've started a new council at the Met, oh, called the Vanguard Council. Cool. It's less than a year old.

[01:02:41] Jeffrey Magid: So initially thanks to Hannah's encouragement I got involved with the Met and now I'm doing an ongoing donation of an artwork each year. 

[01:02:49] Lisa Cooley: Amazing. 

[01:02:49] Jeffrey Magid: To the contemporary department in collaboration with the great curators there, David Breslin and Jane Panetta.

[01:02:56] Lisa Cooley: Amazing. I love them both. 

[01:02:57] Lisa Cooley: You should tell everybody where to find you. I can put in the show notes also, but I should give you that moment to, it's like, where to find Jeff. 

[01:03:05] Jeffrey Magid: Oh. If you wanna see some fun art videos and an evolving journey, it's on Instagram at my last name, M-A-G-I-D and then EYE. MagidEye .

[01:03:16] Jeffrey Magid: And also on TikTok, , for all the tiktokers out there, 

[01:03:20] Lisa Cooley: I started to say if you're like, under 20 years old Yeah. But these, what's crazy is it's it's not I know. I know. Yeah. Okay. I have two last questions for you. One time I named a group show after a dish.

[01:03:34] Lisa Cooley: It was a group show about failure, which I'm totally fascinated by. I named it after this Massimo Bottura dish called, I dropped the Lemon Tart. And then one day into the run of the show, Massimo Bottura turned up to see the exhibition. And I ended up selling this work. So I'm just curious if, now that you're making more art content, has it brought you anything unexpected like that? 

[01:04:00] Jeffrey Magid: Huh? Whoa. I was thinking of unexpected things but I guess I'm trying to think of any that are specific to the art content 

[01:04:09] Lisa Cooley: or just anything you put an idea out into the world and it's fascinating how it mutates and comes back to you sometimes.

[01:04:16] Jeffrey Magid: Yes. Yeah. Okay. One of the first artists that I encountered and loved on my own is Carol Dunham. And I'm super fan and partly 'cause he also is represented by the first gallery that I bought a painting from. So I would look through their stuff and then I bought a little book of his work. And then, I was a late comer to the world of trying to buy things at auctions. So it took me a while to figure out that you could actually do that too.

[01:04:41] Jeffrey Magid: So I had bought a small painting of his from a gallery and, but then there was a great painting of his that was coming to an auction. It was from the collection of Iliana Sonnabend. And it was I think one of the great 1980s Carol Dunham painting and I'm not an art historian, but I think a formative 

[01:04:59] Lisa Cooley: oh, I think Illeana Sonnabend had some okay taste. 

[01:05:01] Jeffrey Magid: She had some okay taste. To me it was a spectacular painting. So for the first time I registered to bid in a auction evening sale at Christie's.

[01:05:09] Jeffrey Magid: And I went in person, I got a paddle and everything. I never had a paddle and I was sweating 'cause I was thinking, how much am I gonna bid on this painting? I was worrying that I would win and not be able to afford it. 

[01:05:18] Lisa Cooley: It's stressful. It's so stressful. 

[01:05:19] Jeffrey Magid: Yeah. So anyway, they opened the bidding on this painting. And I didn't even get a chance to raise my paddle because first there were several people bidding and none of them was me. And then it came down to two people and they just kept bidding and bidding.

[01:05:29] Jeffrey Magid: And one of them, actually, I think they were both in the room bidding and, but I can only see one of them. And one of 'em was this handsome young guy, looked really young. And I was like, wow, this guy's handsome and young and with a suit and won the artwork in the end with he was the winning paddle.

[01:05:43] Jeffrey Magid: And then afterwards the story comes from a podcast. I was listening to Marion Maneker's podcast. Thanks again, Marion. 

[01:05:49] Lisa Cooley: So many shout outs to Marion. Yes. Yeah. Great. And 

[01:05:52] Jeffrey Magid: one of the truly speaking of giving and kind people in art, yes.

[01:05:55] Jeffrey Magid: He's a what do they say? He's a true mensch. Yes. But on Marion Maneker's podcast, he had a guy named Ingo Philbrick on Ingo Philbrick told the story of buying that painting. He was the winning bidder of that painting. It's worth a few minutes listen even to hear him talk about it. 'cause it's a pretty unusual story about how he won that painting. But anyway, I was like, huh. So this guy is the one who won the painting. So then a little while later, I was in London during London Freeze, and I saw that same guy was opening a show of Carol Dunham paintings.

[01:06:21] Jeffrey Magid: So I wrote the gallery and said, hello Inigo Philbrick Gallery. I'd love to come see the show. And I met him and we had a drink together at the Connaught Bar. Inigo Philbrick and I, and we talked about Carol Dunham. And I partly knew about it because of a podcast. So I was like, this is so cool.

[01:06:35] Jeffrey Magid: And he was like, yeah, this is a historic painting and I said, it's amazing. And then to fast forward a bit, when when Ingo left the country and and ended up having 

[01:06:44] Lisa Cooley: having some challenges. 

[01:06:45] Jeffrey Magid: Had some challenges some challenges, which he's hopefully overcome, and I wish him the the best, wherever he is. All of a sudden that same painting came back to auction and it said subject to a writ of control. And I was like, whoa, I don't know what that mean. What's that? So I called Christie's and was like, Hey, what's this mean?

[01:07:00] Jeffrey Magid: 'cause I knew what the deal was and it wasn't marked anything. It didn't say to pay creditors or whatever. , I said, if I buy this will I actually get it? They said, no, it just goes to pay the whatever. So anyway, to make a long story short, years later, I ended up buying the painting that once belonged to Ileanna Sonnabend, and then Inigo Philbrick and I live with it.

[01:07:15] Jeffrey Magid: But the missing piece is, I never met Carol Dunham . And just the other day, like a couple weeks ago thanks to speaking of amazing art people with great galleries and really just wonderful and giving people. Thanks to Miss Ellie Reins of 56 Henry Gallery. We went together to visit Laurrie Simmons and Carol Dunham.

[01:07:30] Jeffrey Magid: And I had never met him before, even though I'm a big admirer of his art. And he had no idea that 

[01:07:35] Lisa Cooley: yeah, what a story you had to tell him, 

[01:07:37] Jeffrey Magid: or even that he had no concept. So the three of us were standing in his home studio.

[01:07:41] Jeffrey Magid: And he said, nice to meet you, son. Like no context of who I am at all, which is fine. He wasn't really given any background. He's oh, Ellie and this nice guy, and and Ellie said, jeff owns one of your paintings. And he said, oh, that's cool.

[01:07:54] Jeffrey Magid: Which one? And I said, it's a painting called Fourth Birch. And I could see his face and he was like, whoa, I've always wondered what happened to that, and he said, that's a painting that's dear to me. I always wondered where that ended up. And I said, It was Illeana Sonnabend's then it was Inigo Philbrick's.

[01:08:08] Jeffrey Magid: And he said, oh, I know I heard that part. And then I always wondered where it went next. And I said it's with me. It's in my apartment. And as I was leaving, he said, I. I'd love to go visit that painting again sometime. Oh. So we haven't done it yet, but at some point it'll go full circle.

[01:08:21] Jeffrey Magid: I'm guessing Ileana Sonnabend and Inigo Philbrick never met. Yeah. 'cause they're almost generations apart. Yes. And and Carol Dunham and I had never met and I don't think Indigo Filbrick and Carol Dunham have ever met. But together we all meet all our stories and Marion's story, too. All of us meet in this one painting. So that felt serendipitous. 

[01:08:39] Lisa Cooley: Amazing. Okay. My last question, is there an artwork that you remember seeing that gave you full body chills or gave you a really intense feeling and I base this, I don't think I'm repeating myself, but I always base this question on an experience I had when my dad took me to the National Gallery of Art in DC when I was 14 years old and I saw this Hudson River School painting and I got butterflies in my stomach. And I just remember thinking , how is this possible?

[01:09:07] Lisa Cooley: How can art do this to me? 'cause music hadn't even really done that to me. It's just a different experience. And so I'm always curious if other people have had similar experiences like that. 

[01:09:17] Jeffrey Magid: Yeah. Should I tell you the Pure Museum appreciation one or the collecting one?

[01:09:22] Lisa Cooley: I don't know. Your choice. Whatever your heart tells you. 

[01:09:24] Jeffrey Magid: Okay. I'll give the fast version of of the museum appreciation one, which I think maybe I started to say before, which is really seeing Francis Bacon painting. Oh, yes. I really spend some You mentioned that. Yeah. You know what another one is?

[01:09:35] Jeffrey Magid: I remember right. You were talking about, maybe this is more towards your towards your chef story. What's the guy's name? Massimo. Massimo.  Bottura . Bottura, okay. I was gonna butcher his name, but right when I first met these couple of artists,

[01:09:44] Jeffrey Magid: then all of a sudden I knew two. And then I went with my friend who I knew from games. He's actually the world's greatest Magic, The Gathering player ever. Oh, wow. Shout out John Finkle. John Finkle and I were at the KG B bar in New York, 

[01:09:58] Lisa Cooley: Uhhuh, legendary. 

[01:09:59] Jeffrey Magid: And somehow we were.

[01:10:00] Jeffrey Magid: Yeah, I was, in my late twenties and we were just drinking and chatting and somehow this guy was at our table. I thought he was a friend of John's or something, and he was a guy with big glasses and a mysterious air about him. And he was like, what do you know about the art world?

[01:10:14] Jeffrey Magid: Do you know about the YBAs? And I was like, I don't know what that is. And he was like, you don't know the YBAs? And I said, no. And he started telling me about it and he said, what's your favorite artwork in a museum? And I said, I don't really know. I just started to I, I like the Francis Bacon painting.

[01:10:29] Jeffrey Magid: And he said, The Palace At 3:00 AM I think it was 3:00 AM 4:00 AM but he said, what about The Palace At 3:00 AM? And I said, I don't know what that is. And he said, what? You don't know The Palace At 3:00 AM He said. Here's what you're gonna do. The next moment you can, you have a free hour.

[01:10:46] Jeffrey Magid: You go to the museum and you find the palace at, I wanna look it up now to see if it's 3:00 AM or 4:00 AM you go find the palace at 3:00 AM and just, and then next time you tell me what you think about it. And then at some point we left and I said to the guy who I knew, John, what was the deal with that guy?

[01:11:00] Jeffrey Magid: And he said, what guy? I said, the guy who was talking to me, he said, I don't know. I thought you knew that guy. He was a total stranger. I still don't know who the guy is really. Yeah, he was a total stranger, but he told me to go find this Giacometti sculpture. And it's at MoMA the palace at 3:00 AM three.

[01:11:13] Jeffrey Magid: Or. The palace at 4:00 AM Thank you. Oh, the palace at 4:00 AM and it's a, yeah, it's a we'll link to it in the show. Okay, cool. Yeah. And so I went and I stood there and looked at it for, I don't know, it was an hour.

[01:11:24] Jeffrey Magid: At some point they were like, Hey, you can't just stand here all day and look at it. But I spent like an hour looking at this this sculpture. And that was a transformative experience. Amazing. But I'd say the other one, I think of in terms of what's possible I, in going back in time I remember I was maybe aware of who Francesco Clemente was, but 

[01:11:41] Jeffrey Magid: I don't think I had any opinion. I would've said, oh, that's an artist. But I'm not sure I would've even been able to put my finger on what an artwork of his looked like. 'cause I would've thought of him as from a different generation I dunno. I didn't know anything about it.

[01:11:51] Jeffrey Magid: And then I saw a painting, speaking of collections. It belonged to the collection of Thomas Amman, the legendary Swiss art dealer and collector. And they were selling his collection at Christie's along with that Super Warhol that set the record. And he had all kinds of amazing art.

[01:12:07] Jeffrey Magid: But I walked in and saw this Francesco Clemente painting and thought, I just said, this painting's amazing. Who made it. Yeah. Yeah. And I realized it was by someone I'd heard of, but knew nothing about. And it just, knocked me over.

[01:12:21] Jeffrey Magid: I spent a lot of time thinking about it. Then I got really lucky because. Through friends, also through Ellie. Thanks Ellie. 

[01:12:27] Lisa Cooley: Ellie is great. 

[01:12:28] Jeffrey Magid: Ellie's amazing. Not just generous with her ideas and information and knowledge, but even generous with her friendships and introductions.

[01:12:34] Jeffrey Magid: Absolutely. Which is another great way to be. Absolutely. And she introduced me to to Ricardo Kugelmas, sorry for mispronunciation of your name Ricca, but who's a really cool guy who has his own gallery in Brazil, Auroras, but also worked alongside Francesco Clemente for years.

[01:12:50] Jeffrey Magid: He told me all about this exact painting and he said, that might be my favorite Clemente painting. And I said, really? And we talked all about it. And I've learned not just, about the making and the history of this exact painting and the series of paintings and the person who owned it and then I bought it in a way, 

[01:13:07] Lisa Cooley: so we need like a cymbol crash there to Oh, 

[01:13:09] Jeffrey Magid: in a way that surprised me that I, he said, Hey, this is a great painting, but to be honest, it's gonna sell for a price that you won't be able to afford. And I was pretty sure that would be true too.

[01:13:18] Jeffrey Magid: And then, it didn't. And I bought it. There's other fun thing about art I love that, everyone feels like they know everything, which is fun. I think it's served me well, I meet a lot of people who are a certain kind of personality, especially among collectors who say, " lemme see that.

[01:13:31] Jeffrey Magid: No, this is good. And that's not right and the color's wrong and it's gotta be 60 inches bigger " everyone knows everything immediately. So immediately afterwards you had conversation with people. They said, whoa, did you did you see that that Clemente painting?

[01:13:41] Jeffrey Magid: I said, yeah, I love it. They said yeah, Peter Brandt bought it, and they're like, actually, sorry, the Mugabi family bought it. And I'm like I know for sure they didn't actually, and I read, someone said, what do you mean, how do you know? And I'm like, I'm a hundred percent sure.

[01:13:52] Jeffrey Magid: They're like, I don't know. I'm pretty sure too. I'm like, I bought it, and it made me realize there are just so many things happening in art at any given time. At every level, including the higher levels, there are opportunities to see something, fall in love with it. And not everyone may be looking at the same things you're looking at. It can sometimes feel like a daunting moment where, how could I ever be a collector?

[01:14:14] Jeffrey Magid: Because whatever I'm be into, everyone else is into, there's a huge waiting list for everything. Everyone's more important than me. Everyone is more senior than me. I'll never be able to get in there. So that was a moment where not only did I have a inspiring transcendent experience, meeting an artwork, but also somehow I got really lucky that at that exact moment, somehow fewer people than I thought were looking.

[01:14:38] Jeffrey Magid: And it was possible to live with it. 

[01:14:39] Lisa Cooley: Incredible. I think it's a good place to wrap it up. Thank you so much. I cannot wait to see how your projects develop. With bated breath. I'm sure it's gonna be incredible. 

[01:14:50] Jeffrey Magid: Thanks for having me, and thanks for doing this podcast, which is a great service to everyone.

[01:14:53] Lisa Cooley: You're welcome. Thank

[01:14:59] Lisa Cooley: That's our show. Thank you for listening. And check out our website at ask-oko.com. That's ask-oko.com. You'll find lots of resources to help you become an art expert. You can also support the show on Patreon. When you become a member, you'll get all sorts of special bonuses. You'll help the show grow, and you'll have a chance to ask me and our guests questions about collecting art.

[01:15:21] Lisa Cooley: See you then.