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Guglielmino has a staff of nine, four
or five of whom advise about 12 clients each; she is looking
for another senior adviser. She has a reputation among former
employees for being intense and exacting, and she has more
trouble finding advisers than finding clients. "It's
difficult to get the right person to do the job," she
says. "If they're too scholarly, they don't buzz around
the market and know everything, and if they don't have enough
scholarship, then they're not giving the advice. I have
to find people who are good at doing business but aren't
in any way pushy. When I took over, I did do quite a bit
of turnover to get it vamped up again."
Although 12 clients may not seem like
a lot for one person, art adviser David Nash, co-owner of
the Mitchell-Innes & Nash gallery, thinks it's too many.
"I don't believe it's possible to advise more than
two or three," he says. "Citigroup provides a
valuable service for one level of chent — those who
don't have a great deal of time to devote to-collecting.
Those collectors who regard it as a shopping experience
tend to be disappointed. So much of collecting has to do
with taste. My advice is to go with somebody whose taste
you admire. Citibank is more all-encompassing than that.
You wouldn't go with Citibank for taste."
Guglielmino counters that taste is
an individual matter and hard to define. "You could
call a late-19th-century painting of two naked nymphs prancing
around on a field bad taste, but funnily enough, they can
sell like hotcakes," she says. "I'm a very firm
believer in knowledge being everything, because the more
collectors understand, the more their taste naturally develops
or refines." What's more, not all collectors are constantly
acquiring; it depends on the level at which they collect,
the size of their collections, and the supply in their chosen
fields of specialty.
Often new collectors have been exposed
only to the two most high-profile areas, contemporary art
and Impressionism. Others want edge and are looking to purchase
video or installation art. Guglielmino, who deals only with
dead, artists, warns her clients that trendy pieces don't
necessarily hold their value. She begins with Art 101, accompanying
novices to museums and galleries, pointing out what's on
the market. She orders books for clients interested in a
particular artist and introduces them to IonArt, a Web database
for clients of the Art Advisory Service.
One of Guglielmino's least pleasant
duties is breaking the news to clients that they have paid
too much for mediocre art. When one client, a businessman
in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, first hired her, she asked to
see his collection. "She came," he said, "went
through every inch of the house, and said, 'This is nice,
this is nice, this is junk.' In a very sophisticated and
very nice way, she pointed out some of the errors I had
made. As you get more serious, you start spending a lot
of money, and you don't know what you're doing in this totally
unregulated, buyer-beware market." Guglielmino always
advises clients that they are better off paying a lot for
one excellent piece than buying a lot of lesser ones, .
"The best returns come from art that is top of its
rank," she says. "The middle market typically
will not show the same kind of increases."
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