Still, calling up an artist and announcing that you knocked a limb off his sculpture is not a pleasant task. Many artists will find the recounting of even the most innocent, slapsticky accident unbearable. “When your child dies, I never heard a parent laugh,” Richard Tuttle says by e-mail. Others will shudder at the thought of revisiting work they completed long ago. “When you do something the first time, you have a genuine experience,” says Smith. “The second time you do it, it’s a job. Plus, some of what I did in the past—though I know it was an essential part of my journey—I now don’t like or am embarrassed by. Sometimes I wish my art would spontaneously combust in people’s houses!”
Even an artist fully willing to restore his own piece can be trouble. “Artists are pretty dangerous,” says Feuer, who won’t let them take pieces back to their own studios to restore them. “They’ll bang it up; they won’t pack it right. It’s easier to mishandle something when you think of it as your own piece, and artists sometimes don’t understand that someone other than themselves owns this now.”
Worst of all, though, is if an artist feels that the damage you’ve done to a piece has, even if it’s fixable, jeopardized its integrity. “Then they can renounce the piece under the Visual Artists Rights Act, which says a living artist must be consulted on restoration to their work,” says Chubb’s Straus. “If they do that, it becomes worthless.”
Fortunately, most damage to art is due to carelessness and poor choices—things collectors can control. “I was at a dinner party in the Hamptons this summer at the home of major collectors,” says Worth, “and I asked what they do about climate control and sun there, because I have clients who are beginning to bring their collections out East. And they were like, ‘Oh, we don’t care, we’re just buying for ourselves, we’re never going to sell.’ Yeah, they’re not going to sell, because they won’t be able to after they’ve ruined the pieces. And while it’s nice they’re not speculating—which none of the best collectors are—at the end of the day, you have a responsibility to those objects.”
