“We had a collector who bought a 19th-century oil painting depicting a bathing scene,” says AIG’s Zigerlig. “He figured, What better place to put this than above my Jacuzzi tub? Needless to say, the steam caused all the paint to flake off and mold to grow, and by the time he contacted us, it was pretty much a total loss.”
But while collectors do have great control over the fate of their art, and the more dramatic, Wynn-type stories are fewer and farther between, hush-hush dinner-party conversations still abound. “I know of a collector who hired an exorcist who accidentally splashed holy water all over a valuable painting in the collector’s home—but how often is that kind of thing going to happen?” says a top art adviser, before reconsidering. “Though I guess if anyone’s going to be hiring exorcists, it’s the same crazy people who spend all their money on art.”
