One of the first collectors to pay close attention to Chinese video art, Michael Jacobs presented parts of his collection last year in the Whitebox Art Center: the result was a seminal exhibition in New York of video works by young Chinese artists. With interests that range from photojournalism, to video art, to more traditional forms of painting and sculpture, Jacobs is rightfully a little proud of his eye in contemporary art: he was an early supporter of artists like Li Ming, Sun Xun, Cheng Ran and Wang Xin. The same exhibition later traveled to an art fair in Turkey, Contemporary Istanbul, and recently also developed into an online presence as the website Now You See (nowyouseeart.com). In this interview, Jacobs shares his ideas on collecting, storing and displaying videos.
Michael Jacobs in conversation. Photo Credit: SCREEN
Jiayin Chen: Tell us a little about yourself and how you started to collect art.
Michael Jacobs: I’m Clinical Associate Professor of Dermatology at Cornell University in the Medical College. When I was an undergrad at New York University, I took many art history courses, in addition to the science requirements. I studied Modern Art, Asian Art, Japanese Art, though I never studied Chinese Art because I had no time. I always enjoyed doing research in museums and libraries for term papers: art’s visual and my brain works well with those patterns, which is why I turned to dermatology, which is also a visual practice.
One of my patients was a photographer who worked for LIFE Magazine. He was retired and living in Paris. He was friends with Matisse, Giacometti, all the artists there, really. One day, he invited me to Paris, and I ended up visiting Paris 25 times in five years! I studied photography with him and went to all the museums to discuss art with him. All the artists from the thirties, forties, fifties, and sixties. I learned a lot from him, and not only about photography. Dmitri Kessel passed away at the age of 93 years old in 1995.
Later, a patient of mine who was on the board of Whitney Museum noticed the photography hanging in my office and told me, “We have a photography committee at the Whitney that’s only two years old, and we’d like you to be part of it.” So I interviewed with the museum and then joined the committee. From there I learned a whole new language, because photojournalism is completely different from art photography. In addition, there wasn’t too much written about it back in 1995, so I had to learn it myself. I studied and started to collect photography. I then joined the committee at the Museum at Cornell, MoMA’s Photography Committee, and then the Getty Museum in Los Angeles. Later I was asked to join the Renaissance Society, Contemporary Art Committee and The Art Institute of Chicago, Art and Architecture Committee of the Museum, etc. As I started to get more into Asian art, the Asia Society under the Contemporary Art Acquisition Committee invited me to join, which was about six years ago, and also the Japan Society. Recently, I joined the Painting and Sculpture Committee at the Whitney Museum for the first time.
JC: Where do you learn about new artists?
MJ: I find them on my own. With the help of Wang Xin and Zhang Peili, I’ll meet one artist, who will lead me to the next, and so on. I did all the research on my own, and I have no art advisor or curator. I know artists through other artists. I always ask who their friends are.
JC: Not from magazines or any art publications?
MJ: By the time they’re in magazines they’re no longer new artists!
JC: What was your first piece?
MJ: My first piece probably was a photograph by Nan Goldin. For me, after collecting photography, videos seemed natural. I can recognize great photography, and I can recognize great video. I don’t know why. So I started to look at videos. I have a very large photography collection and video collection, and am now building a painting and sculpture collection. I’m doing it backwards.
JC: How did you first become involved in Chinese contemporary art? Did it start out as an accident?
MJ: China. Yes, I was invited by one of my friends. I was also on the International Center of Photography Exhibition Committee for a little while. One of my friends who was on the Board of Trustees was going with Christopher Phillips and some people to Beijing, China, for a week in 2010. For some reason my friend couldn’t go, so he invited me to take his place for that trip at the very last minute. I had to rush to get everything ready and cancel appointments. My office wanted to kill me! But I went anyway, and had no idea what to expect. I had never been to China, not even to Asia, actually.
During my first trip I started to do studio visits, and I decided to go back. I was blown away. The quality was so high, and they weren’t copying Western art but inventing a language on their own.
The story of how I met artist Wang Xin is crazy, too. In Shanghai I went to the Museum of Contemporary Art. They had a show of ten young female artists. I wanted to meet the curator and went to the reception desk but couldn’t speak Chinese, so I went to security and they couldn’t understand me either. Finally someone came downstairs who spoke a little English. She contacted the curator Jimmy Wang for me. Jimmy introduced me to many artists and said there’s one artist in Chicago. I have a weekend home in Chicago, so I called [Wang Xin] and we became really good friends. I met Zhang Peili and she helped arrange it for me. We did all the studio visits together and she acted as my interpreter. It was really fun. I couldn’t have done it without her. Here’s this crazy American guy who was finding them on his own, and we all became friends. So far I’ve been to China twelve times now, since 2010.
JC: Do you still do studio visits?
MJ: Yes. I still see video works but now also a lot of paintings from emerging artists too. I think the art world in China is super interesting.I was Li Ming’s first collector. Maybe he’d sold one video before he met me, but that’s it. I own eight of Li Ming’s videos, not just one piece. If I like someone, that’s how I collect. Some collections buy one of everything, but I like to buy the works by the artists I believe in depth. That’s my philosophy on collecting.
JC: Do you consult with anyone before acquiring a piece of art? Art advisors, curators, or artists?
MJ: No one. They’ll have their own opinion, but I feel that this is such a new field that I think my opinion counts as much as theirs. I don’t see why they’d have a better idea.
My first meeting with Li Ming and Cheng Ran was in 2010 in the balcony of a small Hangzhou coffee shop. They didn’t speak any English then, though they do now. Suddenly, Li Ming started to choke up and get emotional. He said that he’d tried so hard to be an artist, and here’s this American guy comes out of the blue to support him. He felt there was a real bond. Cheng Ran went to a residency and now he’s representing China in the 2015 Istanbul Biennial. Li Ming is having shows all over the places, and he’s getting a lot of attention. All of them are doing great now. Artists remember their first collectors, always. Always. Just like they feel a bond with museums that take the chance to acquire their work.
JC: You have been an avid video art collector. What do you think are the main concerns that keep other collectors from buying video works? What makes collectors hesitate? And can you talk a little about how you deal with migrating across formats in your work??
MJ: Technically, to watch the videos all you need is a computer. There are no barriers to entry. When you buy a video in a limited edition,you get the video in some format, either flash drive, DVD, or hard drive, tape, and the certificate of authenticity, signed by the artist, which is the real intellectual property that lets you know you own it. It’s similar to photography, which is also editioned, except that to show the work in a museum, you always need the artist’s permission. It’s easy to store video. You can store videos in a shoebox. You can store them in your closet and pull them out whenever you want. Personally, I won’t keep a video only on a flash drive, because technology is changing and it will break. I don’t know what a flash drive will look like in ten years. Everyone who own videos has to keep up with the technology by migrating, and museums have to worry about that, too. Nam June Paik, the father of modern video, made tapes; if when you bought the original video it was on a tape for an old TV set from the 1950s, how do you show it now? You either get hold of the functional original equipment, or you have to migrate it. So I prefer to have them in many formats. Usually you have to ask the gallery for it. You pay extra if you want it in another form. I migrated a lot by myself actually. I’ll buy the DVD and flash drive and migrate the work myself. There are video companies, technology companies, but the idea is very simple, you just have to make sure when they reproduce, the quality is the same or better. The technology isn’t hard. It’s making the video that’s hard. Sometimes a video has many channels, one channel, two-channel, and so on. Synchronizing can get a little technically complicated. But that doesn’t scare me from doing it. One of Cheng Ran’s works is a four-channel video, and it’s a beautiful, beautiful work.
JC: The video art market is very small at the moment, let alone the secondary market. Are people not educated enough to embrace this art form?
MJ: Well I think that I see videos slowly being inserted into big auctions. One day, video will be just a part of the contemporary art market, just as paintings and photography are. Photography took a long time to get into the market, but now it’s considered mainstream and normal. If you mention a video auction, people will laugh at you. In my office, I have a monitor playing the videos looped so the patients can see the videos and photographs.
JC: Videos can be easily copied. People tend to see that as a threat to the ownership of video art.
MJ: People used to say that in photography. With videos, you might be able to watch it on Vimeo, but that’s different from a proper showing in a museum. More and more museums are building a video collection. The Whitney has a dedicated video and media curator, Chrissie Iles, and MoMA has a dedicated curator. Videos are becoming an important art form because artist are making videos, so the museums have to stay current. I’m not sure how fast it will develop, but who knows? It might surprise us yet.
JC: How do you arrange your collection? How do you archive the works?
MJ: I have a program on my computer that’s commercially available. Some galleries in the US use it and I’m able to know where everything is, at least digitally.
JC: What is your next move? In the long term, how do you see your collection?
MJ: Right now I’m working with a lot of museums. I don’t know where the collection will go, but for example, the DSL collection, which is very elegant and beautiful, has a virtual museum to show their collection. Some people don’t have their collection online but I think what I want to do is to put more of my collection online to share with people. Because the collection is pretty big now. I want to show people how fun it is to collect. I really want to be more involved with different exhibitions. I would like my collection to travel around the world. I’ve given many artworks to museums, I’ve given art works to Whitney, MoMA, Johnson Museum at Cornell, Dallas Museum, National Gallery in DC, Art Institute, the Getty, and so on. Mostly I gave photography works, to get the artists into the museums. I want to keep doing this to make them more known.
JC: Your one piece of advice to new collectors?
MJ: You have to trust yourself. Trust your instinct. It’s hard, but everyone makes mistakes: everyone. I don’t care how important a collection is or how many years someone has been curating. I shouldn’t use the word mistake, because sometimes artists just decide not to make art anymore, that it’s not for them, especially young artists. It’s a matter of many different worlds coming together to make it work. Artists must have talent and support to do something new, to keep going without copying. In good times and even in bad times, they have to get out there and find some gallery backing and institutional backing, leading to museum support eventually. It’s a process and it’s hard for artists.
These young artists in China are very deserving. It’s great to help them and see them succeed. But as a beginning collector, people tend to rely on other people’s judgments. Just remember that nobody has perfect judgment. You need to put faith in your own judgment. Videos are not expensive as collecting paintings, and so, for young collectors with not much money: go buy up all the amazing videos.
