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Magazines:
Aventura Magazine
Collecting
- South Florida art experts share their expertise and help
you maximize the art-buying experience.
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designer Louis Shuster went to law school and art school
at Philadelphia College of Art before opening a Boca
Raton fine-art gallery with two partners in the early
90s, when in South Florida “most people were really
not prepared to spend the big bucks in fine art.”
That’s definitely changed, he says. “People
are far more exposed than they were 20 years ago, and they
are absolutely buying the best. They’ll fly to New
York in a heartbeat to buy from the artist’s studio.” Still,
he adds, there are some who buy “for the prestige
of owning name art. It’s no different from driving
a Bentley or buying a yellow canary diamond.” Today
he often designs around the art people buy, and he also
collects himself, counting Michael Craig Martin, Robert
Longo and Rob Lorenson among his acquisitions.
For his clients and for himself, Shuster haunts Boca Raton’s
20-year-old Gallery Center, which has nearly a dozen fine-art
galleries, “not blue-chip, but very high-end, wow!
Look, a lot of impact.”
“
Talk to someone other than an art gallery,” he recommends. “Someone
on the outside who is knowledgeable about intrinsic values
of what they’re buying, so you know you’re
buying right, not overpaying.”
Shuster’s most prestigious “get” is a
folder of 12 Andy Warhol lithographs, the animal series,
which he bought from Dorothy Blau (“brilliant, probably
one of the most knowledgeable dealers I’ve ever met”)
in the early 1980s for $7,500. When Warhol died, he had
the pieces appraised in New York: $25,000 for each piece. “I
didn’t sell,” he says. “I still have
them under my bed. I keep them as an investment.”
Shuster sees the market moving toward emerging artists
from Cuba, where he recently went on a buying trip.
Artists he likes: French sculptures Arman and Bernar Venet;
British pop artist Michael Craig Martin and watercolorist
David Remfry, both of whom he says, “will eventually
be old masters.”
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