Artsy Legend and Art Enthusiast Barry Hoggard's joins host Sarah Haq to talk about his experience as a collector. Listen to his incredible journey as a collector, from where it all started to how his partner, James Wagner, and him have filled their beautiful home with 1,000s of artworks.
We would like to apologise for accidentally calling our wonderful Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) Everette, Elliot in the podcast.
Artsy Legend and Art Enthusiast Barry Hoggard's joins host Sarah Haq to talk about his experience as a collector. Listen to his incredible journey as a collector, from where it all started to how his partner, James Wagner, and him have filled their beautiful home with 1,000s of artworks.
We would like to apologise for accidentally calling our wonderful Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) Everette, Elliot in the podcast.
Sarah Haq 0:09
Hello, welcome to another episode of Artsy Engineering Radio. I'm Sarah, and I'll be your host for today. Today we have a very special guest my role model who's not only an incredible engineer, but also an experienced art collector. He lives and breathes our value love of art, and are all psyched up for the next 30 minutes. Welcome to the show, Barry.
Barry Hoggard 0:27
Hello. Thank you for having me on.
Sarah Haq 0:31
So before we start, I believe you've not been on the podcast before. Why the heck nah.
Barry Hoggard 0:39
Yeah, no, I've never been on the podcast before. Probably partially shyness or not knowing what I wanted to talk about, we probably will end up doing one. Pretty soon about the new bidding engine. I lead the team now to rewrite our bidding engine for our online only auctions and using an event sourcing system which we've never used at Artsy. So that's what I do now. Oh, wow.
Sarah Haq 1:05
Well, I'd like to actually hear more about how did you end up at Artsy.
Barry Hoggard 1:10
I first heard of Artsy through a meetup in New York City called Art tech. That's where I first met Carter and who was the co founder, and DB who was our first CTO. And then I would see C DB around at other events, other tech events. I didn't have an Artsy account at the beginning because it was behind a paywall while they were figuring out what they wanted to do. And then I worked. I was a programmer during the.com era and CTO of a financial education site, kind of like a Motley Fool. And then I went, collapsed in 2000, I decided to be a freelancer. So I was a freelancer for about 15 years, usually working on things like CMS. And then after that, I had friends that were involved in founding paddle, eight, an auction startup. And so I worked for them as a freelancer, full time freelancer for three years. And then I got contacted by dB with and one of his emails, I think he always sends out a subject like big fish fly when he wants you to come talk to him. And so I knew him. I knew Dylan for Reed who worked there at the time. So I ended up having a pretty easy interview process. And then they made me an offer. And I started working there. I mean, it made sense, I would eventually end up at Artsy as an art collector, and software engineer, but I kind of joked with them that I was waiting until it looked like they had a business model. Oh, wow. Because for the first few years, it seemed like this kind of interesting r&d project around the art G. And it wasn't until later they figured out, you know, having galleries on the site and selling art,
Sarah Haq 3:10
we'll have to do a separate podcast about business, Artsy as well, too. I guess that's what I wanted to talk more about a lead. We're about when did you start collecting? What inspired you?
Barry Hoggard 3:23
Well, the art collection, and there's a website for it. If you Google Hoggard Wagner art collection, you will find that you will also find a Google entry because someone at some point, probably an intern at Google, added us as a museum to the play. Wow. So it shows
I didn't do that. But I claimed it so no one else could change the entry. So James, yeah, my partner's James Wagner. He started collecting before me. So he was a member of act up the AIDS activist organisation. And in the late 80s, early 90s. They had several really incredible art auctions. This was at the height of the AIDS crisis, the art world really wanted to help out. And so people at the level of Cindy Sherman and Barbara Kruger and Robert Gober, donated works to the auction. And he said that was the first time he realised like someone like him, could actually afford to buy contemporary art. He was interested in it, but he had never bought contemporary art. His focus in the past had been the 18th century because he bought a house in Providence, Rhode Island many years ago and realised eventually, as he was tearing off all the wallpaper that it was a mid 18th century house. So he restored it to look like it had never been changed and he only collected art from that period. Oh wow. Fast forward to us meeting in the early 90s. I have no art background whatsoever. I grew up in a little town in Arkansas that had no bookstores. And I would drive 30 minutes. Once I could drive to go to a bookstore, except we did have a brilliant library. I don't know how a little town had that. And that's kind of the thing that saved me. I knew I wanted to see art, I eventually saw art in places like Dallas and Fort Worth where I had family. That's where I first saw Picasso painting in person. I moved to New York in the late 80s. Not because I wanted to do anything in particular, in New York, I wanted to live in New York for the art and theatre and music. And fun fact, my first job in New York in 1989, was working in public finance for Lehman Brothers on the 100th floor of the second tower of the World Trade Centre. So there are more people in my on my floor than the town in which I grew up. When I first came here, mostly I concentrated on performing arts, except my employee, Id let me get into all of the museums for free. So whenever I would have a meeting near a museum, usually it was near MoMA, I would just go in for a little while, because I could for 15 minutes and see one thing and then leave. But so eventually, I was going to museums a lot. Once James and I got together, we started going to art galleries a lot, first and Chelsea, he's lived in Chelsea since 1987. And I moved in in 93. And that's around the time galleries were leaving SOHO and coming to Chelsea. So he suddenly had all of these galleries really close to us. And we would go regularly, regret gradually became friends with people in the galleries, and occasionally, At first their artists. So we started out collecting not because we thought of ourselves as collectors that took a while to be comfortable with that term. We started out because that's how you support galleries and artists is you buy artwork. This is pre social media. It's really the only way to support people. And even now, I often tell people that if you have any money, just putting things on your Instagram or your Facebook is not the way to support artists, the way to support artists is to buy their work. And that's how it started. It wasn't a specific plan. If you look at our art collection, on the website, right there is a website if you Google Hoggard Wagner art collection. So it started out as supporting artists. A few years later, the rise of artists run galleries in Williamsburg happened. If you go to Williamsburg now, it's more like a playground for rich kids. And it has an enormous number of expensive apartments. At the time, it wasn't like that there were a lot of artists run spaces. And you could go to Williamsburg and see 10 shows in an afternoon, because they're all that close together. And that's really where the art education began. Neither of us has ever taken a course in art history. Everything we know is from going to museums, and galleries. Occasionally reading we're not like big readers of art magazines which horrifies all my art writer friends. We do subscribe to freeze and Art Forum. And I read it now more than I used to. So the collecting and earnest began, I guess in the late 90s. I think the first piece we bought pieces were two works on paper by the artist Sharon Loudon, Liu d n. And she's still a friend. We've stayed in touch ever since.
Sarah Haq 9:05
So how did you how did you find Sharon? What do I had? Why was she the first artist you purchased?
Barry Hoggard 9:11
It was because of the gallery. It was a gallery. He's no longer with us. But his name was Richard Anderson. And I don't think I knew his gallery when it was in Soho, but James did and he was this very, very sweet, smart man, whose name was Anderson, but I don't know I assume his father was English. His mother was Iranian. And so like he would go back and forth and visit when he was allowed to. And he had been part of the art world for a very, very long time. And we saw this show and decided on these two pieces we really wanted to buy. That's another thing. We are not deliberate collectors. Almost everything we bought, we bought within an hour of seeing it. Oh really?
Sarah Haq 9:59
Yeah, wow, that's a quick,
Barry Hoggard 10:03
very, it's a very intuitive process. And also at the time, you know, an artist's solo show you could buy, this is the 90s, you could buy works on paper, or even small paintings for under $1,000 At the time, sometimes just a few $100. So being spontaneous was not that expensive at the time. And another good thing about it is that because we learned about contemporary art together, I think we really influenced each other's taste. So we've never had a problem of one person really wanting to buy something and the other one not being interested. We've always agreed. Occasionally one hesitates a little, but we've never really had that problem of arguing over which piece to get.
Sarah Haq 10:55
Oh, wow. So it's a collection, a collectors love story. I think we got to make this into a movie. So sorry, to be nosy, but let's talk numbers. How many pieces do you have in your collection right now?
Barry Hoggard 11:08
We don't know exactly. We are in the process of doing a comprehensive catalogue. The amount of works we've catalogued so far is somewhere around eight or 900. And wow, that's crazy. Oh, wow. And that may? I'm not sure we have a lot of works on paper that are in flat files. And yeah, I will say that we do not have outside our art storage. It's very expensive in New York, to have art storage that you trust with your art. So everything is in our apartment. We are lucky enough because James bought early to live in a large two bedroom apartment in Chelsea on the same block as the Hotel Chelsea. So we probably have 15 or 1600 square feet. Sorry for the Europeans. We use feet
Sarah Haq 12:04
trying to calculate.
Barry Hoggard 12:07
Yeah, that's. And so we have over 300 maybe approaching 400 works visible on the walls. Wow. Because we are definitely salon style at this point. And then we also sometimes have we we also generally have some things leaning against chairs, and other things in the apartment. Yeah, I don't know how many it is, I would guess we're talking somewhere between 12 115 100 works overall. And we're in the process of doing a more comprehensive catalogue right now with two friends. One is the artists William Paul Haida pow, ahi da, and the other is a curator at wave Hill named Jesse Firestone. And they're helping us catalogue everything
Sarah Haq 12:57
that is mind blowing. Wow, I absolutely speak to this.
Barry Hoggard 13:03
Also, if we're talking numbers. One reason why we have this many works is through the fact that many of the works came from early on and early in careers. And also a lot of works are from Benefit auctions. I would say, way over maybe even 99% of the works caused under $800 or under $1,000. So that's one reason why people like us can have a collection of this size, neither of us inherited money. We're not from wealthy families. It's all from our own earnings.
Sarah Haq 13:38
So thank you for sharing that. But also that is still a very beautiful about to spend on art. And I know you said that you bought things intuitively sounds maybe a little impulsively as well. But how would you describe your collection as a whole? Are they any sort of specific artists or categories that you've explored during your collecting,
Barry Hoggard 14:04
the approach has always been focused on emerging artists, because that soon needs us at the beginning of their careers. So almost all of the work is from the first few years of an artist professionally showing quite a few works are the first piece in artist ever sold, including William Paul Haida. We were the first people to ever collect him. We were the first person to collect quite a few artists that are now friends of ours. Because we feel like once an artist is someone who is recognised widely, they don't really need people like us to buy them and we probably aren't even in a position to afford them at that point. We do have a few pieces by well known artists that we got at benefit auctions, usually because they were an artist who already meant a lot to us. Two great examples are We have a print by Robert Rauschenberg that we got added benefit. And it was one of those benefits where it's a raffle. So you buy a ticket, and when they draw your number, you get to pick any of the works that are still available. So we paid $750 for a Rauschenberg print.
Sarah Haq 15:19
That's such a good deal. The biggest grin on my face, good envy, good envy.
Barry Hoggard 15:25
We also have a very nice Kiki Smith print that we got added benefit for a few $100. Also, it was another one that was like that, where was a raffle?
Sarah Haq 15:34
Wow, you're very lucky. I know. You also have Wolfgang Tillman's in your collection. Do you not consider him an established artist?
Barry Hoggard 15:41
Oh, I definitely do. I think I was first thinking of benefit auctions that we did buy from a commercial gallery bought from his gallery at the time, Andrea Rosen. And I don't know, it was his first or second show in New York at the time. And so at that point, people like us could, and you could afford a Wolfgang Volt going Tillman's photograph. Now, we couldn't possibly afford one. But we're very, very happy to have that piece.
Sarah Haq 16:12
Yeah, I'm just waiting for you to decide to sell that at a good price. So I'm keeping keeping you sweet. Until then, you described this world of being friends with galleries and artists, and I lived in London, I'm based in Berlin right now. How did you go about that? How did you befriend these artists and galleries?
Barry Hoggard 16:34
I mean, it wasn't conscious. It was that, you know, we weren't setting out to do this, it was that we were really interested in the galleries and their artists. And people often will ask James Comey and how to how do you know so many people in New York, I mean, you say we've lived here a long time. And unless you're a hermit, you meet an awful lot of people. It's I mean, it's not deliberate. I don't set out to go networking. When I go look at galleries, it's because you're interested in the things this gallery is showing, you end up talking to them every time you visit the gallery, and you become friends. With the artists, we've always made a point of meeting the artist if they're still around, and if they're in New York, when we buy artwork. So sometimes we meet the artists at an opening of their show. Sometimes we will look them up afterwards. Normally, like if we buy a work, and we've never met the artists, pre pandemic days, we would ask them to come over for a drink and see our collection and hang out. And then and sometimes we would buy a work, an art benefit. And it might be the first time that person had sold a work because they just moved to New York, they managed to get some work into a nonprofit benefit. And so we would always nonprofits always connect you to the people you're buying. They exchanged your emails. So we always contact people and ask to meet them. When that happens.
Sarah Haq 18:07
Oh, wow, you make it sound so easy. I will make it my 2022 goal to be friends and artists and galleries and fell in.
Barry Hoggard 18:16
It is really easy. I mean, I think people are intimidated. They see the way galleries are portrayed in movies. And I do think the really big deal galleries, I'm not going to name names, since we work at Artsy can feel intimidating when you walk in. If we're going to talk about Artsy, I think that's one reason why a lot of people especially younger people like to buy online, because they feel intimidated by going into a gallery and talking to someone, they don't know if I have enough money. They don't know if I'm the kind of collector they want to sell this work to. So that happens. Yeah. But in general, I keep telling people it's like, artists are fascinating people, they think creatively about how the world works. The ones I know, are all incredibly nice, interesting people and they're wonderful to hang out with. And so we're the gallerists we know, again, pre pandemic, James and I, you normally celebrate birthdays by taking a group out to lunch on us. And often that would be quite a few artists and gallerists because those are the people we wanted to be around. Wow,
Sarah Haq 19:26
that's, that's, that's something that like it's a 2022 goal. Okay, I'm going to try. I mean, for me, it's not because I'm intimidated. I feel personally judged when I've gone up to galleries ask about prices. That's where I guess my fear comes from and what other barriers you think exist for people collecting art, and people are spending money on nice bags and as fire for cars. Why not art? What do you think it's? Do you think it's societal driven or think it's personal?
Barry Hoggard 19:54
Partially I think the way the art world is portrayed in popular media is is ugly. A lot of the times it's about snobby people. And there are aspects of the art world if you're collecting, well known names, which often are the only name someone knows when they're starting out, galleries don't necessarily want to sell art to someone they've never heard of. One reason is they like to help be in charge of an artist's career. And also, they prefer to let artists prices rise at a reasonable rate, because it's often pretty bad for an artist to suddenly triple all of their prices, and then it's not sustained and prices plummet, and you have a lot of unhappy collectors. So they want to buy people that they trust, well hold on to the work, they want to sell to people that hopefully will be interested in donating the works to museums, and they definitely don't want to sell to people that are ready to flip the works. Because at the ad, an artist with an artist's career, galleries often sell at lower prices than the market would bear for an artist, partially because they're trying not to let the prices skyrocket. And a lot of collectors think of art collecting as an investment, or even trading, which I don't even consider that investment to be like a day trader in art, there are people that are interested in that I actually have been at benefits, you know, where the prices are lower than they would be in a gallery, and have heard people talking about what the true market value is supports and deciding based on that. And to me, that sounds like they're getting ready to go put it up for auction as soon as they get their hands on it. And that doesn't benefit anyone. It doesn't help the artist in the United States, the artists don't get anything from auction sales they do in some countries like France. So, you know, galleries and artists don't want people to buy their work just to sell it in a week. That's not. That's not what what they're here for. And so I think galleries can be intimidating in that way. And also the way the press writes about the art world is primarily about prices, not about anything more interesting than that. Or, you know, even if they don't write about the prices, they write about the lifestyle of the artists rather than what they're trying to communicate, like, what watches they were and where they live, what their houses like. So I think all those things are happening. I mean, I do know, I have friends who are quite successful white men who have plenty of money, who when they first started collecting had trouble getting galleries to talk to them, which is shocking to me
Sarah Haq 22:52
reverse white privilege. I like this. Why were galleries not talking to your friends?
Barry Hoggard 23:00
I don't know. They don't really know, I think I think because they didn't know them. But that makes no sense. You know, our chief marketing officer Everette has talked about this some, and the fact that you're judged based on what you look like, when you come into galleries generally. I don't think that's the case for smaller galleries. But those galleries are harder to figure out which ones you want to go to, you know, it's a lot easier to go to the galleries you've already heard of. And you're not always, you know, sometimes you're evaluated on what you look like. Or, you know, it may depend on the people that are on the front line that are out in public for you to see, like they may be having a bad day. They don't feel like answering your questions or whatever. And also the lack of price transparency. You know, in New York, technically yours, you are supposed to provide people with a price list. Did they ask? It's illegal to not divulge a price?
Sarah Haq 24:06
I didn't I was this
Barry Hoggard 24:08
Yeah, it's like a it's like all part of sort of consumer marketing laws in New York City. But people don't follow that. And so for a lot of people, that's also intimidating. You know, you look at a painting and you think I really like this and you have no idea that thing costs $5,000 or $200,000. Jameson, I actually, I mean, one of the most famous artists in the world right now is rich there. And James and I saw one of his first shows in New York before he was super famous. And it was beautiful painting of field and in German visa. And both of us have spent a lot of time in Germany. James has lived there several times. So, you know, there's kind of this sort of almost like the German were like, Hi my feeling like homeland Your your place feeling when we see paintings like that. And James asked about the painting, because we had no idea at that point that what his works were going for. And we knew we probably weren't going to be able to afford it when they told us, one of the gallery partners would be contacting us to talk about it. So so then we knew we're talking a few $100,000 Probably, yeah. Which now would be a bargain for him. But at the time, that was way out of our range. I don't think we've ever paid more than I think our most expensive works are all under 10,000. We've never paid more than that. Yeah, I
Sarah Haq 25:44
really like what you said about collecting emerging artists and actually using money to support artists as opposed to supporting auction houses or the resale market. So yeah, I really like that. What other advice do you have for people interested in collecting young collectors, new collector port collectors.
Barry Hoggard 26:04
The first thing Jameson, I always tell people when we're asked like, because we've been on a few, a number of panels to talk about things like this is, there is no rush, you do not have to buy art immediately, you should take the time to look at art and learn what areas you're interested in. Basically, what your taste is, you don't know what your taste is, when you start out, you should go look at as much art as you can see, these days, of course, you also can look at an awful art, a lot of art online, like art on Artsy, to try to get a sense of what your taste is. When we started collecting, there was no art world, online galleries barely had web pages, artists almost never had web pages. But now Yes, from the convenience of your own home, you can spend a lot of time looking at art, and thinking about what you like and don't like. And there's a phrase in the art world, it's a little mean, I guess, or simplistic called buying with your ears and not your eyes, meaning when people buy based on what they think they're supposed to buy, or what other people tell them they should buy or buying based on where the hype is right now, rather than buying what you want to buy. For us. We're definitely interested in conceptual work. And most of our work has some conceptual component. But also, to use a trial freeze, one of my galleries friend uses eye candy is important. It has to be something you want to look at as well.
Sarah Haq 27:40
It is a lifelong relationship.
The thing about us deciding on artwork right away, we didn't, we didn't do that. At the beginning. It wasn't until we had collected a number of works. And we had a sense of what we wanted. When people look at our collection, they say so there's no plan. And there never really has been a plan to collect a certain kind of work. At the beginning, a lot of it was photography, partially because it was affordable. And also in the 90s there was a lot of conceptual photographic work more so than then works on paper, or paintings. But now, I would say we tend more towards works on paper or paintings now. We can't afford that many paintings now. But also paintings generally have a lot less conservation worries than photographs or works on paper.
Oh really? Yes, I didn't. I didn't realise
Barry Hoggard 28:41
things tend not to. I mean, we're very careful. We have a south facing apartment. We keep our blinds closed during the day. And a lot of our photographs are behind you, UV Plexi. But even then you have risk of exposing drawings and photographs to light over a long period of time.
Sarah Haq 29:01
I feel we need to do another series with you where we talk about how do you take care of your magnificent art collection because that's something that I feel as on advice on like we always think well, at least out of passion I'm always buying or trying to buy and then I forget what a lifelong commitment. I've just signed up for the framing like glass I used to frame it and like you said the curtains I keeping the light. Yeah, I would personally love a series on that. I just want to end it with one last question. What was the last work that you purchased? And what is your plan for your magnificent collection.
Barry Hoggard 29:34
The last thing we purchased was, I guess it's a photographic print by Sarah Kleiner. See wi NAR is a very interesting conceptual photographer and video artist. She's represented by good friends of ours, the gallery foxy production, and I just seen her solo show there. And it's a benefit for performance which is a performance bias Niall in New York, we'd never had a work by her. And we also haven't been collecting a lot over the last few years because we're, we're totally out of space.
Sarah Haq 30:10
So, finally,
Barry Hoggard 30:11
I wanted to support. So I wanted to support an artist whose career I follow, but we don't own the work by talking about the future of the collection. That's probably not a two to three minute discussion. But one reason why we are cataloguing the collection more carefully now, for the nerds in the room, we're using air table because it's an easy way to have a database that lets lots of people work on it at once without me having to write a CMS for it. So we're working on a very comprehensive catalogue and a new version of the public website to make it easier to browse by categories or themes. Because James, and I want to donate the collection to a museum or other institution like a library. It's a very specific snapshot of New York art, especially artists run spaces from basically the late 90s into the 2000s. We also have a lot of documentation and ephemera. We still have things like the price lists from shows where we bought art, we have a lot of invitations from shows back when everybody used to mail out invitations, many of which were actually made by the artist as they went out. So we're talking to a handful of museums now that we hope to donate it to, it probably will be hard to donate the entire collection to one place, although we'd like to keep it together. Because like we said, it is a snapshot of a certain time and of a certain couples collecting life. But we don't know yet. We're going to talk more seriously. We're already have talked to three museums. But we're going to talk more seriously after we've finished the cataloguing. Oh, wow.
Sarah Haq 32:04
Well, I can't wait to hear more about that. But thank you, thank you so much for your time. Thank you so much for sharing your journey of your incredible art collection. I've just got the hugest grin on my face. And I am so inspired and just forever blown away by you. And thanks for listening, everybody.
Barry Hoggard 32:22
Thank you.
Steve Hicks 32:23
Bye, bye. Thanks for listening. You can follow us on Twitter at Artsy open source. Keep up with our blog@artsy.github.io This episode was produced by Aja Simpson and thank you Eve Essex for our theme music.
You can find her on all major streaming platforms. Until next time, this is Artsy Engineering Radio
Transcribed by https://otter.ai