The Error World (22 page)

At the end of our conversation, I asked Michael Sefi the same thing I had asked when we met. Why do we collect? What is the instinct that propels us to a chosen life of trying to complete something we never can? 'I guess it has something to do with being a hunter-gatherer, the squirrel instinct as I prefer to call it,' Sefi said. 'My wife has said it's all about anal retention and potty training.' So it's mostly a male thing.

'No, I don't agree with that. I think women tend to collect more decorative things. An obvious example is fans ... You could get very sexist and say that women are mostly interested in gathering things for the house. In stamp collecting there are a number of women who are very active in thematic collecting—cats or flowers or royalty.' Sefi thought there may be a genetic element to the debate, something that steers women in a different direction from men. He told me he had three grown-up children, two daughters and a younger son, and when they were smaller the son had all the options of hand-me-down dolls and girl playthings, but he immediately started collecting cars and Action Men. 'I was away working a lot when he was two or three, so I don't think it could be put down to parental conditioning.' Almost inevitably, his son, who is called Charles, is not such a keen collector as his father.

As I left and walked across the royal courtyard, a sadness fell upon me, as if I had just witnessed—or was indeed part of—the closing of an era. I felt as though I was in a dusk-descending poem by John Betjeman. And when I got home I remembered what the poem was—'Death of King George V'. This described the demise of the great stamp king and the accession of Edward VIII, who was not a collector, and who had only four low-value British stamps issued in his name before he abdicated. Edward had no need for stamps: he had found the woman of his dreams.

By far the most joyful working afternoon I have ever spent occurred in the summer of 1992. Very painfully, it was also the afternoon I made an irreversible error of judgement that I regret almost every time I visit an art gallery. Collectors delight in their acquisitions, but it is nothing compared to the agonies unleashed when something gets away. Rationally, one shouldn't care. But desire burns away, and gets deeper with time.

I had gone to Cork Street behind the Royal Academy to interview the art dealer John Kasmin about his final show. This was a significant moment—a clear announcement, as if anyone really needed telling, that modern art was in trouble. The recession that had first hit the property world had swiftly moved to the collecting world, stamps as well as art. For Kasmin to be selling up was indeed a milestone: a fixture of the art trade for almost forty years, Kasmin's decision to sell by appointment from home marked the end of ... actually it just marked the end of Kasmin in Cork Street, but this was journalism and so there was a story to be made.

It was greed that ruined the art world, Kasmin told me not long after I had positioned my tape-recorder on a desk in the middle of the gallery. Kasmin was skittering about on parquet, putting prices up on the works for his show. He was a small man with big round glasses and an open-necked striped shirt, not quite sixty. He used a Bic Biro, and I made a mental note: times tough indeed!

'God, I should never have had a last show,' he said. 'Too many people get sentimental. I really should have done it several years ago. As the prices went up I found it an increasingly meaningless and silly activity. But partly you carry on by impetus, and you get spoilt when the money keeps coming in and it's easy to make.'

But then, in the dealer's phrase, 'the business just stopped. You've got to be very convinced of what you're doing in the face of no possibility of making money, only of losing.'

Value in art was like value in stamps. You couldn't eat off art, unless it was Julian Schnabel's smashed plates. When the bottom fell out of the art market, the market in stamps declined at the same time and for the same reasons—over-speculation and recession. Neither had intrinsic value beyond the price of postage and canvas. For too many people, an enjoyment of art and stamps declines proportionately alongside their value.

Kasmin told me that he always believed the cost of art had to have some sort of benchmark; his final show contained a large Stephen Buckley work in mixed media, and traditionally Kasmin had always priced Buckley's work in line with the cost of a new Mini, but now Minis were costing more and Buckley wasn't selling so fast. I asked him when things ceased to be fun for him. Kasmin called it 'Saatchi time ... All these people in the eighties buying things to leave in warehouses. I began to feel less and less part of it because the money thing just wasn't my game. I don't like to be short of money, but I could never get
into
it. I always liked dealing with people who used it. You know, that old-fashioned thing: people putting art on the walls and looking at it.'

The good news was, there were now bargains to be had. Not the sort of bargains that Kasmin once enjoyed—five Bacons for six grand. But very good value for the art lover so long as the art lover held their nerve. In Kasmin's last show there was a big John Hoyland painting—a painting, not a print, seems mad now—for £5,000. And there was a Hockney—which was a print, one of an edition of five early lithographs—going for £6,000. It was called
Fish and Chip Shop
and Hockney had made it in 1954, at the age of seventeen, when he was at Bradford Art School. The print showed the interior of a local chippy, a plump man in a white coat frying, a woman in an apron serving. She was serving a young blond man who looked rather like Hockney, except Hockney hadn't yet bleached his dark hair. It was a vivid, warm scene, with a skilful display of perspective. It was romantic, and I wanted it.

And £6,000 didn't seem like a lot for an early Hockney.
^*
I could have put it on my MasterCard, and even if I didn't pay it off for years it would still have been a steal. But it seemed like a lot of money at the time, and far more than I had ever spent on anything apart from a house and car. Also, something honourable inside me told me that it would have been a little odd for a journalist to have bought it before the private view later that evening, which was obviously complete rubbish. So I didn't put it on my MasterCard. And when I came back the next day it had a red sticker next to it.

Kasmin's real name was John Kaye. He was born in White-chapel, east London, in 1934. He grew up in Oxford, and at seventeen he fled to New Zealand to write poetry and escape his father. He became a sort of Kiwi beat, and made himself undesirable by trying to rob a bank. On his return to England he fell into art dealing via bohemian Soho, and soon established himself as someone with original taste; when Pop was all the rage, Kasmin said it was junk.

Kasmin was not gay: he was keen to tell me of his many, many successes with women in the mid-1950s when he was just starting out with the dealer Victor Musgrave. 'Nothing else to do but screw in those days. Certainly so little business.' But the man who walked in about twenty minutes after me was gay, something that was first visible to the general public from his earliest art in the 1950s.

'Here is Mr Hockney,' Kasmin announced as Hockney walked in from the street. He had come to say that he was too tired to attend the opening that evening, but he wanted to wish him good luck. He looked just like Hockney should: green shirt, red tie, beige baggy suit, two-tone suede and leather shoes, light blue raincoat, lime green umbrella, tortoiseshell glasses, and a hearing aid that was half bright blue and half bright red. He poured himself a mineral water in Kasmin's office. He was in from Los Angeles to see his mother and receive an honorary doctorate from the Royal College of Art.

Hockney (pulling up a chair):
Being a doctor is not that much use really. You still can't write prescriptions for your own drugs. Someone asked me how it felt. I said, 'Take two aspirins and call me in the morning.'

Kasmin:
I've hung up
Fish and Chip Shop.
Did you see it as you walked in? I thought, in a rather kinky show, why not have a kinky Hockney?

I'll miss having a place where people can drop by and see what I've got. If I get really itchy and absolutely hate it I'll maybe open up a shop or a café. For now I think I'll just put my head down for a bit and become a collector. If you become a collector you get invited to all the parties. People say, will I still go abroad, and I say I won't need to any more. I used to go abroad only to run away from the gallery. I used to travel a lot with people like Bruce Chatwin. I used to love adventures. But now a lot of friends are dead. I'm going to another funeral of a great friend tomorrow, the architect who's always done my galleries. It takes the taste off things a wee bit.

Hockney (patting Kasmin's stomach):
You're exercising, are you?

Kasmin:
I've just been fed up by an old friend.

Hockney
: You should exercise.

Kasmin:
Since I've given up smoking and drinking I've taken up ice-cream.

Hockney (horrified):
You'd be better off smoking than having ice-cream.

Kasmin:
I like the ice-cream, thank you.

Hockney (still outraged):
It's very bad for you.

Kasmin:
I only eat it every now and then.

Hockney:
It's solid fat!

He pours himself more water and asks:
Why am I drinking so much of this stuff?

Kasmin (who once drank heavily):
My unaccustomed bout of sobriety has made me look at things in a completely new light and realise that I've been thrashing about a bit, going on showing what I always did, picking out good art, but no pacemakers. This is not a position to feed you, to make you want to go on into the headwind.

Hockney:
I think it's all rather good now. It's like the art world is going back to being sane again.

Kasmin:
The picture of yours that brought the most money at auction
[in May 1989]
you painted at art school. You painted it very, very big in order to get a bit of privacy. It was as big as a wall.

Hockney:
I got paid £85 for it.

Kasmin:
That was from me! I couldn't work out where to put it. It just fitted in the hallway of my little house off Fulham Road when I was dealing from home. I thought, what am I going to do with it? I finally sold it for £150 to a man who swore to me that it was going to his children's primary school.
[The picture was later sold on.]
Then at auction twenty-five years later it sold for $2.2 million to some mad lady in America.

Hockney (wistfully):
It was called
A Grand Procession of Dignitaries.

Kasmin:
When are you coming back here again?

Hockney:
Tomorrow, if you like.

Kasmin:
No, coming
back.
To Britain.

Hockney:
I'll be coming back to start the opera around 20 October.
Die Frau ohne Schatten
will hit the fans at Covent Garden on 16 November. Hit the fans. Get it? The
Schatten
will hit the fans.

Kasmin
: Oh, the
Schatten.

Hockney:
That was a joke. I won't explain any more. Kas has no ear for music whatsoever.

This one afternoon in the presence of Kasmin and Hockney formed an obsession that later took on the form of a life's quest. Their conversation also assures me that I am not the only one to muse on inflation and opportunities lost.

Of course, it's not just about money. I'm not sure one ever forgives oneself for the errors one makes as a collector, and on that afternoon I made the greatest error possible, the classic mistake: I didn't buy something I loved. A few months later, the former
Time Out
art critic Sarah Kent told me that she had once done the same, and she was a professional. She also said that she might regret the non-purchase until she died.

I asked Kasmin if there was much of Hockney's work that he didn't like.

Kasmin:
Of course. I go through periods when I don't like some of the stuff at all. But I don't actually hate it. Sometimes David doesn't like it, but he only doesn't like it afterwards. David changes so much. It would be impossible for one person to like everything he does.

Hockney:
The only person who likes all kinds of art is an auctioneer.

Kasmin:
Or your mother.

Hockney:
Oh yes, my mother.

They wander out of Kasmin's office. Hockney settles by 'Fish and Chip Shop'.

Kasmin:
I always wondered, was that boy meant to be you, David? An idealised you?

Hockney:
Kind of. Yes, I'm always leaning like that. It was always the husband who did the frying and the woman who did the serving. When I was younger I used to go into fish and chip shops late at night and say: 'Got any chips left?', and when they said yes, I'd say, 'Well, it's your own fault for cooking too many.'

Kasmin (examining print):
You don't get vinegar shakers like that any more.

Hockney:
You do in Bridlington.

Kasmin:
The whole thing has a Vuillard feel to it.

Hockney
: Any student doing a print like that in those days made it look like Vuillard.

Kasmin:
Have you got a copy of it?

Hockney:
I think so. Had to buy it, though.