By Alejandro Martín
First visits are filled with doubt, excitement, and nerves… even more so when it comes to getting into art collecting, and doing so at a fair like ARCO, which is huge and offers so many incentives. Will there be a piece that fits my budget? And if I like several works, what criteria should I use to decide? What's the smartest option?
Against this logical hesitation, like a kind of GPS to avoid getting lost among the thousands of proposals that gather at each edition of the fair, First Collectors was born in 2011, a free, personalized advisory service promoted by the Banco Santander Foundation. Anyone can sign up via email, and thanks to a form, a team of experts will prepare a dossier with suggested works and galleries they recommend visiting, all tailored to their budget and tastes. Would you rather opt for an emerging artist whose work will appreciate in the future? Go here. Sculpture, painting, more contemporary expressions? "The intention is to offer support so that people dare to approach artists' work without shame, so that they lose their fear," says Elisa Hernando, PhD in Art and Economics and founder of Arte Global, the pioneering Spanish company in these fields that provides personalized advice.
Hernando greets Esley Sánchez and her husband Enrique Rodríguez and sits next to the Cuban couple. They've been living in Madrid for barely six months; it will be their first time at ARCO, although they're not exactly novices in the art world. Rodríguez inherited a collection of pieces from his grandfather, Juan Miguel Rodríguez de la Cruz, a ceramist, featuring the finest ceramic work by Cuban avant-garde artists of the 1950s. Since it came into their hands, the couple has taken great care of it and made it grow. It has just been exhibited in museums in Boston and Miami.
And with that purpose, that of discovering new works that dialogue with their own, they appear at the fair.
Hernando hits the nail on the head ("The best avant-garde art remains fully relevant because it has a transcendent and timeless quality at its core," he tells them, pointing with his index finger at a corner of the dossier), and their eyes fall on the sgraffito amphora by a Moroccan artist, Mounir Fatmi. "The shapes of, for example, a Cuban porrón come from the Spanish tradition, and the Arab and Mediterranean have influenced all of that, of course," Rodríguez comments with pleasure.
With at least three ceramic and glass sculptures on the horizon and their locations marked on the fair map, the route begins.
Work begins before the opening
That precise and well-directed tour offered by Enrique Rodríguez and Esley Sánchez began to take shape weeks ago. “We have to arrive at the fair with our homework done,” says Hernando. They spend months preparing for ARCO, speaking with the galleries (214 from 36 countries) and the fair organizers, and they know exactly which artists are coming and what they're bringing. Last year, they served 130 people through the First Collectors program; this year's edition, with the Amazon and climate change as central themes, will undoubtedly surpass that number.
The search for the right portfolio is exhaustive and requires a deep understanding of the potential buyer's interests: national or international artists? Emerging or established? Do they prioritize certain aesthetic coordinates or specific works whose value will grow in the future?
For those more novices, another fundamental task they must complete is purely educational. The art market has specificities that not everyone is familiar with: galleries handle booth rental, transportation (both to the exhibition venue and to the buyer's home), insurance, and all the paperwork—complex and sometimes extremely expensive tasks. Artists typically receive 50% of the work's value, and from this profit they must subtract the production costs of the piece, as well as taxes. This is almost always the case, and it's a necessary explanation to understand the price of a painting, sculpture, or installation. "At Arte Global, we have collectors with budgets ranging from €500 to €200,000. It's an exciting sector, but without anyone to guide you, it's very easy to feel overwhelmed by uncertainty," explains Hernando.
And her advice is truly precious, even to the most expert voices. When María Beguiristain, Art Director of the Banco Santander Foundation, walks through the halls of ARCO, she points out works, knowing almost everything about their creators; she can barely take a few steps without artists or gallery owners greeting her and being delighted to see her there. Well, Beguiristain even tells anecdotes about a time when Hernando advised her to take the risk of acquiring a piece, and she didn't decide—an obviously missed opportunity, now that she knows what she couldn't have known then: "It was a tiny piece by June Crespo [Pamplona, 1982], it was beautiful and cost, I don't remember, between 500 and 600 euros." She would have loved to add it to her personal collection but didn't dare. Some time later, June Crespo was selected to participate in the 59th Venice Biennale (2022). The Pamplona-born artist is today, according to the specialized publication ArtFacts, one of the 100 most important artists in Spain.
Passion and reason for art
Beguiristain and Hernando agree: you have to dare to enter a gallery like someone browsing in a furniture store or a bookstore. “People constantly ask me, surprised, ‘Seriously, there’s no entrance fee?’ We have to break down that barrier once and for all. It’s the first step in educating the eye,” Hernando insists with conviction.
Her story is that of someone who, surely, could not have ended any other way: since she was a child, she loved art history but readily accepted her father's advice to study a "useful" degree at the same time; in the mornings she took courses in Economics and Business Administration, in the afternoons she changed corridors and faculties and studied what fascinated her. She earned both degrees (and years later would continue with doctorates), tried her hand at investment banking abroad, and, at the age of 26, from Brussels, decided to change course. She returned to Madrid, gained experience in several galleries, and finally, in 2003, opened Arte Global, the company that combined her knowledge, a business model that did not yet exist in Spain: what in English they called Art Advisory , the type of art consulting that public and private institutions, from museums to banks and foundations, often need to properly manage their collections and wisely choose new acquisitions or what sales to make and how.
Hernando also wanted to extend the service to individuals, especially because she had been through it herself and wanted to be able to "resolve the questions she had also had" for anyone who needed it. "The first work of art I bought was a Chillida print that I bought in installments and which I cherish very dearly," she confesses.
The first thing that comes into play is always passion, he says, falling in love with a piece, fantasizing about being able to admire it every day; but then reason also enters the fray: “It seems frowned upon, but I'm an economist; you buy art for pleasure, for love, but of course you have to consider that if one day I tire of the piece or want to give it to my children or need to sell it, the investment has been beneficial and it has appreciated in value.”
It's almost 3 p.m. on the opening day of ARCO. Enrique Rodríguez and Esley Sánchez have just finished the tour suggested by Hernando and want to request a catalog of the fair. They haven't decided yet; perhaps this year's edition won't be the time to venture into adding more ceramics to their collection. However, the experience, they say, has been worth it; they found what they were looking for without getting lost. Mission accomplished.
https://elpais.com/cultura/branded/arte-y-accion/2025-03-07/becoming-a-collector-at-arco-without-snuffling-in-the-intent.html
