Making the day go better

Collecting art is an addiction. Neither its cost nor its supposed value as an investment has much to do with it. If you are rich you buy expensive art by recognised masters and get advice from experts, but if you are poor you follow your own taste among the lesser or little known and probably enjoy yourself just as much. The addiction is not confined to individuals; it can catch businesses too, although it’s usually started by an individual, as for instance by David Rockefeller in 1959 when he set up what is now the J.P. Morgan Chase collection. He brought in a selection committee of leading American museum directors and curators, and the collection now boasts, in the words of its current curator, Stacey Gershon, of being ‘a who’s who of the international art world of the 20th century’.

Deutsche Bank began collecting systematically in the 1970s, when a member of the board asked two professors of art to help design ‘the Deutsche Bank Art Concept’.