According to Kathryn Tully of the Financial Times, here the story on Wall Street. "At lunchtime, the public atrium at the bottom of 60 Wall Street contains the normal assortment of city workers eating sandwiches or grabbing a coffee. A more unusual discovery is a number of art installations.
One, “Hip Hop New York” by Cao Fei from China, features a video installation of locals from New York’s Chinatown doing freestyle hip-hop moves. The installation is surrounded by everyday objects you might pick up around Canal Street.
In another installation, you can sit in an armchair in a booth and press a button to provoke a simulated storm, complete with thunder and lightning flashes above and torrential rain on a screen next to you. Or you can press another button to induce a restful sunset. This installation, by the Russian-born artist Vadim Fishkin, who lives in Slovenia, is called “Choose Your Day”.
Both were transplanted from an exhibition in the Byrd Hoffman Watermill Center on Long Island, supported by Deutsche Bank. Now the bank is using them to bring to life the public spaces around its Wall Street headquarters.
Deutsche Bank has about 50,000 pieces – the world’s biggest corporate art collection. But its contemporary art collection isn’t a static group of paintings that have haphazardly found their way into office boardrooms, promptly to be forgotten.
Deutsche Bank is one of a handful of global companies with a museum-quality collection displayed not only in public atriums and its own onsite galleries but exhibited in museums all over the world.
UBS launched the collection in December 2004 and many of the works later appeared as a temporary exhibition in the newly reopened Museum of Modern Art in New York.
Part of the collection has been shown in the US and in Switzerland. It is now on show at the Tate Modern in London and some of the works will travel to Asia next year for exhibitions jointly curated by UBS and local museums.
UBS is scouring the world for museum-grade works to add to its collection. Christensen has been working for Deutsche Bank since 1993 and in that time Deutsche’s collection has grown fourfold.
Aside from acquisitions, Deutsche Bank regularly commissions works that also appear in public museums. At least once a year it commissions a site-specific artwork to be displayed at Deutsche Guggenheim in Berlin with which the bank has a joint venture.
With banks investing a considerable chunk of cash in increasing their collections, how do they determine the acquisition policy or the value of such collections? After all, plenty of banks are involved in arts sponsorship, plenty have Constables in their boardrooms but museum-quality art collections that travel all over the world are extremely rare and, some would say, strange assets for a publicly listed company.
In New York, Deutsche Bank has a small annual budget for acquisitions and cash for one-off exhibitions or collaborations, which are approved by an art committee of senior managers of the different businesses of the bank.
Valuing the collections is difficult. Both banks include works by famous names of the 20th century but they also focus on contemporary art, so they often buy works from relatively young and unknown artists to support the arts community.
Arends says the point of acquisitions for the UBS collection is not just to acquire great art but to foster new talent, which is not necessarily an expensive pursuit. “You can of course invest in artists where you pay millions but that is not our intention. We also want to unearth new talent in the countries where we do business.”
The average purchase price for the Deutsche Bank collection is about £1,000 ($1,890) but the amount spent by the art committee on acquisitions varies enormously. For example, it is hard to compare Deutsche’s recent purchase of 60 individual collages by US artist Ellen Gallagher depicting advertisements for old African-American magazines – digitally manipulated with the details painstakingly highlighted in Plasticine – to one photograph bought from a series by an unknown artist.
Not that Deutsche would be interested in selling. Christensen says works are rarely sold on the open market and the only times that it has wanted to offload some more traditional landscapes or pastels that do not fit with the broader collection, it has held employee sales, which proved ex-tremely popular. “We almost had to break up fights in the end,” she says.
Jessica Morgan, curator of Deutsche Bank’s “Blind Date” exhibition, says emp-loyees react to the art exhibited in their offices much as they would to a blind date. Responses can go one of three ways.
“It could be love at first sight, a gradual awakening to hidden beauty or complexity, or outright rejection and dismissal,” she says.
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