The Stoic Capitalist: An exclusive excerpt from the book by Wall Street titan Robert Rosenkranz

Hindustan Times

2 days ago

Every two years, the Whitney Museum in New York showcases works by America's most promising up-and-coming artists in a highly publicized exhibition. Being selected for the Whitney Biennial can transform an artist's life. It brings newcomers to the attention of prominent gallerists looking to add fresh faces to their rosters and to collectors eager to stay abreast of the competition for emerging talent. .
However, if you look up the Biennial's catalogs from a decade ago, you will find that most of the artists they heralded now languish in obscurity. Few have important dealers; fewer still have a strong and consistent auction market for their work. Page through Sotheby's and Christie's auction catalogs of contemporary art from a decade ago, and the story is much the same. The art world is in large part a fashion culture, constantly in flux.
So, it should be no surprise that investing in art is trickier than, say, buying stocks, and almost always less lucrative. Most contemporary work auctioned a decade ago would not be salable today at a price that could cover the original hammer price, plus the twenty-five percent commission auction houses typically charge, plus the nine percent sales tax a New York resident would have had to pay…not to mention what all this money might have earned over the period in a typical stock market portfolio. There would be notable exceptions, of course, and those are the ones that make headlines. The best that can be said is that if you can afford to buy the finest works by the most prominent artists, and you have first-rate professional advice, you have a reasonable chance to make a decent return. Otherwise, investor beware. Owning art is one of the great attractions of wealth, but you should never mistake it for a great investment.
Then why is buying art a great idea? Simply because to own a work of art is its own reward. You can experience art in museums, but it will not enhance your life nearly as much as living with it every day. Nor will it require of you the focus that should be part of the decision to exchange your hard-earned money for an artist's work. As a collector, you will be part of a community that includes artists, curators, gallerists, and other collectors with shared interests. Equally important, each object you buy can be a catalyst for learning. That too is life-enhancing.
As soon as I could afford to buy art, I started to collect modern Chinese ink paintings. My mentor in the field was a British scholar/collector/dealer named Hugh Moss, who I met through my Shanghainese friend, Jimmy King. Hugh divided his time between Old Surrey Hall, a vast pile in Surrey with Elizabethan antecedents, and a scholarly retreat on a sparsely populated hillside in Hong Kong. He styled himself a modern Western reincarnation of a Chinese literatus. Historically, the literati were a class of scholar/officials who played prominent roles in Chinese culture and often served in high government posts. They collected meticulously crafted furniture of simple design, brush pots, ancient jade artifacts, snuff boxes and 'scholar's rocks'—unusually shaped stones thought to embody nature's mysterious forces.
The literati tradition of landscape painting persisted even after the Communist revolution and Mao's Great Leap Forward. It was the modern expression of that tradition I focused on. There was much that drew me to the genre. I was fascinated that the artists had classical training and technical skill, while their growing exposure to Western influences was encouraging them to experiment with scale, with color, and with abstraction.
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I liked the hanging-scroll format of these works, because it let me readily change the paintings I had on display and experience them with fresh eyes. (The Chinese would no more show the same painting all the time than we would play the same music again and again.) Conveniently for me at that early stage in my career, the prices were modest, yet at the same time the genre was so rarified that I could be one of a handful of serious collectors and have access to the best material from the leading dealers.
I was not expecting these ink paintings to be good investments, nor did they prove to be. But I stayed with them, accumulating more than fifty over the course of a decade. When I was finally ready to move on, I donated the bulk of the collection to the Harvard University Art Museum, whose senior curator, Robert Mowry, was building perhaps the finest institutional collection in the US. By the 1990s, my interest in art shifted to China's ancient traditions—what my then muse, now wife Alexandra Munroe called a step 'forward into the past.'
Hugh Moss again played a pivotal role. He alerted me to the availability of a magnificent Tang dynasty horse which he regarded as one of the finest objects to appear on the market in years. Hugh introduced me to Giuseppe Eskanazi, a preeminent London dealer who was showing the work in New York. Eskanazi was surprised that a beginning collector he had never heard of would buy such an object. The price was hardly modest, but this time I did feel it would be a good investment, because China was fast becoming prosperous, and I expected that collectors there would ultimately spend heavily for outstanding examples of their cultural heritage.
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Since I bought it in 1995, the Tang horse has held pride of place at my Manhattan apartment: it stands in solitary splendor on an art deco console in the living room and is the first thing to catch your eye as you enter.
Starting with such a great object set the bar for the rest of the collection, which evolved with a focus on Buddhist sculpture. Wen Fong, then head of Asian art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, was generous with his advice, and I made the Met my standard. When a dealer or an auction house had an object that I found intriguing, I would go to the Met and see if they had a better example. If they did, I would pass. As a result, I bought only a handful of objects each year.
This pace suited me well. While I enjoyed living with these works, which often combined physical beauty and spiritual power, they were also a challenge. Fakes were not uncommon, and even top dealers could occasionally be fooled. I felt a need to know why and how they were made and what they signified, lessons that often took time to absorb.
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Part of the reason I responded to Buddhist art was the connection between Buddhist and Stoic philosophical systems. Both encourage the cultivation of virtue, though one approach focuses on spirituality, the other on rationality. Both emphasize mindfulness, which Buddhism seeks through meditation; Stoicism through concentration, focus, and elimination of distractions. The Stoic concept of impermanence and change echoes the Buddhist idea of detachment.
Neither philosophy is incompatible with worldly splendor, provided it occupies a moderate share of one's psychic space. Seneca was among the wealthiest men in Rome and the most influential of Stoic philosophers. The Buddha was a prince who renounced worldly goods for an ascetic life and is always depicted in simple robes. In his pantheon are bodhisattvas, who are typically portrayed in elegant, princely garb with elaborate jewelry. My favorite bodhisattva is Vimalakirti.. (He) lived lavishly and had a passion for debate. When Buddha's other followers criticized Vimalakirti's style of life, he argued that they were seeing only the surface of things and echoing a conventional understanding of wealth and poverty. In contrast, he believed in 'non duality'—the idea that one could be fully engaged in the world, could enjoy material possessions without becoming attached to them, and find true wealth in spiritual insight, compassion, and wisdom.
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My expectation about China's economic growth, and the demand it would stoke for the nation's cultural icons, proved correct. The value of my collection has probably increased fivefold. Five times sounds like a fine return, but it is far less than the stock market returned over the same period. Since I have no intention of selling, that doesn't matter very much to me anyway; what did matter was that great objects were no longer 'coming out' of China, and the window of opportunity to add to my collection closed.
I adapted quite radically, stimulated by seeing some extraordinary private collections of time-based media, video art, and the intersection of art and technology. My focus shifted from the past to the here and now, from objects to experiences, and from a category with reasonable investment prospects to one with little financial upside. It struck me that video was the natural language of young people, of a whole generation that gets most of its information from screens, and does most of its communicating on devices. Some artists were doing very innovative work, enabled in part by rapidly changing technology ranging from cameras that make a thousand images a second, to facial recognition software, to artificial intelligence, to virtual reality. Other artists were basing their work on video games, often with an ironic critique of the aggressiveness and gender stereotypes they embody.
While I had enjoyed learning the history, now I enjoyed getting to know artists. I found that I had a good rapport with many of those I met and quite a few have become real friends. Doug Aitken has been aptly described as the best dinner company the art world has produced. He has surfer dude good looks, boyish curiosity about virtually any topic you introduce, and the charm and skill of an accomplished raconteur. He resists the confines of the museum and is eager to project his art into unexpected places. This penchant for the unexpected is central to a work in my collection, Migration, set in a series of cheap motel rooms reminiscent of B-movies. The motels are mostly in desolate industrial settings in a landscape devoid of people.
Into each motel room, he introduces a different species of wild animal. A horse stares in bewilderment at a TV set, a beaver frolics in a bathtub, a mountain lion attacks a pillow as if it is his prey, a buffalo overturns a lamp and crashes a telephone to the floor. The result is sometimes poignant, sometimes hilarious—and a metaphor for the struggles of human migrants to find their footing while adapting to unfamiliar environs.
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Because there were relatively few collectors, I had the opportunity to be among the leaders in the field. The small universe of potential buyers kept prices reasonable, which in turn meant that the artists were making their work with the purest of motives.
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Video art is a challenging area for museums too. Some museums have large collections, excellent curators, and strong technical staff. However, visitors to museums typically expect to enter a gallery with a dozen or more paintings or sculptures and spend less than a minute with each. They do not expect to engage with a single work of art for ten minutes or more. It's not that visitors have short attention spans; they go to operas, ballets, concerts, movies, and theater. But those activities are done sitting down in the evenings, not standing up in the daytime.
I have long felt that if video art is to offer the kind of immersive experiences the artists intended, a new kind of cultural institution is needed—a hybrid between a museum and a performing arts venue. As a venture philanthropist, I am excited to help create such an institution. I have taken a giant step by acquiring a 40,000-square-foot venue in Manhattan's Lower East Side, which we are calling Canyon. It will incorporate the latest technology, and it will showcase both established masters and exciting new talent. I hope it will become a 'must see' destination for lovers of contemporary art. It will be open in the evening to attract new, younger, and more diverse audiences, drawn by the dramatic, experiential nature of its exhibitions.
(Excerpted with permission from The Stoic Capitalist: Advice for the Exceptionally Ambitious by Robert Rosenkranz, published by Bloomsbury; 2025)