Corporate Art Collections

Book excerpt: This new volume in the series of Handbooks in International Art Business published in association with Sotheby's Institute of Art offers a timely guide to the history, nature and importance of corporate collecting and the different reasons for starting and maintaining corporate collections, including investment, cultural cachet, and asset diversification. Based on interviews with the curators, consultants and investors who run such collections, and more extended case studies of important collections, the book concludes with an examination of when corporate collecting becomes a liability and the market-impact of deaccessioning, looking ahead to the future of corporate collecting.