edward helmore reports on art’s newest ‘super-consumer’, billionaire Steven A Cohen |
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The autumn art sales at Sotheby's and Christie's in New York next month are expected to break new records. The reason? Collectors are flooding the art market with work looking for new homes among the hedge-fund super-billionaires.
In the art market, as on the trading floor of a hedge fund, it pays to be ahead of the game and no one knows this better than Steven A Cohen of SAC Capital Advisors in Greenwich, Connecticut, who has lately turned himself into a super-consumer of modern art.
Two weeks ago, the 50-year-old money manager, whose personal fortune is estimated in excess of
$3bn, announced he had purchased Willem de Kooning's Police Gazette,
an abstract 1955 landscape, for $63.5m. (The seller was David Geffen, one-time music and movie mogul, who is widely
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| Cohen’s fund has generated an average annual return of 43.5 per cent since 1992 |
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believed to be raising money to buy the Los Angeles Times.)
Then, just as Cohen was about to complete on a $139m purchase of Picasso's La Reve from Vegas hotelier Steve Wynn, came the news that Wynn had accidentally put his elbow through the canvas while showing it to guests. That deal was called off.
The loss of the Picasso was a disappointment, but not a tragedy - if you've Cohen's kind of money, there are always pictures for sale.
On a typical workday, Cohen (caricatured left) is driven from his palatial home to his hushed 20,000-sq/ft trading room overlooking Long Island sound. He sits at his desk in the middle of the room, dressed in black jeans and a sweater, and directs 100 or more traders. Telephones do not ring, they blink, and there is no hum from the computers - the hardware is isolated in another room. It is, one might say, the pure heart of capitalism, and on any given day the fund accounts for up to two per cent of stockmarket activity.
With a reputation for making fast trades, 
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