Vermont Magazine Fall 2020 Fall 2020 | Page 32

A: Well, why not end up in Vermont? It’s a very beautiful state. When we discovered Vermont, Christine and I were living in Connecticut in a suburban area that felt like it was in the shadows of New York. We were missing the beautiful landscapes of England. Then we spent a weekend in Vermont, and said “Hey, this place is pretty nice. It has a different feel”. It was rural in a way that Connecticut wasn’t. We came up one weekend looking for a property and ended up buying almost the first one that we saw, an old dairy farm in Reading, Vermont. A few years later another dairy farm nearby came on the market so we bought that as well. We owned it for some time without really knowing what we were going to do with it. Then Christine decided that we should turn it into a place for an artist-in-residence program. I took a look at it when we were halfway into it and I thought “My god…this is the perfect place for a museum!” and our foundation took it over. We opened it to the public about four or five years ago. Q: It was interesting that your original intention was to make it into an artist- -in-residence space and then decided that the property was a more appropriate space for a museum. People sometimes have a difficult time with changing gears. Thinking about an educational program is one thing, but thinking about a museum is a different scale. When you decided to build a museum there, what was the response? A: We set up our foundation back in 2005 or 2006, and the first thing that we did was the collaboration with Mass MoCA. The idea then occurred to us to use the second property that we had acquired in Vermont as a further extension of the foundation. It has been well received. We don’t get an overwhelming number of visitors, but from the visitors that do come, we only get positive feedback. Q: Are there any Vermont artists included in the collection? A: About three years ago, we started the “Made in Vermont” exhibition series, which we held in the visitor’s reception area. This “Made in Vermont” series has been well-received and reviewed by various Vermont publications. For at least two or three of the artists that we featured in the shows, it helped to change the trajectory of their careers. Q: Art is one of those things that people see as decoration. Some people see it as a true “object”, while others see it as an investment that they can keep in a storage facility. I’m curious to hear your take on it. You’ve mentioned art as decoration for your home, you mentioned it in the context of collecting it as an object for its artistic value, and you’ve mentioned it as a financial investment. What does art mean to you? A: To clarify, I don’t see art as purely an investment in any sense. Paul Kasmin was the New York art dealer who I knew and mentioned earlier. Sadly, he recently passed away. He was very influential in my journey in the art world. He was the one who told me that I shouldn’t view art as conspicuous consumption. It’s not like buying a fleet of Rolls Royce cars or a private plane or boat. But art is something that can hold its value over time and that made me feel better about spending a lot of money on it. However, my thought process concerning investing money in art was very different from the way I would put money into stocks or bonds. It’s not an investment mentality. There are a lot of people whose approach and involvement in art is exactly that—purely an 30 VERMONT MAGAZINE