By Mackie Healy, Art Market Views Contributor

David Rockefeller, MoMA’s honorary chairman, is among 23 collectors profiled in Diane McJanus Jensen’s The Art of Collecting: An Intimate Tour Inside Private Art Collections with Advice on Starting Your Own. The glossy book offers a voyeur’s treat: photos of collectors’ homes and interviews. There are some surprising nuggets.

For instance, Rockefeller is enamored with fiber optic lighting—used to illuminate his Bonnards and Monets—and occasionally makes the gallery rounds with  MoMA director Glenn Lowry.

Other factoids: Lawyer Alan Dershowitz’s house is packed with works by De Chirico, Rockwell Kent and myriad lesser known finds. Janet and Larry Larose own over 350 objects by Christopher Dresser.

The collectors cross a range of categories including the contemporary holdings of Kelly and Scott Miller, Erinch Ozada’s video art and Norman and Alicia Westmoreland Volk’s dog portraiture.

The author, who has worked as a gallery owner and private art advisor, creates an intimate, behind-the-scenes tour. Each Q&A section features installation shots of the collector’s homes, revealing that yes, David Rockefeller lives in a duplex, and that his staircase is adorned with two late waterlily paintings by Claude…

Shelley and Donald Rubin via New York Social Diary

Himalayan art collectors Donald and Shelley Rubin, founders of the Rubin Museum of Art, were motivated sellers.

Their 8,000 square foot townhouse at 122 East 70th Street lingered on the market for a year, tagged $20.9 million. In May the Rubins slashed the price to $14.9 million and snagged a buyer, according to an article in the Wall Street Journal.

The article quotes brokers predicting fallout from the Rubins’ re-pricing efforts, warning other would-be sellers “expect to see lower offers.” (See property listing here.)

It’s hard to work up much sympathy for sellers of Upper East Side townhouses, or even the Rubins, who acquired the house, with a hot tub and roof garden, in 1995 for a mere $5 million. It seems the Rubins cleared around $10 million on the deal.

Rubin, who founded a health care network, forked over $22 million three years later for the former Barneys building on 17th Street. The Rubin Museum opened in 2004 and has an annual budget of $13 million. The museum is currently searching for a new chief curator, more here.

Halsey Minor, via Flickr

Halsey Minor made headlines in art circles for his recent litigation with both Sotheby’s and Christie’s, as well as the recent sale of his property at Phillips de Pury, at the behest of the courts. (Some earlier coverage here and here).

Last week Minor penned an essay titled Why I Fight on Huffington Post railing against banks and the FDIC. His battles stem from a hotel he was constructing in Charlottesville. His loans were cut off by Silverton Bank which shortly thereafter was shuttered and taken over by the FDIC.

Minor estimates “between the government and me, roughly $10 million already has been spent in legal fees on a dispute over a $10.3 million loan.”

Read Minor in Huffington Post here.

Sender curator Sarah Aibel with Chris Ofili sculpture in entrance to New York's Exis Capital

Link to story here.

A black-and-white Ed Ruscha painting with the words “Let’s Be Realistic” spelled out in bold white letters hangs outside the sound-proof trading room at art collector Adam Sender’s hedge fund.

Sender’s curator, Sarah Aibel, 28, is giving me a tour of the art-stocked office in an old loft building in New York’s SoHo district.

“Trading is what he does for work,” Aibel says of Sender. “And when he’s not trading, art is what he does for love.”

In the trading room, the light is movie-theater low. Sender, who declined to be interviewed, is seated at what resembles a science-fiction command center, surrounded by two dozen glowing monitors.

Out in the hall, a Kara Walker mural runs along a wall. A pink-and-green neon sculpture by minimalist Dan Flavin illuminates a corner. An otherwise generic conference room is hung with a piercing John Currin painting. “The Activists” depicts a frail elderly woman seated before a microphone, holding a sheet with a presumed list of grievances.

“The traders are so focused on finance, the art gives them a break,” Aibel says.

Sender, 41, has collected art…

New York collector Adam Lindemann featured on cover of May-June 2010 issue of "Sotheby's At Auction"

On a recent visit to Sotheby’s I nabbed a copy of  Sotheby’s At Auction, essentially a glossy advertorial for upcoming auction property with a few articles sprinkled in the mix.

The cover features collector Adam Lindemann, photographed at home in New York, surrounded by contemporary and tribal art. Also prominently displayed is Lindemann’s green and purple faced watch, which I am guessing is probably a Marc Newson designed Ikepod–a brand Lindemann got involved with in 2005.

The cover story focuses on tribal collectors Lindemann as well as South African artist and collector Karel Nel and German collector Peter Henle.

Rendering of Rosenblum Collection space, opening in Paris this fall

Here’s a story I wrote for the Art Newspaper on French collectors Steve and Chiara Rosenblum and their new contemporary art exhibition space. The venue is slated to open in Paris this fall.

Link to story here.

Link to Bloomberg story here.

Interview by Lindsay Pollock

June 4 (Bloomberg) — Hedge-fund investor James R. Hedges IV mingled with assorted Bronfmans, Gunds, Sacklers and several hundred other art-world notables at a fundraiser this week, munching the canapes at Manhattan’s Four Seasons Restaurant.

The goal was $1 million to help restore a pair of modernist houses owned by the National Trust for Historic Preservation. Yet Hedges, 42, was more than a patron.

Earlier this year, the former president and chief investment officer of LJH Global Investments LLC said goodbye to 18 years in finance to focus on producing, promoting and advising on art. A longtime collector and museum patron, involved with London’s Tate Modern, New York’s Museum of Modern Art and other institutions, he is now putting his insider’s experience to work.

“I’m pragmatic about viewing art as a financial asset,’’ Hedges said in an interview this week. “I see it as an inefficient market that is misunderstood, that has got little in the way of transparency and limitations in the way business is conducted. But with all that being said, people can make a tremendous…

Urs Fischer "Abstract Slavery"

Click here to watch video.

Peter Brant has given Swiss artist Urs Fischer the run of his bucolic Greenwich, Connecticut-based Brant Foundation Art Study Center, resulting in an irreverent, cunning portrait of the collector. Using wallpaper and wax, Fischer raises poignant questions about mortality, reproduction and the very nature of art accumulation.

Brant’s reputation as a longtime collector is well known, but there was still something startling about standing in a two dimensional likeness of his home, filled with so many expensive artworks, reduced to flat copies.  The wallpaper piece, which reproduces Brant’s Warhols and Lichtensteins, alongside shelves arrayed with art books, family photos and silver polo trophies, is pointedly titled “Abstract Slavery.”

To further the point, Brant’s waxy likeness, a life-size human candle, melts amid the material trophies.

Though I couldn’t get an credible explanation from Fischer’s dealer Gavin Brown or Brant or anyone else about the show’s ironic Oscar the Grouch title, the squat green Muppet is best known for his compulsive hoarding of trash.

This is a show well worth seeing. It’s open by appointment through Spring 2011. (To schedule an…

Valentino outside Christie's. Photo: Phyllis Tuchman

Fashion designer Valentino is something of a fixture at the contemporary art auctions, usually perched in the front row, bidding–but not overspending–on choice items.

At Sotheby’s May 11 contemporary art sale he went for a large riotous Cecily Brown canvas, but relented as the price soared. The painting sold for $1.1 million (est. $500,000-$700,000) to a phone bidder.

Critic Phyllis Tuchman snapped this photo of him outside Christie’s on Sunday during the auction previews and kindly shared it with Art Market Views.

Photo: via Bloomberg News

Link to Bloomberg News story here.

By Lindsay Pollock

May 12 (Bloomberg) — Marguerite Hoffman, a prominent Dallas art collector, filed suit this week against Mexican financier David Martinez for failing to keep her 2007 sale of a star Mark Rothko painting a secret. The suit stems from the painting’s public sale tonight at Sotheby’s, estimated to fetch as much as $25 million.

Three years ago, after her 59-year-old husband’s death, Hoffman sold the painting to an undisclosed buyer, with the proviso that the details of the sale remain a secret, according to her lawsuit, filed in a Dallas, Texas, district court.

Hoffman sold the Rothko in April 2007, just as the painting came off the walls at the Dallas Museum of Art where it had hung in an exhibition titled “Fast Forward: Contemporary Collections for the Dallas Museum of Art,” featuring promised gifts to the museum. Hoffman is a trustee at the Dallas Museum of Art.

Marguerite and her late husband Robert Hoffman were among three Dallas couples who in 2005 announced a pledge to donate their art collections to…