The Venezuela-born patron and collector Tiqui Atencio, who sits on several major museum boards worldwide, is behind a new book which promises to lift the lid on collecting art.
Could Have, Would Have, Should Have: Inside the World of the Art Collector, which is due to be published in October by the London-based company Art/Books, includes almost 100 interviews with collectors worldwide.
These include the philanthropist and Swiss pharmaceutical heiress Maja Hoffmann; the London-based jeweller Laurence Graff; the Iranian-born collector and patron Fatima Maleki and her husband Eskandar; the artists Damien Hirst and George Condo; and the Saudi collector Basma Al Sulaiman who founded the virtual museum, Basmoca, in 2011.
The book is divided into chapters such as “What was I thinking?”, “Learning from mistakes”, and “Keeping it in the family”. A new series of biting cartoons by the New York-based artist and satirist Pablo Helguera, a contributor to The Art Newspaper, will accompany the texts.
Atencio, herself a collector of pre-Columbian and Latin American art, founded the Tate’s Latin American Acquisitions committee in 2003. She is also a member of the museum’s International Council, the most influential and far-reaching of the Tate’s committees. Since 2005, she has been an ex-officio trustee of the Guggenheim Museum in New York.