Maura Brewer Pulls Back the Curtain on Art Investors

LOS ANGELES — Maura Brewer’s video essay “Leverage” (2024) unpacks the contemporary phenomenon of art as asset class by focusing on the financial dealings of one individual: Daniel Sundheim. Using simple diagrams, stock photos, and film clips, the work avoids simplistic conclusions about the mingling of capital and culture, instead laying out Brewer’s findings in an accessible manner that encourages further scrutiny. 

This is the first entry in Brewer’s ongoing project “that traces the history of the financialization of art,” according to the press release. Using publicly available documents, she tracks 12 art-backed loans that Sundheim, a billionaire investor and Museum of Modern Art trustee, took out between 2013 and 2019, a period of feverish speculation in the art market driven by low interest rates. As Brewer explains in the concise 18-minute video, Sundheim used works in his art collection as collateral to secure loans, with which he bought art, and he put that art up as collateral to secure more loans, in a self-perpetuating loop. The artworks never changed hands; they are simply listed as line items on the loan documents, known as Uniform Commercial Code Filings.

Brewer narrates the ebbs and flows of Sundheim’s loans and debts, as images of the pieces in question flash by: Basquiat, Grotjahn, Gursky, Koons, Prince, Ryman, Wool, Twombly, and other market darlings. The works appear on the screen of an iPhone held by the artist’s hands, drawing us in with a point of human connection, but also mediating our experience, keeping us at a distance from the actual artworks. This underscores the way in which most of us interact with art now, as uniform digital rectangles on a screen, as sterile as their corresponding numbers on a balance sheet.

Sundheim’s narrative is interwoven with autobiographical stories about Brewer’s struggles with money, art, and relationships. After she received the largest grant of her career in 2023, she got a bitter email from a former friend, bringing up old resentments and rivalries. The relationship between art and money is much different for a working artist and for a wealthy investor. These scenes are illustrated with clips from the 1988 film Beaches, which follows the tumultuous relationship between two longtime friends, played by Bette Midler and Barbara Hershey. Conversely, she uses clips from The Wolf of Wall Street, Martin Scorsese’s loathsome 2013 celebration of amoral greed, to illustrate the art market bubble of the 2010s, which popped once the Federal Reserve raised interest rates in 2022.

For her exhibition Leverage at artist-run space Timeshare, the video is projected onto the floor, taking up a large swath of real estate. While this makes comfortably viewing the work challenging, it’s also impossible to avoid, like an elephant in the room. Its horizontality asserts its sculptural quality over the cinematic. In the video, Brewer likens the abstract marks of “zombie formalism” that topped auction records during this period to financial ledgers and spreadsheets, a connection made literal in three small pastel drawings on the wall. These minimalist grids take their structure from the Uniform Financial Code Filings of arts patrons Ronald Lauder and Peter Norton, with the text removed. The crisp white lines and boxes stand out against the dark, gestural backgrounds, which Brewer composed with her fingerprints, as if asserting the hand of the artist against the cold monetary logic of the market.

Brewer is not simply setting up a binary between artist and investor, however. Rather, she pulls back the curtain on these often invisible or elusive systems that overlap with the art world, as they become harder and harder to disentangle. “In the debt theory of money, there is an empty hole in the center of the universe, animating all our actions,” Brewer says at one point in the video, as she cuts a hole through the black background with an electric knife, reaching her hands through it and seemingly into our space.

Maura Brewer: Leverage continues at Timeshare (3526 North Broadway, Lincoln Heights, Los Angeles) through November 16. The exhibition was organized by the gallery.