“The stock market doesn’t bring me any fulfillment” – NBC Los Angeles

• Real estate entrepreneur Grant Cardone, who has a gallery in his Miami home, said collecting art gives him more fulfillment than investing in the stock market.
• Former investment manager Christian Levett opens his Florence home for private tours of his all-female art collection.
• The Boros Collection houses contemporary art in a vast Second World War bunker in Berlin – and owners Christian and Karen Boros live in a penthouse above.

Multimillionaire Grant Cardone, who has been collecting art for about 15 years, says he is a spontaneous buyer.

“I don’t consider myself a connoisseur. I’m very new to the art world. If I like it, I buy it. I don’t care who made it,” he said at CNBC. In addition to the pieces displayed throughout his home, Cardone also has an art gallery to house his considerable collection.

CNBC spoke to Cardone via video call — behind him in his office in Miami was an untitled work by American graffiti artist Retna that Cardone purchased at an online auction.

“I clicked the button – I really hadn’t done any research… and I got the part… And it came here and I really loved it,” he said. He paid “maybe $140,000” for the work, he said.

Along a hallway in Cardone’s home are two works by American pop artist Burton Morris, both depicting red Coca-Cola bottles lined up in a repeating pattern named Coca-Cola 50A and Coca-Cola 50B. “This is what I bought from Tommy Hilfiger…it reminds me of the importance of scaling,” Cardone said — fashion designer Hilfiger is the former owner of the house.

Cardone, a real estate investor and author of “The 10 X Rule: The Only Difference Between Success and Failure,” has about 17 million followers on social media and uses his platforms to occasionally give advice on art investing.

“(Followers) are starting to see art saying, hey, you know, (has) it been good for you? And I’m like, yeah, it’s good for me… It’s better than the dollar or the euro… The stock the market doesn’t give me any fulfillment, I don’t go back and look at my Apple shares and I feel good But I walk around my gallery, in the kitchen or in my office and I see one. room and I’m like, man, that’s super cool.”

Inside Cardone’s gallery – complete with floor-to-ceiling windows and a security guard – is a work by American contemporary artist Kenny Scharf titled “Blipsibshabshok” (1997), an abstract painting featuring colorful futuristic symbols . Cardone owns a second Scharf, “Controlopuss” (2018), a striking image of a red, many-legged creature, which he acquired for $279,400 from the Phillips auction house.

“It’s a Basquiat right here. The original would cost $45 million,” Cardone said, pointing to a copy of a Jean-Michel Basquiat work called “Flexible” (1984/2016). The original was sold by Phillips auction house for $45.3 million in 2018. “This piece, I bought it with the house,” he said, pointing to a work above the Basquiat titled “Read More” by American contemporary artist Al-Baseer Holly.

Grant said he chooses which pieces to buy on instinct. “I’m going to try to get away from it. And if I keep seeing it, or if I keep thinking about it, then I go back and say: OK, I’m supposed to have this,” he said. declared.

“I intend to never sell this stuff. It’s really for my own personal enjoyment. And you know, art makes me happy,” he said.

Feminine art in Florence

Former investment banker Christian Levett has a different approach. He has been collecting art for almost 30 years, starting with Old Master paintings and Roman, Greek and Egyptian antiquities before moving on to works by Abstract Expressionist women.

In addition to owning an art museum in Mougins, France, Levett leads tours of the artwork on the walls of his home in Florence, Italy, where he lives six months a year – one could say his entire house is an art gallery. “It’s sort of a museum with a private tour,” Levett told CNBC by phone.

Near the city’s famous Ponte Vecchio bridge, Levett’s house boasts 20-foot-high ceilings, original frescoes and two floors of artwork, all made by women. The collection is largely made up of abstract expressionist works by artists such as impressionist Mary Cassatt and surrealist Dorothea Tanning.

Once or twice a week, Levett invites small groups to view his collection, often giving tours himself. The groups are sometimes made up of students from American colleges with outposts in Florence, such as Harvard University and New York University, or come from museums or patron groups.

A 1977 painting by American artist Joan Mitchell is one of the highlights of Levett’s collection, he said. The large piece, titled “When They Were Gone,” measures nearly 240cm high and 180cm wide and hangs in her dining room.

Levett acquired it for around $2.8 million around 2015.

“This is now a painting likely to sell at auction for between $15 million and $18 million…Mitchell has consistently been one of the most important female painters of the 20th century.^th century,” Levett said.

He also praised an oil painting by Elaine de Kooning of John F. Kennedy, commissioned as part of a series of portraits of the former U.S. president in 1963. Levett purchased the work in 2020, paying around $600,000.

Levett said he opens his home to students in part because it might spark interest in supporting art in the future. “Students…are the acorns of the art world,” he said.

Levett focuses on the work of female artists and is set to reopen his museum in France as the Female Artists Mougin Museum on June 21. He is currently selling the museum’s previous collection of art and antiques through a series of auctions in London. house Christie’s, which have so far reached almost £9.5 million ($11.9 million).

Bunker art

In a unique art space in Berlin, husband and wife Christian and Karen Boros live in a 6,000 square foot penthouse apartment above their private collection. The Boros Collection is housed in a former World War II bunker, a sprawling high-rise building that the couple acquired in 2003 and spent several years transforming into a five-story exhibition space, with their home on the sixth .

The bunker housed up to 4,000 people during the war, then served as a storage location for tropical fruits before becoming a nightclub. According to Raoul Zoellner, director of the Boros Foundation, 450 tons of concrete ceilings and walls were removed during its transformation into an exhibition space and house.

Christian, an advertising entrepreneur, bought his first work of art – a cat by German artist Joseph Beuys – when he was 18, he told the Financial Times.

“The bunker is not a museum… but an exceptional project initiated by a couple of enthusiastic collectors who could not have imagined how many diamond saws it would take to demolish dozens of bunker walls – nor what it would would trigger,” Zoellner said in an emailed statement.

Nearly 600,000 people have taken guided tours of the bunker since its transformation in 2008, with pieces from the Boros collection on display in rotation, Zoellner added. Currently, 114 works are on display, “with an emphasis on the human body in a multiplicity of positions,” Zoellner said. “The work focuses on the constant constraint of optimization, the progressive adaptation of our body to technological devices,” he said.