Winning this Best of Luxury Design 2024 award for Best Art Resource is truly a thrilling honor.

After decades as an art consultant, professional success for me is still that moment when I watch a client fall in love with a work of art. I think of myself as an aesthetic matchmaker. I need to have the right tools and expertise to do a great job, but ultimately it comes down to a human connection that allows me to understand what might be the perfect art to suggest to a particular client. At its best, art consulting is an affair of the heart.

Since the Best of Luxury Design awards are granted on the basis of Modern Luxury Boston editorial review and popular votes, I want to celebrate this heartfelt recognition by sharing my beloved clients and colleagues own words about their experience of working with us. If their words inspire your art collecting desires, let us do some match making for you too!

How’s your art love life? Need a match maker?

Peruse Our Portfolio

As we close in on the first quarter of the 21st Century, it’s intriguing to step back and consider the state of real artistic innovation in the fine arts of our time. If novelty is the birthright of artistic genius, has modernism run its course? Was the explosive pace of artistic growth during 20th C modernism an anomaly? And if so, what are the current trends in art of our time?

Miaz Brothers, Amor Vincit Omnia, (Love Conquers All), acrylic spray paint on canvas. These Italian darlings of the new pop art scene use spray paint, evocating of graffiti, to create a modern pastiche of Botticelli’s Venus.

Abstraction continues to be the most sold style of art in galleries now. Painting techniques that feature voluptuous paint creating dynamic and multi-dimensional effects are enjoying special attention. But one can argue that all abstract art has been done before, that all strokes to the canvas are derivative of some earlier master.

Pop art is undoubtedly one of the biggest trends in 2023. Many newly emerging pop artists are harnessing digital art content to create their work, often using highly derivative photographic images lifted from other sources. They coast on our nostalgia for the bygone—our love of Marilyn Monroe, Botticelli or Charlie Chaplain—delivered in colorful, catchy packages. It’s as if these artists know they have little new to say, so hedge their bets with lovable content styled to replicate the bombardment of social media scrolling. Think Mr. Brainwash, his appropriation of the style of Jean Michel Basquiat, wedded to the street art imagery of Banksy.

Mr. Brainwash, “Goldrush”, silkscreen and mixed media on canvas. Bringing appropriation art to new extremes, Mr. Brainwash adopts Warhol’s soup cans, Keith Haring’s dancing figures, Litchtenstein’s cartoon “POW”, and then seals the nostalgia deal with Charlie Chaplain and a 1950’s boy using a brownie camera.

I’ve seen lots of discussion about the ethics and artistic integrity of “coopted” content in art, a topic that will become even more heated as artificial intelligence is used to create art. It seems fitting that Pop art is the style of our age. It’s unashamed incorporation of popular culture and mass media is perhaps the only style that can hold the attention of an audience that has been born and raised on the non-stop voluminous content and sales pitches of social media. The sculptor Jonathan Paul takes all this commercially driven pandering one step further, proudly adopting the name DESIRE OBTAIN CHERISH as his ‘stage name’ and incorporating chic logos in his paintings intended to produce a shopper’s high upon purchase.

DESIRE OBTAIN CHERISH, “Ones pacifier is another’s panacea”, with its appropriation of the Chanel logo, is designed to produce a “shoppers high” upon purchase, true to the artists adopted name.

Perhaps the most innovative thing about fine art of the 21st century is not the art itself but the fact that it is often inseparable from its mode of transmission. From buying art on line, to pop art that replicates the highly saturated content of doom scrolling Instagram, to art that literally cannot exist without a digital form—art sold as NFT’s, non fungible tokens—is the most relevant art of our age designed to be a replication of the modern digital/commercial experience?

I’m reminded of the famous 1964 aphorism of Canadian philosopher Marshall McLuhan, “the medium is the message”. McLuhan predicted the eventual demise of the printed book. Will hard copy fine art meet a similar fate? I don’t think so. I think the compulsion to express the human condition by literally making one’s mark, an urge as old as the cave paintings, will never die. Even the mash ups of popular artistic iconography and cultural symbols found in the low hanging fruit of art made to please/sell/look good on social media is still a statement of sorts, if not the most original. It’s up to us whether we want to buy it.

The 17,000 year old Cave Paintings of Lascaux France, the oldest known prehistoric drawings, affirm that even prehistoric man was compelled, and found the wherewithal, to record life of their time.

How’s your art love life? Need a match maker?

Peruse Our Portfolio

From populist ‘immersive’ digital light shows of VanGogh and Monet, to highbrow digital artists like Krista Kim’s NFTs of immersive spaces–accessed only via virtual reality–a hunger for art that hits us full on and transports us is being fed by the art world with verve.

At the vanguard are creators like Kim of the futuristic tech company (0) –pronounced zero– and their Orb, pictured above. Orb, which has the sleekness of a luxury car turned giant kazoo, is designed to become a social space that hosts high fidelity immersive content. Price of admission: purchase it as an NFT, and get an ownable, navigable space that connects to the metaverse. The creators envision a system where people can see and share 360-degree content and have a social experience, including Kim’s own immersive environment that is airdropped to Orb owners, and the owners own video content. Hoping to become as ubiquitous as Play Station or Xbox, Orb is being road tested now. Its creators think 5 years from now artificial intelligence glasses will be mainstream, and technologies like Orb will become commonplace. Content for vehicles like Orb is being created by leading digital artists, to be minted as NFT’s, and will replace the current 2D art experience in most metaverses with high fidelity immersive content.

Why do we hunger for the metaverse’s alternative reality and for immersive art experiences? Perhaps the pandemic, which had us siloed at home and interacting digitally, has us questioning the value or importance of real-life experiences. But while we all live on our smart phones, we still come home at night to eat and sleep. Has the ‘social’ in social media convinced us we must try to be ‘everywhere all at once’ in order to exist anywhere? And was I the only person who found the movie Everything Everywhere All the Time, the darling of the Oscars, like being put through a sensory meat grinder? The metaverse is a meeting place between the physical and digital worlds where some of the most exciting ways to integrate the two will be made by today’s and tomorrow’s artists. But if the objective of these artists is to make the immersive virtual environment more ‘social’ and interactive as we go from 2D to high fidelity, will we simply become even more isolated in what is, and will always be, a fiction? Will we become even more siloed in the digital world, but not even know it?

Please tell me that a quiet, soul sustaining, proactive experience of viewing art in the real world will always be part of life as we know it.

Community Service with IFDA at ABC Wellesley

What do twenty design world vendors and contractors know about making life better for a very special group of academically gifted women high school scholars of color?  It turns out a lot!

My long association with the International Furnishings and Design Association bloomed into the New England chapter’s largest pro bono community service project to date. As VP of Community Service for IFDA NE, I worked with a dream team of 20 design world contracts and vendors who undertook improvements to the dormitory of ABC (A Better Chance) Wellesley, home to a very special group of young women of color who live there while attending Wellesley High School to prepare for college and eventual leadership in America.

Jacqueline Becker Fine Arts Consulting Services donated artwork for their study hall and for the newly created multi-user bath that replaced one out of commission for years. In a home with 6 teenagers and two resident advisors, that new bath was very much appreciated!

A special shout out to IFDA members who have stepped up to lead this effort: Kevin Cradock and Dan Wilson of Cradock Builders and Jessica Chabot of Katie Rosenfeld. And heart felt gratitude to the entire team: Pat Bryson of Bryson Electric, John Speridakos of Cosmos Painting, Richard Siegel of Stanhope Framers, Matt Clark of Clark Fine Art Services, Jim Lavalle of Lavelle Systems, Beezee Honan of Designer Bath, Jon Moss of Installation Plus, Jeff Pomeroy of Light New England, Joe DiMare of Art of Tile and Stone, Manny Makkas of Makkas Drapery, Lauren Hamilton of August Interiors, Tom Skinner of Skinner Demo, Brian Spellman of Metropolitan Cabinet and Countertops, Ken DeCost of Materia Millwork, Diego Olivera of Oliver Wall Plastering, Kyle Tripp of Simple Home, John Nicholas of Oasis Shower Doors and Cheryl Savit of Savvy Words. It takes a village…

How’s your art love life? Need a match maker?

Peruse Our Portfolio