Corcoran Curator Leaving

(Via RE) - Dr. Jonathan Binstock, whose thesis work in Philly was about DC artist Sam Gilliam, will be leaving his post as the Curator for Contemporary Art at the Corcoran in Washington, DC in order to join the corporate world at the Art Advisory Service at Citi (nee Citibank), where he will work as a senior vice president.

For almost 30 years, Citi has helped some of the Citigroup's customers find and collect art (since it's investment and banks and Samolians... I guess for investment goals) and a whole lot of other art services.

Their website implies "access" as a mean to penetrate the inside and outs of collecting artwork for fun and profit.

As a sideline, I advise and then buy artwork for two collectors, and have a $20,000 monthly budget to buy artwork for those two folks. This is not as easy as one would have imagined, and actually quite an arduous (but still fun) process.

What Citi does is a billion times harder, because they are somewhat promising investors a payoff and payback and return on their purchase price on artwork.

Jonathan Binstock is a sharp, hardworking and savvy dude, and DC and the Corcoran will miss him, but he's got a tough job in front of him, and I wish him the best of luck.

It will be fun to see if Jonathan pushes any DC artists. This will be somewhat difficult, as I suspect that this level of collecting seldom concerns itself with discovering artists who have not yet made it to the ranks of the secondary art market (only about 5-6 DC area artists (as far as I know) have done so... of those only 2-3 are alive.