The Hollywood Reporter (Weekly)
Adviser to Hollywood’s A-List
Joe Sheftel, whose clients include Ryan Murphy and Greg Berlanti, talks art collecting and fairgoing
Ryan Murphy, Netflix’s Bela Bajaria, Greg Berlanti and Joel McHale are among the Hollywood names who work with art adviser Joe Sheftel in building their art collections. “Joe has been great in helping us focus and translate our passions into visual arts, while also teaching us a great deal about market trends. We’ve discovered artists’ works both historical and current that our whole family is inspired by every day,” say Berlanti and his husband, Robbie Rogers, in a joint email to THR. The New York-based Sheftel talks current trends in art and what he likes about working with industry clients.
How would you describe the current moment in the art world? It seems like we’re on the cusp of a transition. For the last decade or so, things have been very focused on younger artists and emerging art and figuration. But that’s not the only narrative right now. There’s a lot of interest in historical work; we’re seeing a lot of younger galleries looking at art from the ’60s and ’70s from
overlooked artists.
What is it like when you start with a new client?
With everyone I’ve worked with, we spend a lot of time looking — without the pressure of buying for a while. It’s important to look at a lot of stuff without making decisions and meeting galleries and experts and artists and auction-house people.
Are industry clients different from other clients in any way?
People from entertainment have done so much visual work as part of their careers. So they bring a lot of that insight to collecting, as well as a decisiveness about what looks interesting to them.
Could you describe Ryan Murphy’s point of view as a collector? Ryan’s view is very narrative and he has a really instinctive understanding of what is happening culturally and creatively. A lot of his collection is inspired by the location the art is going to be in. So for the New York house, the reference points were very much 1980s New York, what was going on then, the AIDS crisis and the artists who were being political in that moment, like David Wojnarowicz. Also what Ryan is working on, [like] The Boys in the Band and [The Andy Warhol Diaries] documentary, has a lot of influence.
How is Greg Berlanti and Robbie Rogers’ collection different? They both have a lot of love for painting, both abstract and figurative and also colorful. They have an interest in gay historical painting, like Hugh Steers is an artist they’ve been really interested in, and Betty Parsons, a lesbian painter and gallerist who was showing Mark Rothko and all those artists in the ’50s and ’60s. They’re also interested in younger queer artists like Anthony Cudahy. And they are interested in things like American surrealism, artists like Robert Vickrey and George Tooker, and then moving to artists like Peter Halley and Alex Katz.
Do you have any tips for navigating the Frieze art fair?
Come in with a plan. To access the A-plus material, you need to have some access figured out beforehand, whether that’s a qualified adviser or a relationship with a gallerist there. — D.P.
out West, and the places that provided solace while he battled waves of microaggressions and othering — namely, the beach and the outdoor activities that make up Southern California’s horizon line. “I think oftentimes the ideas of identity [or] intersectionality become a bit banal, or lost in these polarizing narratives that we’re often interested in,” says Hall. “[I’m] just trying to take that step a bit further into my own realm of nuance.”
WHERE At Frieze Los Angeles, through Feb. 19
WHO COLLECTS Among Hall’s collectors is SpringHill Company
CEO Maverick Carter, who tells THR, “From the first time I saw his paintings, I was drawn to how he depicted Black people in a way most don’t see us.”
— EVAN NICOLE BROWN
Friedrich Kunath
In his beautiful yet melancholic landscape paintings — inspired by the German Romantic period and paintings of the American West — Kunath looks at the ideas of home and belonging. Born in the mid-1970s in East Germany, the artist moved to Los Angeles in 2007. “A big part of the concept of the show is my quest of finding home again and just realizing that it isn’t there anymore,” says Kunath, who splits his time between Europe and Pasadena. “In a spiritual sense I don’t feel home in one place, and I realized early on that that is the engine of my work, this forever quest to define home.” Among the pieces in his new show, I Don’t Know the Place but I Know How to Get There, at Blum & Poe is the clever Cars & Coffee Los Angeles, which depicts L.A.’s car meetup culture amid the landscape seen in Albert Bierstadt’s famed 1864 painting Valley of the Yosemite. “I go to these [car enthusiast] meetings in Griffith Park. And it’s a little bit funny [seeing] all these cars with the sublime nature,” says Kunath, who sees L.A. as “a complicated city full of substance but also full of surface. I think this is still the best city for an artist to step into — this roller coaster of never-ending dualities and paradoxes that it holds.”
WHERE 2727 S. La Cienega Blvd., through Feb. 25
WHO COLLECTS “Friedrich’s work is the perfect ethos of Los Angeles — brightness and noir,” says Endeavor executive chairman Patrick Whitesell. “It drew me in because of its romantic view of the world filled with lots of humor and irony.”