Ramtin Naimi

Once I spent enough time familiarizing myself with the market, I realized like anything, if you're going to

invest time and resources into something, you're better off doing the majority of the work yourself.

Obviously, it's good to have people like advisors who are experts, who are boots on the ground in the ecosystem advising you here and there.

But I think you need to maintain the relationships with the galleries yourself.

You need to maintain the relationships

the auction houses yourself, even having some direct artist relationships yourself.

So I spent time and energy and resources dedicated to learning as much about it as I possibly could.

I wanted to collect primarily contemporary artists and primarily living artists.

And I decided to collect

three different buckets of artists, and I break them down by generation.

So I have artists who are two generations before me, and these guys are in their mid to late 60s, early 70s.

Artists that are maybe one generation before me, these guys are late 40s to late 50s.

And then artists of my generation, and that's everyone who's 28 years old to 38 years old.

I started to understand who is important in the conversation at any given time and who is getting museum institutional interest.

Who are museums paying attention to?

Who are museums hosting exhibitions for?

What makes this artist unique?

Where does this artist draw inspiration from?

There's a lot of artists that are great and have all those boxes, but might necessarily be something that I want to live with.

I personally, my wife as well, we like living with our art.