Recap: Why I Buy: Art Collectors Reveal What Drives Them, Yazzy's at www.williamverdult.com

According to the Wall Street Journal every man is an artist, said Joseph Beuys. That may be, but not every artist is worth collecting.

An art collector must make the distinction, and his task is more difficult than ever. Competition is stiffer, as new buyers emerge from Asia, Russia and the Middle East. Art is more expensive -- Sotheby's said it sold about $5 billion of fine and decorative art last year, up 39% from 2006, while Christie's sold about $6 billion, up 30% -- and auction records are shattered regularly. And the sources for artworks are mushrooming -- from international art fairs and biennials in Athens and Dubai, to galleries showing works from India to Greenland.

Fine art has entered the pop mainstream -- Japanese artist Takashi Murakami made the cover for rapper Kanye West's latest album -- and owning art is the latest barometer of trendiness.

But beyond the hip factor, what compels one to buy art at all? Why are some satisfied with just looking, while others feel the need to possess? Beuys himself thought collecting was inhibiting. Just storing his own finished works hampered new ideas, he thought, and he sold his art partly to break with past phases.

But one man's burden can be another's pleasure. Francesca von Habsburg, scion of a collecting dynasty, says she collects because of her restless curiosity, as well as her personal crusade to support new commissions. There are patient anthropologist types such as Uli Sigg, the leading collector of contemporary Chinese art, who collect in order to better understand the world around them. Or those like London-based Amir Shariat, who says collecting is a way to better understand oneself.

Julia Stoschek, heiress of a German auto-parts company, collects in order to draw nearer to the artistic process, as did Beuys's early patrons, the Van der Grinten brothers, who began as artists themselves.

Uli Sigg

Why he collects: to try to understand China

Contemporary art is a very good way to access a culture, says Uli Sigg, whose unyielding discipline in studying China has resulted in a collection of roughly 1,600 pieces of contemporary Chinese art.

When visiting Beijing for the first time in 1978, then a representative of the Schindler Elevator Co. to establish a business venture, Mr. Sigg, 61, says he had "no idea" about China, nor had he ever been particularly interested. At business meetings, he says, "I had huge deficiencies in understanding the people sitting on the other side of the table, and I knew I had to close this gap somehow."

Already an art collector in his native Switzerland with works by artists such as Rachel Whiteread and Gerhard Richter, he delved into Beijing's nascent underground art scene -- "discreetly," he says -- which was slowly emerging from the petrification of Socialist Realism, the sole mode of artistic expression permitted by Mao. Now, art has "given me an idea of most people," he says.

It wasn't until the early 1990s, after a decade on the sidelines talking to insiders to get an overview of the scene, that Mr. Sigg actually bought anything -- a triptych of tulip blooms recalling Georgia O'Keeffe and painted by a young woman artist whose work he wanted to promote. It took that long for Chinese artists to arrive at their own visual vocabulary based on their history, symbols and language, he says. Until the late '80s, artists raced through the "-isms" -- impressionism, expressionism, abstract painting -- compressing almost a century of Western art history into a decade, and with uninteresting results, he says. "It's this Chinese skill of copying, absorbing, then very quickly making something new of what they have seen of outside cultures" that fascinates him most about China's artists, he says.

By the mid '90s, Mr. Sigg had formulated a collecting plan. "I realized that nobody collected Chinese art even remotely systematically, which I thought was very odd for one of the biggest, oldest cultures in the world," he says. One reason: "Most art couldn't be publicly exhibited; it was only possible to hold very small studio exhibitions, or in apartments or cellars, and these lasted only 24 hours and were only communicated to a very small circle," he says.

So Mr. Sigg tracked down key works from past exhibitions to begin collecting examples in all media of what he thought important in Chinese society -- the obsessions with consumerism, taboos, the body and of hyperurban growth. He scoured the countryside as well as major cities, visiting more than a thousand studios, he says, in order to chart every emerging artistic movement.

Almost three decades and several factories later, as well as a stint as the Swiss ambassador to China from 1995 to 1998, Mr. Sigg, now vice chairman of the board of directors of Zurich-based Ringier media group, says understanding China, in fact, is a question that goes far beyond contemporary art.

His collection "isn't only about collecting art objects," says Guangzhou-based curator Zhang Wei of Vitamin Creative Space, "but [about] the concepts and energy that form Chinese society, and a channel for him to explore other possibilities of existence -- what human beings could be."

Today contemporary Chinese art is regularly found in modern art museums and is hotly pursued by collectors -- partially due to Mr. Sigg's relentless promotion of Chinese artists to skeptical curators in the 1990s. He says he practically had to force the late Swiss curator Harald Szeemann to board a plane to China in 1998 to survey artists' ateliers. Mr. Szeemann, director of the 1999 Venice Biennale, included 20 Chinese artists in the show, and the event is still referred to as the "Chinese biennial."

Mr. Sigg also created the biennial Chinese Contemporary Art Award as a way to introduce juries of influential curators, such as Alanna Heiss of New York's PS1, to the scene. He has also served as a personal guide for other curators, including Roger Buergel and Ruth Noack, curators of last year's Documenta 12 exhibition.

His collection, first shown in 2005 at the Museum of Fine Arts in Bern, where he lives, is touring and will head to Barcelona's Joan Miró Foundation this spring.

Insider's tip: Commissioned work can be more affordable

Prices for Chinese art have soared, and Mr. Sigg says "my means are finite," so he has begun commissioning work. Most recently, this includes an installation with wheelchairs on aging society by Peng Yu and Sun Yuan, shown this spring at the Kunsthaus Graz in Austria, and two works from Feng Mengbo based on traditional Chinese shadow puppet plays.

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