Yesterday Artinfo published a sweeping look at 30 of the biggest celebrity art collectors, paying tribute to those starry actors, athletes, musicians, and designers who serve as ambassadors of art appreciation to the wider pop-culture-besotted world. One of them, like history-making cyclist Lance Armstrong, just so happens to do that through Artspace: you can buy work by Dustin Yellin (a favorite of Armstrong’s) on our site to benefit the LIVESTRONG charity. We’ve sifted through the rest of this impressively researched—and breezily fun—undertaking to find the ten top luminaries who drop their millions on art. Our list is determined by a mix of analysis, level of fascination, and gut instinct (and artists whose work you can buy on Artspace are hyperlinked below).

– Madonna has a $100 million+ collection of art by the Modern greats, the Surrealists, the Art Deco artists (she had prescient taste for the in-vogue Tamara de Lempicka), and contemporary stars like Damien Hirst.

– Steve Martin is a wild and crazy customer at Gagosian and Acquavella—where he buys everything from Picasso to Lichtenstein to Hockney to Cindy Sherman—he also writes novels about the world of dealers, gallerinas, and priapic collectors.

– Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie have a mammoth $25 million art collection, and we’ve only glimpsed the tusk-tips with high-profile purchases of work by Neo Rauch, Atelier Van Lieshout, and Banksy.

– Elton John is a supercollector when it comes to photography, owning more than 5,000 works by everyone from Man Ray and Edward Steichen to Nan Goldin and Richard Avedon.

– Jay Z—who raps about Gagosian and includes homages to contemporary art in his videos—and Beyonce are working with art advisor Kim Hierston to build a collection including works by Ed Ruscha, David Hammons, Laurie Simmons, and Tim Noble & Sue Webster; Jay Z has even talked about opening a gallery of his own.

– Marc Jacobs buys art almost as often as he changes styles, snapping up work by Karen Kilimnik, Mike Kelley, Ed Ruscha, Richard Prince, and John Currin.

– David Bowie didn’t just fall to Earth yesterday, buying up refined work by Rubens and Tintoretto and then selling contemporary stuff on his own Bowie Art website.

– Val Kilmer is trying to create the world’s largest park of contemporary sculpture at his ranch in New Mexico, buying up Roxy Paine, Anish Kapoor, and Olafur Eliasson.

– A billionaire along with her sister, Mary Kate Olsen is a collector to watch with taste in art that veers from the bondage fetishism of Araki to Warhol, and in artist boyfriends from Nate Lowman to Max Snow.

– Suitably enough for the star of Raiders of the Lost Ark, Harrison Ford has a passion for the work of the Nabis—which means “the prophets” in Hebrew—a group consisting of Vuillard, Bonnard, and their decorative confederates.

Here are the rest: Leonardo DiCaprio, Blake Lively, Ellen DeGeneres & Portia de Rossi, Hugh Grant, Padma Lakshmi, Courtney Love, George Lucas, Toby Maguire, Kate Moss, Oprah Winfrey, David & Victoria Beckham, Gwenyth Paltrow, Daniel Radcliffe, Raf Simons, Swizz Beats, Bill Cosby, Sofia Coppola, Neil Patrick Harris.

Posted on: May 2nd, 2012 by Andrew
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