Why Does Everyone’s Art Collection Look the Same?

At Art Basel Miami Beach last December, I ran into an art dealer who was at her wit’s end. She described a mounting sense of déjà vu every time she entered a collector’s home. There it was again: a painting plastered in richly colored, looping scrawl by Rashid Johnson. A mangled steel tube sculpture in a chewing-gum hue by Carol Bove. An uncanny pastel landscape by Nicolas Party. “Why,” she asked, “does everyone’s art collection look the same right now?”

She isn’t the only one wondering. The Belgian art collector Alain Servais says he’s had similar experiences in Istanbul, Mumbai, Dubai, New York and Paris. He couldn’t go anywhere without coming face-to-face with kaleidoscopic clusters of glass spheres by Olafur Eliasson. It’s “one name I cannot see anymore,” he says.