Raphael Orlove
Something new is happening at Morton Street Partners. It does not operate like a car dealership, though it sells cars, typically in the six-figure to $2 million range. It doesn’t operate like the nearby art galleries that dot the rest of downtown Manhattan. This repurposed garage in the West Village functions like an art advisory, a rising trend within the art world that has exploded over the past decade.
The role of the art advisor is to connect collectors and institutions with the right art, by the right artist, at the right time. An art advisor bargains on their client’s behalf, helping them build or refine their collection. It’s not a novel position – its professional association was founded in 1980 – but art advisory firms have exploded in value over the past decade. Sotheby’s $85 million acquisition of Amy Cappellazzo’s Art Agency, Partners, in 2016 was a watershed moment. The firm was only two years old at the time. Art advisory firms have grown to meet the demands of businesses buying expensive art and “the newly minted superrich” who wish to build art collections, as the Wall Street Journal reported in a 2015 trend piece.
“The gallery/advisory thing informed our business model,” explains co-founder Ben Tarlow, whose background is in art, finance, and art history.
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Image Credit: Raphael Orlove Morton Street Partners is hosting a Singer debut that night, but Tarlow is happy that I’ve arrived on the ship-out date for a Porsche Speedster waiting just behind the front door. It’s for a new client, Tarlow explains. “Most of the people we work with are young. The next generation of collectors.”
When the Speedster came up, the client had already looked at plenty of perfectly-restored examples online. “We looked at the use case and saw he needed something more rough,” says Tarlow. The car is dinged and dented, and the paint is chipping off the nose. You can see where the original owner cut and welded the fender for more tire clearance. It might seem tattered, but it still wears its original race stickers from the late Fifties. It’s a perfect time capsule from when Porsches were underdog heroes of a budding sports car racing scene in the United States. They won David and Goliath battles on track. They didn’t sit in climate-controlled garages, and nobody worried about chips in the clear coat. This one doesn’t have any clear coat. I’ve never seen a Speedster still in this condition, down to the 8-ball shifter.
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Image Credit: Raphael Orlove “Our job was leading him through the process to something he didn’t know existed, that he didn’t know he wanted,” Tarlow says, an avid vintage racer himself. This was a buyer who wanted something he could drive, something that he could use, something that he didn’t need to worry about every paint scuff or rock chip. After all, that’s how these cars were meant to be used, and how they were driven in period. “We can help him understand that a beat-up one is more in keeping than the shiny ones he’d send us on Bring a Trailer.”
This is part of the job of an art advisor, guiding the client away from making a misguided purchase. It’s easy to buy the wrong piece from the right artist.
“A lot of guys go through that phase of buying all the things they thought they wanted,” says co-founder Jake Auerbach, formerly of RM Sotheby’s and Rally. That guide work, of cultivating taste, is a big part of Morton Street Partners’ business. But so is the hunt for the cars themselves.
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Image Credit: Raphael Orlove “Just sourcing cool shit,” as Auerbach says, “for lack of a better word.” A particular specialty for the two-person firm is prototype and design-style cars. “Stuff that doesn’t have an engine.”
Zaha Hadid’s Z car was part of Morton Street’s inaugural show “Unsafe at Any Speed” in its opening year of 2022. “We sold the Zaha to an institutional school, to the Broad in Michigan”
Tarlow and Auerbach are particularly proud of another recent re-discovery, the Dino Berlinetta Aerodinamica. Small and modern, it’s an aerodynamic study by Pininfarina that debuted in 1967, made the rounds for a year, and then practically disappeared. “The last photos were from the ‘68 Geneva show,” Auerbach says. “It had been lost for so long.” Like other prototypes, “it disappeared into very cloistered and private collections.” After unearthing the car, Morton Street brought it to the Villa d’Este Concours d’Elegance just as it had been left half a century ago.
Pininfarina is the most prestigious of all the Italian design houses, but even in the 2020s, it’s possible to dig up its forgotten works. There was a period when the art world went through a similar phase, “when you could find Pollocks at a Hamptons yard sale,” as Auerbach says, or old masters hidden in attics Upstate. “Eventually all this stuff will be found.”
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Image Credit: Raphael Orlove He and Tarlow stay busy on finding trips to Europe, running down tips and rumors through colleagues and out the back of mechanics’ shops. Just as much time is spent on catalog resumes. These are complete lists of works by a particular artist, or in this case, of a particular car or design house. This is a challenging job, particularly for ‘80s and ‘90s prototypes, says Auerbach. “As 5-mph impact bumpers come forward, you get a lot of cars that were chassis zero.” Crash test cars and other development vehicles were poorly cataloged when they were being created, and those records have been poorly kept. “Sometimes even the factory doesn’t know how many were made,” particularly when “OEMs treated their archives as a burden.”
“We have such fun navigating this,” adds Tarlow, “and our clients have fun, too.”
Auerbach and Tarlow function as educators, passing their clients rare books on obscure designers, casting light on forgotten corners of car history. It’s a valuable service for their clientele, which includes overnight multi-millionaires who don’t always want something flashy or mainstream. “They sell their company overnight and they show up in a hoodie,” says Tarlow. “They don’t want to show up in a Pagani.”
It’s tricky work when high-value cars are more accessible than ever. A new collector doesn’t even need to walk into a Ferrari dealership. These cars are a keystroke away on online auctions. But there are cars you can’t pull up on the internet. “For people who have weapons-grade shit, we help them find things even they couldn’t,” says Tarlow. Sourcing things like one-off Swiss prototypes is where Morton Street Partners comes in. “You can google ‘buy Enzo’ and buy an Enzo,” says Auerbach. “If you google Sbarro, you’re gonna get pizza.”
