Chicago Booth’s Harper Center is like a small secret museum of contemporary art. More than 650 artworks are installed throughout its six floors: in the hallways, the waiting rooms, the study areas. There’s even a sound piece that plays in a stairwell.

But it’s not a museum, it’s a school, which brings two pervasive threats.

By day, it’s bags: “People brushing by things, scraping into stuff,” says Canice Prendergast, W. Allen Wallis Distinguished Service Professor of Economics at Chicago Booth, who oversees the collection. By night, it’s vacuums and dustcloths: “I refer to this as Midwestern vandalism,” because the well-intentioned cleaning staff “are just trying to help.” Sculptures are more easily damaged than works that hang on the wall; that’s why Booth has so few.

In 2008 the school was renamed the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, in recognition of a $300 million gift from David Booth, MBA’71. Booth’s gift specifically set aside an endowment for art. (Some of David Booth’s own contemporary art collection can be glimpsed in the 2023 Errol Morris documentary Tune Out the Noise: “Very similar to my view of economics and investing,” Booth says in the film, “I like simple ideas, well executed.”) The gift led to some prickly negotiations with the Harper Center’s architect, Rafael Viñoly, who had forbidden art because he considered the building itself to be art.

Prendergast is explaining all this to a group of 20 or so Booth faculty members, none of whom seem to know much about contemporary art. “You can ask me literally anything,” he offers.

A microeconomist, Prendergast is probably best known for his work on using markets to improve the efficiency of food banks, but he has a side interest in art and art markets. “I got into this because my sister’s an artist,” he explains. (Kathy Prendergast is a London-based artist whose work includes sculptures, drawings, and installation art.) “I always describe myself as the family disappointment who became an economist.”

He’s equally fascinated by the machinations of the art market. His academic work includes the 2019 paper “The Distribution of Contemporary Art” in Portable Gray and the unpublished manuscript “The Market for Contemporary Art.” “Beneath its glossy veneer,” he writes in the manuscript, “the market for contemporary art is as opaque as can be.”

But the point of Booth’s collection is not to speculate in art, or to display wealth, or even just to be decorative. It’s didactic. It’s intended to inspire thought and discussion.

“We think of higher learning as having some level of abstraction,” Prendergast explains at the tour’s first stop, two photographs by Ori Gersht on the fifth floor. “The whole idea of the collection, and much of the idea of contemporary art, is it’s just another language to think about the world.”

Many of the artists “are actually thinking about relatively similar things to the ones that we do,” he tells his colleagues, “but in a totally different way. So largely it’s just meant to ask people to be curious.”—Carrie Golus, AB’91, AM’93

These excerpts from Prendergast’s tour have been edited and condensed.

Judy Ledgerwood

Early Afternoon (Daylight Burning), 2007

This is probably the most popular piece in the collection—students like this more than anything else. It’s by a Chicago artist, Judy Ledgerwood. If you ask her about this piece, she will tell you the colors used here are overtly meant to be feminine. It’s essentially meant as an antidote to successful male artists who tend to work in very dark, serious colors, while women are not taken seriously because of the palettes they use.

Sergej Jensen

Ohne Titel (Streifen), 2009

This is something we bought very early, by a guy who lives in Denmark called Sergej Jensen. This is what I would steal if I were to take something.

Partly it’s because of the texture. It’s burlap. And partly it’s the contrast between the colors and where they stop. The color doesn’t go all the way down. It just has a sense of stopping at the right place. And that would probably make no sense to you, but if you’ve seen a thousand of these pieces of minimalism, you know the obvious move is not to do this.

You know how there are some economists who are just really good at modeling? They know what assumptions to make, what not to make. This is like the analog of that, with an artist.

Claire Fontaine

Foreigners Everywhere (Spanish), 2008

For those of you that don’t speak Spanish, this means “foreigners everywhere.” There’s one in Mandarin that also says “foreigners everywhere.” To give you a sense as to, luckily, how prescient we’ve been, the biggest art show in the world every two years is the Venice Biennale. And the Venice Biennale in 2024 was called Foreigners Everywhere. It’s based on these pieces.

The reason why we bought them is because the expression “foreigners everywhere,” for us, it’s everything that’s great about Booth. But to many people in the current political environment, it’s actually to do with what they would call illegal immigration. So it’s this totally ambiguous thing, and I’ve had people pick up on both.

The word in Mandarin for foreigners is the same word that’s used for strangers, with the connotation of people you should not trust. We had a group of Chinese students go to the dean’s office. They thought it was a service announcement about people who might steal your possessions. They wanted to know, “Why are you only telling the Chinese students?”

Ori Gersht

White Noise #1, 2001 (bottom)
White Noise #2, 2001 (top)

If you ask people in the art world who is the greatest living artist, probably the most common name—and the correct name—is a German painter called Gerhard Richter. He’s largely known for two things. One is the relationship between painting and photography: What’s the role of a painting, when we can all take a pretty good iPhone photo? The other is that so much of his art is about Germany’s sense of shame after World War II.

These two pieces of art here look like paintings, but they’re photographs by an Israeli photographer, Ori Gersht. To anybody who’s seen a Richter painting, these look almost exactly like it—in fact, a gallerist from New York came here a few years ago, and he said, “You have a Richter?” So in the same way Richter is using painting to think about photography, this guy is doing it in the opposite direction.

These photographs were both taken on the train on the way back from Auschwitz. Gersht’s father-in-law was a survivor. It’s about the blurring of memory, the fear that we forget events that are super important.

Tomoko Yoneda

Hill – View of Serbian front-line during the Siege of Sarajevo, 2004

This photograph was taken just outside Sarajevo, and it’s actually where snipers would shoot from during the Bosnian War. As you know, we have one faculty member who’s Bosnian [Emir Kamenica, Richard O. Ryan Professor of Economics]. So before we purchased this, I said to Emir, “Look, if this upsets you, I’m not going to do it.”

As it turns out, Emir is probably the second most arty person in the building. He’d actually seen this piece at the Venice Biennale. He said, “This was taken close to where I grew up, so not only do we have to buy it, but you have to put it outside my office.” That’s why it stays there.

And again, it’s thinking about what we remember and what we forget.

Stephen G. Rhodes

Excerpt (gray), 2007
Excerpt (green), 2007
Excerpt (turquoise), 2007

This guy lives in Berlin now, but he grew up in New Orleans. A lot of his art is about the way people perceive the Southern states of the US. So the backdrop in these three photographs looks like the French Quarter, but actually it’s the French Quarter in Disneyland. Fake New Orleans, compared to what New Orleans actually is.

Superimposed are these post-Katrina images. And then spray painted over that is the X they put on abandoned buildings after Katrina.

These are not the most cheerful objects, and I’m moderately sensitive to people’s preferences, so I made sure not to put them outside anybody’s office, because they’re just too miserable. But people keep asking for “The X’s.” I’m really bad at working out what people are going to like.

This [Excerpt (turquoise)] is the one piece in the collection that’s been damaged. Obviously somebody’s bag scraped across the X here. And of all the luck, the artist says to me about five years ago, “I’d love to come see my work installed.” So he shows up and looks and then says, “Oh, it’s way better with the scratch.”

Edgar Calel

Runojel xa xti jotayimpe, Runojel xa xti tzolimpe, chuech ri ruach’ulew No. XI, XIII, XIV (Everything Will Blossom, Everything Will Reappear Before the Face of the Earth No. XI, XIII, XIV), 2023

This is work by a young Guatemalan artist. The story behind it is the following. He’s Mayan. When the Spanish first came to Latin America, the Indigenous people would typically bury their sacred objects to hide them from the Spanish. And the belief of the Maya is that the soil in which it was buried also becomes sacred.

These three paintings have been covered in sacred mud. But over time, the mud will desiccate and just peel off. So it’s going to reveal the treasure behind it. I have absolutely no idea what it is.

Raymond Pettibon

Untitled, 1998

This is work by an artist from Los Angeles called Raymond Pettibon. One of the real changes between my generation and younger generations is the reading of graphic novels. When I was a kid, we never read comics after we were about 10 years old.

Two of the people who are given credit for changing this are Art Spiegelman, author of Maus, and Pettibon. They both use comic-like images, but in the context of very serious adult language.

Giuseppe Penone

Idee di Pietra (Ideas of Stone), completed 2004–07, installed 2010

Giuseppe Penone is one of the originators of an art movement called Arte Povera, poor art, which is largely about nature. There’s no real conceptual component to this. It turns out he lives in the mountains in Italy where there are avalanches, and rocks just lodge in this beautiful way. That’s what this is meant to be.

It was exceptionally hard to install. The whole thing weighs about 20 tons. It’s a bronze tree with a stainless steel interior. That one rock there weighs six tons. Directly underneath is the parking lot, and we had to redo the concrete base, because otherwise it would have gone straight through.

This is probably the best outdoor sculpture installed in Chicago since the Picasso in 1967.

Janice Kerbel

Ballgame, Innings 1 & 2, 2009 (audio play)

Radio voice: “The cosmic right-handed White on the mound, Jones catching—”

Obviously I can’t have sound where everybody’s working. This is by a Canadian artist called Janice Kerbel. She’s interested in the line between fiction and reality.

Radio voice: “And it’s play ball!”

She worked out the perfectly average baseball game over the last hundred years. And then she hired an actor [Colin Stinton] to announce this. So it turns out, the first inning of a baseball game lasts 15 minutes. The second inning lasts 14 minutes. We have bought the first two innings. So it plays for 29 minutes and then goes silent. It’s only on about a quarter of the time.

The reason why we bought it is the following. By picking the perfectly average game, it’s both the game that’s most likely to be played, but one that surely won’t be played. That’s the cleverness of it.

How selling art is like an IPO

As part of the tour, Canice Prendergast, W. Allen Wallis Distinguished Service Professor of Economics at Chicago Booth, gave Chicago Booth faculty a quick overview of the puzzling mechanics of the art market. His comments have been edited and condensed.—C. G.

Here’s the weird thing about the art market. If you wanted to buy a Porsche, and you had the money, you could. If you wanted to buy a painting by Sergej Jensen, you can’t. Literally.

The gallery will price it at 30,000 bucks. But when you walk into the gallery, they will tell you it’s sold. If I walk into the gallery, and they know I’m from Booth, they’ll tell me it’s available, and they will give me a discount.

The reason is the following. It’s similar to IPO logic. You want to place the stock with your best customers. And that’s the way a gallery builds an artist’s career: by placing their work in the best collections.

There’s a very clear pecking order. If MoMA wants to buy something, they’re at the top. The Art Institute is similar. But Booth is close to the top, because we’re seen as very, very good at spotting people whose careers are about to take off. That’s why we get this stuff.

Here’s another similarity. If you think about an IPO, nobody’s going to like it if you sell the stock the next day. So people have asked me, “How much is the collection worth?” And it’s probably gone up by a factor of ten. But I could only sell it once, because I would lose my reputation as a museum.