Features

The Genius Collector

At this, the room is silent.

Creativity isn’t exactly the word some might use for the way MacBain has been running her publishing company, LTB Media. Art is interesting to MacBain because of the way it makes her feel, for the difference a light sculpture produces on her mood, which is noted to swing quite wildly, but it is hardly her passion. Unlike other art-world players, who are at least occasionally spotted in galleries and museums, MacBain rarely goes to see art. She zips into art-world stops like Art Basel and the Venice Biennale on her private jet for press conferences about her new business plans and acquisitions, sometimes making speeches with autocues. As the art-media business loses money, it has become boring to her. The mood in the offices is grim. Five heads of finance have left this year, and there has been near-100 percent turnover in the past eighteen months. MacBain has visited LTB Media’s Eighth Avenue offices only a few times, usually with a Paris-based consigliere whom employees call her “French brain”; a search is now on for new space. Payroll was a day late last month when MacBain didn’t wire the money. (MacBain says there was a problem with the payroll carrier.)

Among the few staffers she treated nicely was James Truman, who seems to have made it clear early in his tenure (he lasted barely a year) that she was not to bother him with her plans to make peace in the Middle East. His departure was devastating to her. Truman, the former Condé Nast magazine director, was CEO of LTB Media until October. He became livid when MacBain began insisting that the company become profitable by Christmas. Sources say Truman had also been trying to find a buyer for the magazines, but realized MacBain was not going to sell.“Working with me is a vocation, a calling,” MacBain says with a shrug. “It’s not for everyone.”

“Usually, people that criticize are people that don’t do anything,” says MacBain. “Ones that try are the courageous people. The world is so scary now, don’t you feel that? Don’t you feel we all have a responsibility to help people who are fixing the world?”

MacBain essentially bought a group of publications that had been small operations founded by art lovers—Gallery Guide, Museums, Modern Painters, Art + Auction, Spoon—and then began to starve each one of editorial cash (Spoon was closed). The anger of those who have been there during this transition is enormous: The jobs they loved are now destroyed. (“She’s not violent,” says one, struggling to come up with something nice to say.) “We are probably the one that invests the most in content in the world of art,” says MacBain. “I have a real interest in writers. There’s a lot of content. And content is king.”

MacBain has said her company is worth as much as $120 million, and the company claims significant revenue growth across all of its titles, but LTB Media internal spreadsheets show losses except for the Paris-based Somogy art-book publishing house, which made a profit of $1 million, and Art + Auction magazine, which made $230,000. The rest of the magazines are in far worse shape: Culture + Travel lost $1.2 million; artinfo.com lost $2.3 million; Modern Painters and Gallery Guides in the U.S. and the U.K. show losses. The company is running at least $6.6 million in losses this year. (MacBain says these numbers are inaccurate.)

How much more can she afford to lose? Her $250 million fortune may be leveraged to the breaking point. Her shopping binges have included tens of thousands of dollars on custom underwear. According to sources, MacBain has been selling home contents in Paris and some of her art collection in London at Christie’s contemporary-art auctions. One of the Meier apartments has been sold. Other homes are on the block: La Dune, her eight-bedroom Southampton mansion on Gin Lane, went to contract for $35 million with Donny Deutsch but has since fallen through. In London, she has put her ten-bedroom Holland Park villa on sale for $27 million. “She has asked for such astronomical sums they most likely won’t sell,” says a friend. “She refuses to part with them.”

MacBain denies any cash-flow problems. “You can criticize all you want—I did build an empire and a second one now,” she says with steely resolve. “Usually, people that criticize are people that don’t do anything. Ones that try are the courageous people. The world is so scary now, don’t you feel that? Don’t you feel we all have a responsibility to help people who are fixing the world?”

So they still come to her, those who want to change the world. Eric Kandel has even postulated a Louise MacBain Theory of Creativity: He says that it is possible, though only metaphorical and prescientific, that the alternation in wiring in the language-oriented part of the brain’s temporal lobe that occurs with dyslexia allows for an enhancement of wiring in other areas of the brain. This is what MacBain wishes for more than anything: to be picked apart and studied by important scientists, who will tell her who she really is. She daydreams about it as she makes notes for a book she wants to write about creativity and culture—the title: “The Obvious.”