details on Pods art 'addiction' specializing in photos/video
he recalls. "I ended up leaving the campaign with a treasure trove." Collecting became a "form of addiction".
Today, he reckons, he and his wife have the world's biggest collection of Anna Gaskell ("maybe second to Anna Gaskell"). Other contemporary favourites include Gillian Wearing, Marina Abramovic, Sam Taylor-Wood and Olafur Eliasson, whose work Podesta discovered 10 years ago, when the artist was still at the Royal Academy of Arts in Copenhagen.
They are always looking out for little-known artists. Asked to come up with a handful of names that are in the second rank now, but that will one day be in the first, they offer a list that ranges across the world: Britain's Darren Almond, Janaina Tschape from Brazil, Mads Gamdrup from Denmark, the Italian artist Loris Cecchini and Patricia Piccinini, a Podesta protegee who is to represent Australia at the Venice biennial.
It is tempting to see Podesta as a US equivalent of Charles Saatchi - another entrepreneur who has also operated with great success on the margins of politics. Specialising in photographs and video, Podesta is more focused, though he says that his most admired possession is a sculpture, another of Bourgeois's works, "a gloriously beautiful carved marble".