A Day in the Life: Rainbow Media's Josh Sapan

Cable World, July 25, 2005

By Mavis Scanlon

Some people collect dolls, some collect cars. Josh Sapan, CEO and president of Rainbow Media, collects what he calls "discarded art"--paintings that he finds or buys on the cheap at yard sales, flea markets and antique or second-hand stores. He's amassed a collection of about 100 canvases. Earlier this year he rescued dozens of paintings--his biggest haul by far--by aspiring artists at the Art Students League that would otherwise have been carted away by New York's Strongest.

"Determining what's appreciated or valuable is so subjective and so relative that even the artists themselves may not know if they've done something wonderful," Sapan said.

Recently I accompanied Sapan on a discarded art excursion to one of his regular haunts, Marika's, an antique store near his weekend home on Shelter Island. After disembarking on the island, an eight-minute ferry ride from Greenport, Long Island, I found his home a short drive away in Shelter Island Heights. As I alighted from my car, Sapan shouted a greeting from the tennis court across the street, where his regular weekend doubles match was in progress.

Inside his home, which was built in the late 1800s and whose lawn sweeps down to meet Dehring Harbor, an all-points bulletin had just gone out for Babba, the family's 8-month-old, very large golden retriever-standard poodle mix. Sapan's wife, Ann Foley, EVP of programming at Showtime, was preparing lunch and seemed untroubled by the dog's disappearance.

The bulletin was called off when the pup bounded out of a back room off the kitchen, so we were able to leave. We set off in Sapan's 1980 MG convertible, purchased on what he said was "a very bad whim" about a year ago (he's trying to resell it). The little car chugged to life after several tries.

When we arrived at the shop, Marika, a Shelter Island native who has owned her eponymous shop for two decades, greeted Sapan with a hug. "To what do I owe the honor of seeing you two days in a row," she said from the doorway. (He'd been there the previous day checking out antiques, but restrained himself from looking over a new cache of paintings.) Marika said she has her eye out for a pair of chandeliers for him; he's given her a settee to sell on consignment.

Taking off his sweater and putting on his glasses, he got to work. He was immediately drawn to a painting of Romeo and Juliet that hung high above the rafters.

Sapan looks for colors and shapes that work well with other paintings, and tends to cluster his finds in large installations, such as a grouping of 26 paintings that dominates a wall in his Jericho, Long Island, office. The overall effect is of an orchestrated exhibit rather than a bunch of paintings no one wanted.

"I find it visually appealing," Sapan told me. "I find the idea of rescue appealing [and] beautiful. In certain ways they may be discarded but undiscovered. I don't know where it all heads, but I love the idea of them being displayed to the public."

Sapan is toying with the idea of opening some kind of museum to display his collection; already a real estate investor, he's looked at property that might house such an entity. The Internet is another possibility (he's registered the domain name discardedart.com).

At Marika's, Sapan gathered several potential buys, then culled them further. Among the four he bought was a sea scene with a soft gray palette, and a green and brown playground scene from 1962. He also wanted the Romeo and Juliet; Marika told him she'd let him have it for $5 if he climbed up and retrieved it. In addition to the paintings, he bought two animal-print blankets he'd had his eye on. His wallet $50 lighter, Sapan carried his treasure out to his MG.

[Copyright 2005 Access Intelligence, LLC. All rights reserved.]