Art collecting is not an avocation; it’s a disease," says Kent Logan, who along with his wife, Vicki, has amassed one of the finest contemporary art collections in the United States. "You begin with one painting, and then you cross several thresholds. There’s a milestone when you pay $10,000 for a painting and then another milestone when you pay over $50,000. There’s a major milestone when you’ve filled all the walls in your house and you buy a piece of art that you’re going to put in storage and not even see. As each of those milestones are met, you’re farther down the slippery slope, where it becomes all-consuming."

And the Logans know very well how a growing collection can infiltrate a life. Their 15,000-square-foot home and private gallery, situated among the ski-trailed mountains of Vail, Colorado, is the current home of one of the nation’s largest collections of contemporary art. They built a diagonal front door to accommodate monumental—and often outrageous—works by artists such as Damien Hirst (a bull’s skull preserved in a vitrine) and Yasumasa Morimura (a wild three-part deconstruction of the "Mona Lisa" that shocked purists because no one expected to see a pregnant sitter.) Such works suit the taste of the Logans, who have amassed hundreds of pieces based on the idea that art should reflect contemporary social or cultural events and also be visually arresting.

At a moment when no clear movement or style dominates the art scene, the Logans have taken up the cudgels of edgy social commentary and built a gallery with an unparalleled selection of provocative artworks that they believe will stand as a watershed of our times.

With their values shaped by the social upheavals of growing up in the 1960s, the Logans amassed their disparate collection in less than 15 years, starting with blue-chip names from that period: about 30 Andy Warhols (including a self-portrait, skulls, electric chair, "Double Jackie," eight "Brillo" boxes and "Campbell’s Soup" cans, a large hammer-and-sickle painting, three male and female torso paintings) an early Gerhard Richter ("Tourist Office") and several pieces by both Ed Ruscha ("Slug," "Molten Polyester," "Scratches on the Film" and "Sin with Olives") and Anselm Kiefer ("Seraphim" and "Operation Sea Lion" from 1975). Their earliest acquisitions were by figurative artists from the Bay Area, like Richard Diebenkorn and Wayne Thiebaud, followed by a host of younger California artists. In the mid-1990s, Kent, a securities executive often on business in London, honed in on the brash Young British Artists. And, long before it was fashionable, the couple began to collect contemporary Japanese art.

"We’ve always looked for cultures that were undergoing dramatic change, because that is fertile ground for visual artists to work," Kent explains. This philosophy led the Logans to Tatsuo Miyajima, the gender-bending Yasumasa Morimura and more recent Japanese artists like Yoshitomo Nara, with his seemingly innocuous Pop cartoon figures, and Takashi Murakami, the anime specialist whom curators and collectors call the Andy Warhol of Japan. Next was Chinese contemporary art, of which they now have one of the largest collections in the world. "Ten years ago," Kent says, "no one cared about these artists, but they remember we were there when they couldn’t even afford to boil tea." Until very recently, most Chinese contemporary artists had not established formal dealer relationships as is common in the West. The Logans were introduced personally to these artists, bought from them directly and continue to do so today.

That was after the Logans moved from Greenwich, Connecticut, to San Francisco, where Kent became a senior partner with Montgomery Securities. One Saturday in 1993, a business associate invited the couple to join a gallery walking tour. Upon seeing "The Butler’s in Love," an enigmatic painting by the California realist Mark Stock, they were hooked, and bought it for $5,000. Today it hangs in their dressing room. "The irony is all those years we’d spent in New York we never collected art," says Kent.

Since they did not have a formal art education, the Logans relied on Martin Mueller of Modernism Gallery, in San Francisco, from whom they bought the Stock, as their advisor. He outlined in chronological order the important movements in modern and contemporary art. As they learned, they started to challenge classifications. For example, they thought using the term "figurative" was "too simplistic." Kent explains, "While the figure was used, it wasn’t about the figure, which typically in artwork is used in a conceptual sense. So we coined the phrase ‘conceptual realism.’"