This past March, as the reality of the Coronavirus began to make itself felt in the United States, I sent out an email entitled “Art in an Uncertain Time” in place of my normal blog.  Galleries were being shut down, and dealers were working remotely.  I...

This past May, I wrote a blog about the art seen on the walls of talking heads from the news shows, broadcasting from their homes since the pandemic began. My wife, who suggested that I write the post, was struck in particular by the painting on the wall by the...

If you’ve been crazy about dinosaurs since you were a kid and you have several million dollars burning a hole in your pocket, mark your calendar for October 6. That’s the evening Christie’s in New York is selling the 40-foot-long skeleton of a Tyrannosaurus Rex,...

One of the most celebrated artist/collector confrontations of the 20th century occurred at Sotheby’s (then called Sotheby Parke Bernet) in New York on October 18, 1973, when taxi-magnate Robert Scull was selling 50 paintings from his well-known collection of Pop Art....

Almost forty years ago, working for Ira Spanierman Gallery, I was participating in the San Francisco Art and Antiques Show. Regional antiques shows were a major opportunity to acquire works for our New York-based gallery. In those days before cell phones, we took out...

One of the now-normal occurrences of life in this Age of the Corona Virus, at least for those of us who watch the nightly news, is our newfound entry into the personal spaces of the talking heads who must broadcast remotely from their homes. These intrusions into...

Economists may not have caught on yet, but the art market has often made a pretty good canary in the coal mine. There seems to be something in the air that the art market senses a few months before everyone else. In 1989, for instance, the gallery I worked for was...

I got the kind of call last month that no dealer, appraiser, or art lover in general ever wants to get. A client called me to say that his home had been destroyed by a fire. He had managed to rescue some of his collection, but most of it had burned completely or had...

John Singer Sargent famously said that a portrait is a painting with something wrong with the mouth. Two portraits have been much in the news lately, as the National Portrait Gallery announced that its portrait of Barak Obama by Kehinde Wiley and its portrait of...