I met a fellow dealer walking down Madison Avenue a few days ago. When we first met, 20 years back, he had a gallery on the Upper East Side. Since his primary focus was contemporary, he had followed the migration of contemporary dealers to Chelsea and opened a new gallery there. Now, he told me, he was closing his Chelsea space. He was going to deal privately out of his large apartment uptown. “Wait,” I asked him. “If you don’t have a public gallery, how can you remain a member of the ADAA?” The Art Dealers Association of America has always required that each of its members operate a public brick-and-mortar space with regular exhibitions. Private, by-appointment-only dealers have always had their applications rejected. “No problem,” he told me. “I’ll continue to mount exhibitions under my own name but in conjunction with other dealers, and I’ll publish catalogs. I’m about to mount a show in a pop-up space, and I’ll continue to do art fairs. The ADAA is fine with that.” In a few words, my friend had summed up the changing situation in today’s art world. Commercial rents in desirable neighborhoods have gotten ever higher, and the contemporary art market has bifurcated into a handful of mega-galleries such as Gagosian and David Zwirner, which represent a few superstar artists, and a lot of smaller galleries which often exhibit emerging artists. The smaller galleries, handling artists whose works trade in four and low-five figures, are having a hard time keeping their heads above water financially, even when the shows they mount are critically well-respected. Creative strategies to solve the...
Thirty-five years ago, I was working for a New York gallery that ran frequent ads in national publications. Our high profile meant that we received inquiries seeking advice about art. One day I received a call from a man who had recently returned from a vacation in Hawaii. There had been an art gallery just off the lobby of the hotel where he had stayed, and the dealer had attempted to interest him in a really good deal. My caller wasn’t sure exactly what the medium of the work was – he felt sure it was a print of some kind – and he couldn’t remember the name of the artist, but he was struck by the facts that the artist was both famous and elderly and could reasonably be expected to die soon. The dealer had assured my caller that the death of the artist would immediately cause the artist’s prices to rise, and he was wondering whether he should follow up on this marvelous investment opportunity. “Let me guess,” I asked him, “Was the artist’s name Salvador Dali?” “Yeah, yeah, that’s right!” he responded. “Dali!” Salvador Dali (born 1904, he would die in 1989) had once been a Surrealist painter of some significance, but by the time of the call, he had long been a caricature of himself, indulging in publicity stunts, appearing on late-night television, and endorsing a variety of products. He was not in good health and was dependent on caretakers who controlled him. It was rumored that he had signed thousands of sheets of blank lithographic paper at their behest, paper that would be...
The first time Roberta and I visited the Barnes Collection, we could tell why it was world-famous. The museum was at that time in its old digs in Merion, Pennsylvania, and they didn’t make a visit easy. This quiet suburb of Philadelphia did not want a lot of traffic, so admission was strictly controlled. You had to make your reservation for a visit some time in advance. Once inside, however, you were treated to an incredible array of paintings by the greatest of the French Post-Impressionist and modernist artists – Cezanne, Seurat, Picasso, Matisse, and more, all represented by true masterpieces. They were laid out on the walls with folk art and decorative objects in the idiosyncratic hanging prescribed by Albert Barnes, the museum’s famously irascible founder. I didn’t mind the installation, but the lighting was terrible, especially for someone accustomed to the track lighting found in modern museums and commercial galleries. Whole rooms were lit by only a single lamp in the middle of the ceiling, and the colors of many paintings seemed muted instead of being vibrant as they ought. Barnes intended his collection to remain ensconced in Merion until Doomsday. 40 years after his death, however, the trustees found themselves facing major financial difficulties. A suggestion was made to move the collection into Philadelphia to make it more accessible to visits by lots of people. It took years of lawsuits to break the will, but in 2012 the collection moved to a modern building on Museum Parkway, not far from the Philadelphia Museum of Art. I was excited when the new museum opened. I had heard...
The end to my days as an outsider artist occurred in the second grade. My classmates and I were making crayon drawings the way children do today – a strip of green along the bottom for the grass, with a child and a tree standing against the white of the paper, and a strip of blue along the top for the sky. Mrs. Goldwater, our teacher, told us to fill in the uncolored portion with blue. “The sky comes down to the horizon,” she told us. And we looked and saw that she was right, sort of. But our drawings were also right – we instinctively knew that when we were running around at recess it was not in a sea of blue as if we were underwater. It was clear where we were. The sky was Up There. From then on, however, we made our drawings with the sky coming all the way down to the grass. The days of untutored talent were over. These reflections are occasioned by my having kept my New Year’s resolution: I attended the Outsider Art Fair in New York with my wife, to whom I give thanks for suggesting this blog’s title. I came away having seen a lot of interesting art, but with less clarity than ever about what the term “outsider art” means. The term was coined in 1972 by Roger Cardinal as an English equivalent to the French term art brut (“raw art”) which was used by French artist Jean Dubuffet to categorize art made by untrained or mentally-ill persons. Such art has also been called “folk art” and...
It’s the time of year for vows of changed behavior in the year to come. Take these art-related resolutions with me — they should be easier to keep than losing 30 pounds or quitting smoking. Explore something new: Museum curators of American art, not to mention dealers like me, tend to confine ourselves to our area of specialization. The prospect of reading a book or visiting an exhibition on something outside our bailiwick can seem like time lost that ought to be spent improving our knowledge of our subject. It is important, however, to indulge in that sheer enjoyment that brought us to art in the first place. I vow to see at least one show and read at least one book in 2018 on a field of art I’ll never deal in. It can be liberating to visit, say, an exhibition of Islamic art and just enjoy its beauty instead of walking through a show of American art and mentally placing a price on each piece, i.e. “That Hassam, $350,000 once; now probably $275,000. And that John Falter! Could have bought it for $20,000 or less, twelve years ago; now worth at least $100,000.” Shut the market out, and just look. Delve a little into something new. See it now: I missed the Florine Stettheimer exhibition at the Jewish Museum this past summer. I intended to get to it, but I kept postponing a visit, making the usual excuses – I don’t have the time today to devote enough attention to it, the museum’s too far uptown to combine with today’s trip to 57th Street, and so on....
Unless you’ve been living someplace without newspapers, TV, or Wi-Fi, you have doubtless heard about the painting by Leonardo da Vinci, discussed in this blog last January (Selling Mona Lisa), that sold for $450,312,500, including buyer’s premium, at Christie’s New York two weeks ago. Dmitry Rybolovlev, the Russian oligarch who is suing the Swiss dealer who sold him this work for $127,500,000, alleging that the dealer overcharged him on several other deals, undoubtedly had the last laugh here. The sale was surrounded by controversy from the start. Was this a genuine Leonardo? Experts differed. If so, how much of the original painting remained? The work had been heavily restored. In the end, it didn’t matter. Christie’s put on a full court press in marketing the work, holding public viewings of it in Hong Kong, San Francisco, London, and New York. De-emphasizing the Christian theme (it is a portrait of Jesus, after all), Christie’s touted it as “the male Mona Lisa,” brilliantly linking it with what is arguably the most famous painting in the world. I witnessed some of the hoopla the New York exhibition generated as I arrived to view the American works coming up for sale at Christie’s that same week. I had to push my way past a long line of people who had waited 30 minutes to an hour for a look at the painting. The atmosphere reminded longtime New Yorkers of the 1964 New York World’s Fair, when Michelangelo’s Pietà was on display. Over 27 million people visited the Vatican Pavilion at the fair to stand on a moving walkway and be transported past the...
