Allan Schwartzman | "The Art Market: How It Is Shaped and Challenged" | Barcelona Symposium 2020

thank you very very much Lucia and and all it's my absolute pleasure to be here and you talk about the weather more than the Brits well no but it is it's my pleasure to be here and to conduct the keynote interview now the art market how it is shaped and challenged and to introduce someone who needs no introduction but I will sitting with me with us is Alan Schwartzman one of the world's smartest and best connected art advisors he is the co-founder and principal of art agency partners which was brought for an impressive 85 million dollars in 2016 by Sotheby's where Alan is now also chairman and co-leader of its fine art division Alan is many things beyond his official biography he's also a writer with some enviable terms of phrase a critic and a curator plus I learned while doing some research um Alan helped start New York's new museum as its first employee and curator he's also someone who has worked seemingly tirelessly in the art market and all it touches for some 40 years and so as we've got you here Alan I'm going to get some free advice by downloading as much of your brain as possible in an hour and let the guys I invite you to do the same when I open to questions in about 45 minutes effect Alan when we spoke you mentioned that 40 years ago the art market didn't exist which I thought was a fascinating point to make and I just wondered if you could give us your potted history of how the art market has been shaped happy to thank you when I so I became involved in the art world in 1976 I was 19 years of age maybe it's 18 I'm not sure I took a year off from college to see if art history was an avocation or vocation found myself working as an assistant to a number of curators at the Whitney Museum one of whom Marcia Tucker was fired three months later decided she would never be fired again and start her own Museum which was the beginning of the new museum from which she was later fired but that's another story I should say retired so the art world that I entered did not have people didn't collect contemporary art quite frankly I mean there was no market the entire scene was organized around artists it was a small world you kind of knew everybody or you knew half of everybody there were a few galleries that dealt with emerging artists but there were probably as many coop galleries in Soho which was then the center of the art scene in New York the the the organization of the art world at that point with the New York art world was around alternative spaces which were created by artists as an alternative because there were no venues open to them since there was no market for emerging art and because there was a lot of very cheap real estate and artists like Richard Serra began working on an architectural scale because Elana hice before she created ps1 had access to massive storefronts for practically no money because they were vacant so there was the this interweaving of the artists and the supporters for what they did and those supporters were those few people who created alternative spaces and critics or more commonly theoretical critics the art market that existed was for pop art to a much lesser extent for minimalism there was one gallery in a most prominent way dealing with emerging artists that was Paula Cooper there was I mean it's interesting to hear so much of what was spoken of in the morning yesterday because there were no price lists because there was no I'm buying art so it's it these really were like open venues for looking at and experiencing art my guess is that they were rarely asked for prices the market started to evolve in the late 1970s there was a collector named Holly Solomon who was a collector of pop art she was let's call her a second string collector meaning Leo would not sell her the great Joneses and Lichtenstein's but she got the landscapes of Lichtenstein instead of the comic-book ones which in the end all of them were great and valuable but as she and there were three collectors of pop art by the way there were the skulls let me knock that claiming I'll just try to rap run through some decades but isn't to get us where we are no it was small I could actually back up and just point out one fact which is there's an essay or a book that Susie gavlak wrote in the 1970s and in it she said in the 1950s there were fewer than 50 so-called modern artists living in New York City by that I think what she meant was avant-garde or in those days abstract when I entered and it was still a little world there wasn't a block in below 14th Street that had fewer than 50 artists and in many cases there there were 50 buildings per block that had that that were filled with artists and so with with the baby boomer generation as as it was identified yesterday art became a pursuit every University had an art department you could become an artist there wasn't a market for it but there was a world I wouldn't necessarily that fully supported it but that embellished it or that that supported it emotionally if not financially Holly in the early sick it sorry the late 60s early 70s decided that her annual budget which was $50,000 and at that time I think that was probably a fairly significant sense was better spent she had noticed that artists were going outside of the gallery system outside of studios and the institutions into the landscape and they were forming their own spaces the artist who led her thinking the most was Gordon matta-clark who had created 112 Greene Street which was one of the leading alternative spaces at the time so she decided to take her $50,000 budget and instead of buying art she would create an art space and she felt that was a more effective and appropriate way to be utilizing an art budget which was courageous and actually right on target and at some point that alternative space turned into a commercial gallery and that was the beginning of this art market there were very very few people collecting it the art that she showed range from Gordon matta-clark and Mary Heilmann and Laurie Anderson to the artists of what became known as P and D pattern and decoration and that was the radical emerging movement radical in a kind of retro way in that it was a return to painting and to painting as a kind of decorative form okay so you have got Holly here who's through her own moxie convincing a couple of outline people that they should buy art and buy from her and then in Europe you had basically two figures Bruno Bischoff Berger and Thomas Amon one a veteran in the field and one a rather new person in the field both Swiss both functioning in Switzerland who and then there were some others there were few other dealers who were waiting for a new Jennifer the next generation of Warhol's to emerge most of the art in the 70s was anti-materialistic it was ephemeral much much of it was ephemeral in nature probably the greatest influence on art then and continuing through to today but not still recognized fully was feminism which turned its back on I'm the system of objects as we knew it and so these guys were waiting for that to happen so you had a primary market focused gallery in New York you had a secondary market focused group of or small number of dealers in Europe waiting to buy things in order to sit on them in order to raise the prices and then to accelerate a market Holly wasn't comfortable with that every artist who emerged wanted to show with Holly because I mean Paula had 12 artists it was a very specific stable of artists Holly was much more diverse and multi-generational and and she wasn't really playing ball with this notion of an accelerating market along comes Mary Boone who had been the secretary at by Kurt which was probably to the early 70s what Paula was to the later seventies and she started her own gallery originally the artist she represented were the artists from biker that the big galleries didn't pick up so by Kurt included artists like Chuck Close and Brice Marden and and the it's interesting because some of these post minimalists are now having a renewal of interest yes and so we're seeing these names but names like paul mogensen and Allen who glow no one heard of for 40 years and it wasn't interesting work at the time or it wasn't viewed as all that interesting Along Came Julian Schnabel who tried to get Halle to show his work because she was the gallery she was not interested he went instead to Mary and then after a year he said your gallery is really boring and if you've got to get rid of all these artists and I'll connect you with interesting artists and there and something was born simultaneously you had a lean whiner who was the director of art of space which at the time was the the most prescient informed alternative space where the pictures exhibition was mounted who in a very traumatic controversy left her position in the nonprofit world joining up with Janelle raring who was working for Leo Castelli and they formed a gallery and then at the same time there was this woman named Nina knows a who was married to John Weber John Weber was the gallery that represented the minimalists so he showed Bob Ryman sala whit anon anon and Annina was as much a scholar as anything but she was a good crafty dealer I would say that most of the artists who were quote discovered in the late 70s early 80s were discovered by a Nina first she was really good at identifying really interesting artists she was really bad at maintaining relationships with them and so you had the birth circa 1980 or exactly a 1980 of of a new market now with that new market emerged a new generation of collectors there emerged a new generation of collectors because there were things to collect so even though artists of the pictures generation were coming also from a kind of somewhat I wouldn't say anti market position but they were not making things that look like what the what an art market would value I mean sherry making photographs of photographs for example or David's Ali making very crude drawings on canvas initially nonetheless they were working in object form and I remember years later doing an interview with John Baldessari and he said they were all his students and he said to my generation the highest value as an artist would be to be on the cover of Artforum magazine and he said to this generation their highest goal was to have a sold-out show so he could see the shift when they were in college before there was a market to support them just by what they were making I think all of them were informed by the skull sale which made a huge impact in 1973 and and then in the early I mean the United States it's kind of amazing to think now because it's well to me it's not a lot of time I guess to a lot of people here it is a lot of time that's passed but in the early nineteen should say up to the early 1980s in the United States the view was that all great contemporary art was art made in the United States this is the story that was told to us by MoMA which was which created the Canon of Modern Art and and we didn't know what was going on in Europe there was spurn a West Water Fisher gallery showing Richter but they were maybe two shows and nobody noticed it and nobody bought anything maybe acknowledged it's the moment that that we've been expecting for the last 30 years and it's finally come to come this way but then in 1981 and 82 there were some exhibitions that made us very aware of truly compelling artists in Europe and and so then you had this crossover all of a sudden there was a world of objects being made by really interesting artists and so a generation emerged what tended to happen is that new collectors collected contemporary art and they would collect the the art of the generation of artists that emerged at the time that they began collecting and then as the next generation of artists emerge they would continue to collect the new a few of them would start to look backwards in time like at a certain point a New York collector would wake up and realize that a Jeff Koons cost more than a Richard Serra and so they would sort of go back maybe 10 years but they wouldn't go back really far and so from the 70s through the 80s the the market was I should say the value system wasn't was in the 70s defined by critics in the 80s it was defined by dealers it was always focused on the new the value was always placed in the new the the mark in the international market was mostly in the United States in Italy they could sell a young Italian artist if they showed in New York just like in the 60s Americans would collect pop art once it was bought in Europe so there was always this this kind of self-loathing going on amongst collecting communities and and then a market exploded in prices start to rise and in the early 1980s an auction house auction houses had the policy of not selling a work of art that was less than ten years of age that changed maybe around 80 to 83 when a julian schnabel painting play painting at the time they were retailing I believe for $15,000 there were more people who wanted than they could get them one showed up at auction sold for around $85,000 and therein began a secondary market for Contemporary Art a lot of people were the collectors were professionals old moneyed no it was they were new bunny newly rich not filthy rich so sort of followed that the boom and the finance exactly industry so in the early 80s you had artists who were coming from an intellectual base who as the market grew created work that was bigger Brasher bolder and by the end of the 80s so I would say that the value throughout the 20th century was placed on the work of young artists and most artists made their greatest works early in their careers by the end of the 80s you had an entire generation of young artists who were dying of AIDS and that that virility of youth was destroyed and and so you had a dramatic shift take place first in the content of art so a big bold painting by Julian Schnabel or Anselm Kiefer who were leading the market in the early 80s was looking very self-indulgent by the late 80s and at which time the more imperfect handmade intimate psychological objects of an artist like Bob Gober or Charlie ray or Felix gonzalez-torres felt more relevant to what was going on and again it was the same collectors that came along by the late 80s as the market for contemporary art began to really accelerate and by that I mean the secondary market in the secondary market for and things didn't go to auction unless there was a bigger market to support them than the primary market so that market but by 1987 there was a crash in the stock market and that was I think the first time that the art market became aware that as so the art market was kind of rising at a very steady but substantial rise and when the stock market crashed the art market didn't follow suit it did the opposite and it shot up at a much higher trajectory and I think it's because people with money who were no longer comfortable putting in the stock market but who realized that they were doing a lot better with the art which they weren't buying primarily for investment purposes but with an i with an expectation that if they were smart about it and by the way the way people collected was if 50 new artists emerged in a year that seemed interesting they would buy 50 works and three would study then that would support all of that capital going into it so you found a lot more speculation going on at the end of the 80s by seasoned collectors who saw new people entering the market because they were learning that art was rising in value which then ultimately led to a crash in the art market so anytime there's excessive speculation in the art market it will end in a crash and whenever things get tough in the art world or the art market or in the larger world there there tends to be a shift in taste from in times of bounty from very expressionistic where very Popish work art that is easier to absorb not to say that it's necessarily superficial yeah but nonetheless easier to to connect to and then art that's tougher to read that's more resilient that's more content driven and psychological tends to [Music] what attracts the interests of the market curators and so on and so I've seen this kind of cycle happen again and again and again by the 90s you had a new generation of artists emerging who were suspicious of the art market and so in the work you would see values that that ran counter to the art of the 80s so a tip of a prototypical artist for that would be somebody like Lou toyman's who made work which at the time was small in scale I would say more than small modest of uncertain imagery yes residing somewhere between representation and abstraction with a palette that was subtle yeah and and just represented a very different kind of sensibility and then of course a market grew for that by the 2000s the market became global you had buyers from all parts of the world especially from several areas of new wealth collecting art there's been another marked art market crash in there or mini crash and the people who emerged after the crash to collect are tended to be much richer than their predecessors and so there was more money that could go in which resulted I think in a higher degree of connoisseurship and selectivity and what you found was that people would pay a lot more money for a great work by a desired artist then then look for a value yeah of a more medium level work by that artist and so you saw a kind of shift it was no longer named it was the work of art that sell itself and the shift there was a shift from artists collecting the work of artists to collecting artworks and so new collectors rather than starting with the new generation or always starting with the new January of artists would be collecting the work of mature artists and maybe artists who weren't alive as well as younger artists and so that created yet a totally different market and that's the market that we find ourselves in now having accelerated in price and demand at a much at an unprecedented extent and I would say that as the amount of money and the number of people looking to collect art especially quote master works by most validated artists at the top level increases the the number of artists that are interested in pursuing doesn't increase the supply of of available works decreases and so you see this huge spikes that we see in pricing over the last number of years which are really principally a function of supply and demand and how does that what is the logical conclusion of that for the galleries that are serving well it's just you know a few a few artists and no one is interests as interested in taking a punt on a younger artist of their own generation I think in the last few years and it really is just like the last three years there's been a dramatic shift in the market that where a substantial number or percentage of I'm gonna differ from what Kenny said yes the way I see it a core of the primary market is highly threatened and likely to collapse or need to change substantially how it functions in order to survive as the markets gotten as there's more money coming in and more people seeking to buy art they're spending less time investing in that in in the actual search so there are more and more collectors who are just buying at auction or maybe auction and Larry Gagosian and not going to galleries and developing relationships there we're waiting until an artist gets to a certain level at auction where it's been validated initially I think that came out of a belief not particularly well rooted in reality that something at auction was a real market yes because you could see other people bidding as we know the market can get manipulated at all different levels and through all different parties and so that anyway that's that's it it does seem on the face of it more transparent because there are numbers and people are correctable and and what's happened most recently I find is that as the market has become I should say as the auction market has become very indexable and as we see certain artists not perform well at auction but who have very healthy primary markets some of them who have very healthy primary markets but that's only known to the small a more limited group of people who buy in the primary market if they don't perform well at auction then there's a general perception that there's no value in the world and so in the last three years there's been least in New York a shocking drop in the amount of transacting taking place in what used to be a very healthy and broad primary market supported by healthy primary market galleries for decades and and you see galleries that used to have let's say 70% of their artists sell on a regular basis now maybe it's 30% I'm making up the numbers but my numbers aren't really very far off there are yes there are a number of galleries in this in the primary market at a certain kind of mature tier like three or three that can you refer to yesterday that that are getting by in a very healthy way there are several that are growing in a very healthy way but the vast majority are very highly challenged and amongst them galleries that were able to sustain themselves and the artists they support to a very healthy degree and as a result I mean most galleries you know go back to Leo Castelli Leo focused on two artists they were John's and Lichtenstein and every other artist in that gallery would complain that Leo never sold anything of theirs there's the view now that like almost everyone who showed there was a brilliant genius artist that was heavily collected and they were collected but not in the same way similarly most primary market galleries are supported by one or two artists maybe three if the if a primary market gallery is being challenged by its ability to support a market that isn't being regularly sustained at auction through publishable numbers then the likelihood that a a larger better capitalized gallery can come along and attract that artist is greatly increased as we've seen and you lose the the if you lose the to that that's fatal to most primary market galleries with primary market gallerists a very resistant to publishing their own sales and would it help if they could validate I think publishing is just one step I think validating prices I should say validating the ongoing health of a market case report isn't one of the problems that prices are so high they're quite difficult to validate well you yeah it depends on the dealer and it depends on the artist I mean there are moments where there's a lot of money in the market where where dealers break from the patterns of the past so it used to be every year every exhibition a primary market gallery would raise prices ten fifteen percent even when the secondary market was increasing fivefold they'd still go up pretty conservatively there'd be a huge gap between primary market pricing and secondary market which meant that galleries became far more controlling over how they place the work so that they could they would decrease the possibility of work entering into the open market yes and but they didn't raise primary market prices to to come anywhere near secondary market prices that changed you know ten or fifteen years ago and as primary market pricing came closer to secondary market pricing for many artists a creative vulnerabilities because there are certain price points that up until that point most collectors say why not and once it goes above a certain number it's like well I've got choice yes but you're not giving me choice so and so that can create for destabilize markets except for artists who are incredibly consistent of which there are very few and most of artists who are very very consistent I should say most great artists are it takes a lot of risk to make continual greatness and and and sometime oftentimes when an artist can be very consistent can also be kind of relatively flat as a kind of long term engagement at least that's that that's my observation and so now what you have is more money more people in a market right now seeking the work of fewer artists a bunch smaller supply and therefore you see prices doubling tripling quintuplet and more which says as much about the value or the lack of value of the dollar as it does about the value of the art and about the excessive wealth of those people buying at those levels and so while you have a very strong market for very top blue-chip things you also have a threat of that market atrophying because there's not enough of a supply coming in to keep the market active then you have sir galleries functioning very well in the primary market but very much controlling what trade goes on there I would say that three of the strongest most vital galleries most powerful galleries functioning in the primary market are operated by owners aged from 80 to 90 something and you know likelihood will not be in business at least in the way that we know them in five to eight years you have two galleries mega galleries or just larger galleries that are one what that is being moved on to the second generation pace which may be able to sustain itself into a second generation but not not with the same degree of vitality in the artists that it represents you have to go gene who has a succession plan which I think stands a better chance of surviving then than most galleries because it's always been a sort of business they've made no bones about that they represent artists but they don't function like a primary market exactly it is it is a gallery it's a secondary market gallery focused on trade the shift in the contemporary art market from primary to secondary was created by Larry Gagosian and it happened in the 80s and it happened because artists didn't trust Larry I mean he had a bad record of payments and so artists wouldn't be represented by him so the primary market was closed to him so he had to go to the secondary market it was like and he made me think it was heat well he did it well it is he really did single-handedly create that market I mean he woke up one day and and saw you can buy a de Kooning woman painting for more money than but not dramatically more money than let's say a new Jones so and also there were three people collecting art who could pay ten times that amount and he focused on those three people it was just a totally different psychology entering into it sorry I interrupted your brilliant run down the galleries over there at but but and and I suppose the question is can these you know we've got used to the big galleries getting bigger and bigger and bigger are they gonna just keep is this is this gonna keep happening this kind of widening gap between the the best or the biggest I should say well I've to me the the the most grim part of the contemporary art market is that until not that long ago as a generation of a new generation of artists would emerge a dealer would emerge who represented those artists and as those artists matured and their markets rose so grew the capacity of the dealer to raise the prices to sell at higher levels to to more mature collectors and everyone kind of rose up starting in the late 80s as Leo was aging there began a practice of poaching artists which never would have rarely took place prior to that by the late eighties the the market and the notion of representing artists became a kind of open field and and after of recent generations we've seen two galleries have the capacity to continue to rise and grow and meet the needs of a collector above a certain price level and we have not seen in in in generations younger than that dealers come along who either have the skill and relationships or the appetite to to continue to rise in the market sometimes it's purely a matter of but-but-but-but there there I mean the biggest challenge to the market now is is that you simply don't have a lot of options there were a number of SEC primary market galleries functioning at a fairly high level who who were quote in a race they'd used the term but it's an easy way to say it ten years ago to be viable to rise up and become a more significant gallery and and most let's say three or four that had that capacity simply didn't fulfill it and so there's even that much more challenge on primary markets what I find interesting right now at this moment is that there we do see an emergence of a lot of artists and a lot of different types of artists who are interesting who have are represented by a new generation of dealers who are much more light in the spirit of let's say a Gavin Brown when he opened meaning much more an artist spirit than a mercantile spirit and so much going back to nineteen seventies yes that's when you were talking about it it's made me think of this seems to be what everyone was craving but we'll see if that can sustain itself but but I I mean I've seen a lot of work by young artists that today is priced at a third or an eighth of what the equivalent emerging artist would have been ten years ago and so it's there's there's a getting back to basics here that I think is coming from new dealers emerging who for whom the trade and the growth I mean they want they're responsible to their artists but they're not looking to become make memories at least at this stage of their activity they're much more creative environments they are much more resourceful and able to function in multiple ways and representing a very wide range of artists that we're who seemed to be poised to benefit from not getting too much attention too fast and is that and when you say that they can function in multiple ways are you talking about as you know they are part dealer part advisor but or do you mean they're using technology in different ways of the above all the above they're also creating slightly different models you know they're not moving with the neighborhood where the we're the core of the traders yep they become creative environments unto themselves they have different value systems and different people who they would consider a significant collector to be buying their work so it's I think they're really starting from the ground up which which is healthy and are you seeing and your when you advise collectors are you seeing their mindset changing as well I mean is there is there a move away from the sort of objects people have been buying for 40 years well interestingly something the collectors who started off collecting the new and continued to collect each new generation they're now in their 60s and 70s the ones who have been Mauritius they owned 7,000 objects and they're saying I just can't keep doing this yeah it's like what am I gonna do with all of this plus the price of entry except for very very very young artists just most recently was much higher than than their predecessors and so there has been a shift in general or had been a shift in general from let's say taking a budget and buying 50 works spread across a wide range of the market to buying four works and buying much more blue chip for example so so I think the the actual style and spirit of collecting has changed quite a bit amongst emerging collectors and I think just now I'm beginning to see signs as you mentioned is kind of something of a return yes to the the optionality of the late seventies early eighties and the reality seems to be the market I mean I wouldn't you look at the Clare McAndrew figures of the size of the market it isn't really getting bigger that it is limited in size isn't it there's only so much the market well there are many markets but the market that at least gets measured and published is a lot smaller than people yes it it really does just take two people to make a record price high price and and sometimes we see like five people bidding and that that was unprecedented and that's when you can see some mega prices but but the market is is rather small and select and if you look at the auction market the way guarantees have functioned and if you'd like I'll address that for Gary always having to talk about gate although we have we are we are running out of time okay maybe then you can ask this I can ask that question anybody I mean you've talked about how how the market if you like I'm gonna use the word manipulated you didn't say that but you have talked about how the market can be managed and guarantees seem to be one way of keeping that this limited number I mean how many how many buyers are there at that the guaranteed end of my view of guarantees at this point and let me say that being in an auction house which for people who know me is the last place they would have seen me in the last place I would have seen myself but but circumstance put me and I found it really interesting we don't have done the same and and I found my way with it you did which is sort of like focusing on the part that's not option or the part that didn't exist before it is today I mean that the assumption is that a guarantee is a ism is a root of manipulation the way I see it today more often than not is that the demand for top lots is so great that what happens you basically have a private auction taking place to get to the high guarantee so let's say you have Sotheby's and Christie's competing with one another for the same piece of property they keep bidding each other up based upon what they believe their market can sustain in some instances the door is open for them to actually speak to potential buyers in advance to suss out what they're willing to pay for something in some cases it's not open but maybe those conversations take place I would imagine this come not in any specific way but could happen so when you get to a very high low price level or estimate and something sells on one bid and it seems manipulated because something's been pre-sold to that one person more often than not to my experience having seen it from inside that there's actually been the auctions already taking place it's already gotten to that maximal amount that thing that started at twenty to thirty million and then got to a guarantee of 60 million wasn't a wasn't a gamble it wasn't like somebody in most instances I should say it wasn't that somebody got stitched up to pay that price but it was understood that there it was somebody looking for that kind of work who would be prepared to spend up to a certain amount and so then why have the auction well thank you public I mean I'm in gold in favor of public pricing option is opera without that event you wouldn't have an art market at the prices that we have long before there was a focus on guarantees they were probably fewer than 30 bidders in in a room of 800 people today there are probably fewer bidders than that saying maybe twenty of them have done that bidding yeah and so this is these are public events it's a contemplation of art is a solitary activity decision-making in the past about buying art has been principally something that happens behind closed doors it's a world that more and more craves public moments and I think the auction I mean it was a wholesale business until until the contemporary art market entered into the auction world and then it became a retail business yeah Alan I have a whole page of questions I haven't asked you and I reckon but thank you se7 it just wanted to open it up in case I can ask him one one okay I can get onto my page of questions excellent thank you very much well I wanted to I just I knew we have it we have a chat later on about them and about the environment and the environmental issues and I'm hearing a lot of people saying to me oh collectors are a lot more conscious and we've had some survey done that shows like I'm really thinking about sustainability are you hearing that from your clients perfect see that was a quick question but I think you do have perhaps there there's some very significant new money amongst very young people who perhaps have more concern about not just the environment but that's social issues and education and and probably some of whom are not even collecting art and putting more money into philanthropy so I think there there is amongst some wealthy more consciousness about a hope for a future yes but well yeah a little bit but not really yeah 20 years down the line and then and I suppose the before I open up then that you're I mean you've talked about there being a crisis in the primary market and you've mentioned some of the the innovative ways that could I mean if those that were the green shoots for you ah essentially that galleries just have to find another way of doing the same does not try model the models have to be rethought greatly he and I think most galleries are not oriented that way yes I mean a gallery really is about the person who owns it who has a vision and the passion and a commitment and if the gallery sustains itself over time they do a very good job of of working with artists which is a very complex relationship oftentimes parental almost always deeply psychological and and and so it's it's a population at least other than let's say very new dealers who may open may enter with a very different way of looking at the market that that that's not used to I don't think is that well equipped to rethink what it is having said that you know you see little things which really isn't a rethinking but a reshuffling where in New York there are galleries that have been forced out of Chelsea because of prices that have moved to Tribeca when there were two galleries on Walker Street it was dead and now that there's like six there it's a little bit and that be and and these galleries are often working in tandem with one another so that's created a kind of microclimate that I think has a better chance of sustaining itself because it will actually draw traffic to but you know we had the East Village in the 80s which was hugely successful for two years focused on micro galleries and and then when five of those artists rose up into the more mature gallery system that scene died and Lower East Side has been highly challenged many galleries there have fallen and I think that that sadly if unless the style of collecting or the economics of it or the nature the practice changes substantially that in the next not so many years we inevitably will see many many galleries challenged by that as it when you say the nature of collecting you mean just continuing this trajectory of let's say if there's a big bag if there are more collectors emerging who are creating who have a renewed faith in in art that has not been validated by published numbers but because they believe in it yeah or they believe in the longevity and how things change over time but right now I don't see that happening I see I see the opposite happening and people getting far more conservative and then occasionally you'll see in an evening sale an artist introduced for whom [Music] there's a knowledge that there's great demand that didn't exist six months ago and then you'll see crazy price and up until a few years ago I mean that used to be the place where an artist who is ready to get yeah who was ready to truly be sustained he'd be introduced then maybe 15 years ago any artist you saw who went from fifty thousand dollars to eight hundred thousand dollars in an evening sale was destined to die within five years or market that is and more recently I think we are seeing at least to a meaningful extent some artists introduced to evening auctions who are just at the beginning otherwise in their markets that that's a bit of a shift yes but do you think that's more sustainable I think that space no case I think that's mostly rooted in in a sharp increase in the interest in and the collecting of the work of african-american art yes and that's and so I mean that's the hardest part of the contemporary market right now to gain access and because everyone wants everyone wants but it's also that there are so many institutions that have a mandate to collect that work and and and names we're not driving that part of the art market for a long time so it's you've got a much broader a deeper market interested in that work and so to the extent that those are artists who continue to make work that remains interesting to a marketplace I think you'll see a longer life more sustained to those markets definitely I really am going to let you ask questions now are there are there any questions for Alan who has said that she he said he will answer anything so everything you wanted to know about I did I'm afraid to ask which is that and I spoke about it a bit now but what I realized yesterday is that it that a lot of people don't know what goes on in the primary market because it's not published and it's not public and I'm happy to talk about anything so if you have questions mysteries about the art market you want answered if I can't answer them I will thank you very much you've focus for variable reasons on the American art world in the American market is the driver in the generator and it's gonna stay that way for a long time I just wonder if you can maybe speculate or look 10 years 20 years ahead and see how the global market might grow how that you know that real dependence on America might shift more broadly well it depends on what part of the market you're talking about when I talk about the American market from a dealer perspective or a trade perspective it's an international market the same people are buying in London as they're buying in Los Angeles as are buying in Hong Kong so to a large extent this is an international market a truly international market the the market is still driven by American dollars if and there are real challenges now to getting money out of China but if for example collecting were to increase and become multi-generational and deeply sustained in China that could change the art market completely it could change what's valued completely because you've the wealth they're completely Dwarfs the wealth and most of the rest of the world combined so a lot depends upon where the buyers come from Thanks yes over here good morning thank you I like for this brief history of American art market I would like to ask how do you think the art market is gonna be shaped by cryptocurrencies you have thought about this I'm too old to have anything I apologize but I don't have a viewpoint I will say the legality of money is he's being watched more and more closely whether these are trades at auction or through private galleries and certainly in the United States the Attorney General and certain politicians are always eager to to find problems with money and art so to whatever I think they'll always be a need to to validate where the original source of the money is so if that becomes obscured through crypto currencies and that could be challenging Thanks hello thank you for this very nice summary of it I am I used to work for Provost of America and I got to hear a lot about it and it was always very fascinating and now we're here in a totally different moment I think but I was wondering so if you look at the current financial markets what's your reflections on the art market I mean we had a crash and then people bought a lot of art what do you think is happening now specifically with money in relation to the art market yeah or if people are gonna buy into art more because they want the security of having an artwork instead of a stock or you know like kind of what happened before I think any time that a significant amount of money goes into art as investment its dangerous for the art market there's a lot of wealth out there that believes in our and and that's not going away what what it what it believes in and where it sees sustained value may change the extent to which that's meaningful to major purchasers can shift the the at times when the markets been challenged the money that's come into the market or I should say that the the collectors that have come in have been much much wealthier than their predecessors and so people who were really rich are become increasingly even that much richer and so that there's a lot of excess money when you see a Picasso sculpture go from forty million dollars in value to 140 million dollars in value or there abouts maybe was 39 to 140 and and those numbers are openly published and there's still somebody to spend that extra hundred million dollars that that talks more about desire than quote value that's that that's more like because someone can pay it I had a really interesting experience years ago which is that sigh Newhouse who was the owner of Conde Nast and for a very long time was the most significant buyer in the art market Larry Gagosian secondary market business was built on sigh as a major client he he entered into conversations with me to possibly advise him on collecting the work of younger artists and so I went to his apartment and he had this fantastic Rauschenberg which we were talking about and he mentioned you know rebus has come back up for sale which is a painting I believe Bruno had bought back then for 40 odd million dollars and I mean it was the highest price paid for a Rauschenberg it's certainly a rosetta stone for Rauschenberg and then as the value for art went down at a certain point the painting came back on the market it was widely known within the trade that the asking price was around 24 25 million dollars but you could probably buy it for 23 so as we were talking about size Rauschenberg he said oh you know rebus is back on the market I said I know he said it's 30 to 2 million dollars was a 33 that he said I said well maybe that's a price that you've been quoted but my understanding is that it could be bought for around twenty two and a half twenty-three and he said no it's thirty three million dollars and then I repeated what I knew and then I realized the third time I did it that he needed to believe that it was thirty three and it would have been less interesting to him if it was twenty three so money and value and art can be relative as as the quantification of desire can be relative high so my question is how can you take small regional markets like Middle Eastern contemporary or African contemporary or let's say Latin American contemporary to graduate beyond being seen as like niche markets or do they are if they're only operating in their own environment will they never graduate do they have to go to America so they can well I would say two things number one I think at this moment that the contemporary art market in general is challenged I think it leaves a lot more space for niche galleries in each markets so I don't think that's necessarily a bad term in the in the way that it might have been in the past certainly I mean a lot of my work as an advisor has been focused on looking at undervalued markets twenty years ago we were collecting post-war Italian art when Americans were not looking at that material so my I Fontana is as important to post-war art as Jackson Pollock but a most valued fini idea which would be the most valuable body of work by Fontana was under a million when the equivalent Pollock would have been maybe 60 80 million dollars we were looking in well I mean I created a museum in Brazil so it kind of brought me to look at art and Latin America where I wouldn't otherwise have seen it and to fall in love with a lot of it and so we were collecting that for collectors and we see a lot more mainstreaming of it Tania Barisan is in the room who generated I think one of the greatest retrospectives I've ever seen and this was for Mira Schendel and and it got a huge amount of attention because it was curated so well one could see the brilliance of it I I'll I'll just share what you shared with me yesterday which is that the and so there's been a huge interest in the market for the work of african-american artists there has been a slower but quite recently rapidly ascending interest in the work of contemporary African artists from Africa and and there should and will inevitably be an increased interest I already see signs of it the work of Middle Eastern artists and perhaps linking as you're seeking to do contemporary African with contemporary Middle Eastern being that you actually do have some imprecise borders between those cultures I think is one natural route but I've seen it I mean I see collectors in New York who who didn't know the name of a an artist from Iran or Lebanon or Iraq five years ago collecting work from those countries so I see that inevitably happening I think as the the new models for institutions are being developed outside of the United States and Western Europe and we will inevitably see a lot more or should be seeing intermixing of contemporary art from cultures that we might not have been as familiar with so I think it's I think that's the future part of the future yes one here and then with you and then we should probably finish yes hi I'm I was wondering I was curious to hear both of your thoughts actually on how the influences of the well have been shaping the art world in the market so I'm thinking you know curators critics museum people and how that's changed to collectors being more influential and what how that's shaping the art market now and the art world at large and sort of where you see that going and that might look in the future two minutes down sir it's a very good question thank you but yes what what who's shaping I mean I think Kenny mentioned yesterday that at the moment collectors seem to be calling the shots I know you have quite strong opinions on critics and journalists yeah I mean I was a writer for 10 years critics don't usually have much impact on the art market when I started off the chief critic of the New York Times was Hilton Cramer who hated most contemporary arts and if he wrote a pot he wrote a positive review of the first exhibition of Susan Rothenberg in 1976 or seven when she showed her horse paintings which at the time we're the most desired works of contemporary art prior to his review came out I think the the Friday before the show closed I think one painting was sold prior to that and then the show sold out after that I think Roberta Smith sometimes can sell a show and I don't think most critics have an impact on what collectors think I think that there is more journalism that is opinion driven and provides inside [Music] information delivered in very entertaining ways and that's interesting to collectors but I don't think it influences them I think curators for the most part or more often than not are put in the uncomfortable position of having to raise funds for their own shows in ways that was not how it worked in the past and more and more institutions are focusing their program on shows that can be funded that tend to that tends to mean artists that are collected by their patrons I fit the space for curators to actually have both physical space and the curatorial time to really play and to lead the way is greatly reduced from what it had been there were many more project spaces in many museums in the past there are a few museums that have always had as their mandate to be ahead of the curve and they and there still are museums that way but but I think sadly that the market is the greatest influencer on the market and the people who hold power in the market then that then the professions that surround it I mean once once there were schools of curatorial studies that came into creation that also then created a parallel world of curators who existed more in a theoretical realm than a practical realm there's a surprisingly small percentage of people who came out of those programs who have become curators and mainstream museums many of them exist in a world that's kind of related or parallel to the academic world and I've I mean when I was a writer I I had to support myself from my work and so that dictated to a large extent where I wrote for how much I wrote and and I woke up one day and realized that the system a friend of mine had said that when he started writing journalism in the 50s Esquire magazine paid $1 a word to a journalist and then when I was writing in the 80s and 90s Esquire was still paying on average $2 a word the cost of living went up I couldn't even begin to guess how much from the 50s to the 90s and and the wage scale did not really change for the art writer and as we know most journalistic vehicles are deeply threatened and so that the opportunities become even narrower or the the craftiness required to sustain oneself is even greater and so I came to a conclusion which is a a which can be an overgeneralization but I came to think that the world didn't value as much what it didn't pay for and and that you have to if you're practicing in those areas you have to be deeply profoundly committed to it and and get your satisfaction from your work if I can just take 60 seconds to tell a story seconds there's a cut off this poor person's question okay I apologize 60 seconds okay so when I started writing full-time I was writing more for general publications and art publications because in our publication paid $600 a word for three thousand word piece and that was never gonna make it and plus I became interested in how the market impacted how we perceived art and at that time the market wasn't really written about except by financial journalists not by art writers and so I had written a piece for I can't remember what publication at the time I mean I've been writing for several years but then I wrote a piece that was critical of an exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum the Guggenheim used to have a young artist show every other year that was funded by Exxon corporation and then in the tenth year they had it used to be called the theodore on I won't go into that and in the tenth year rather than have a new show of of emerging artists they had a kind of review of the ten years of the previous shows and what they didn't say was that this was the last year that ex someone was going to fund them they gave them funding for ten years and so it was an exhibition masquerading as something that it wasn't and I referred to it as the first retrospective of corporate funding and Roberta Smith when she reviewed the show quoted that line in her review and the next opening that I went to I had fifty people come running up to me to congratulate me on being in Roberta's column and none of these people had ever acknowledged anything I'd written before that and so I think that speaks a little bit of the the power of the press at least within the value system of the art world itself thanks very much you made me feel a bit better than when you said we were in crisis but but thank you all for your brilliant questions and thank you very much energy for talking about the crisis but also offering some some real screen shoots for everyone's future I'm sorry to run a bit late but it was definitely worth it from my point of view thank you so much [Applause]

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Id: 7CJEt3ZeWSI

Length: 70min 52sec (4252 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 18 2020