Richard Serra, “Throwing Lead at Leo Castelli’s Warehouse” (1968). Image credit: C4 Gallery.

Yesterday, Charlotte Burns of The Art Newspaper reported that Richard Serra, the contemporary alchemist who has spent much of his career transforming lead and weathered steel into towering stacks of US dollars, has agreed to create a new large-scale sculpture for David Zwirner’s West 20th St space. It will be the renowned artist’s third solo project with the gallery since last spring.

Why is this news? Because Serra has been repped by Gagosian, whom Josh Niland of artnet rightly identifies in his reporting of the story as “Zwirner’s chief competitor,” since 1991. During that stretch, Serra’s work has been included in 43 exhibitions organized under the Gagosian masthead: 17 group offerings and 26 solo affairs, with the two most recent one-man shows now running simultaneously in Larry’s Brittania Street and Davies Street locations overseas.

Technically speaking, Serra isn’t violating any contract terms by jumping in Zwirner’s convertible like this. Gallery representation, even at the blue chip level, is non-exclusive by default. The willingness to share talent is one of the main reasons that so many elite sellers can co-exist in the marketplace. 

Still, one of the pillars of the industry is the tacit understanding that artists and gallerists alike will divide territory along clear lines. Usually, those lines are drawn geographically. It’s common for a superstar artist to have a New York dealer, a Los Angeles dealer, a London dealer, a Berlin dealer, a Zurich dealer, etc.

The line of commerce doesn’t always proceed single file. Sometimes one gallery will be given multiple territories—say, New York and London together, or multiple metropolises in East Asia. But for the most part, the streams tend not to cross by design. James Turrell’s list of reps provides a great example of this delineation in action. 

Serra is mooning that convention. Though Gagosian maintains 14 permanent locations to Zwirner’s 3, the nodes of the Zwirner triangle land in two cities—New York and London—where Gagosian operates multiple spaces. That makes Serra’s dalliance with David an almost unmistakable “fuck you” to his primary dealer of the past 13 years. 

Still, it doesn’t necessarily mean the end of the relationship. Serra is too valuable a brand in his own right for Gagosian to just jettison from the roster—and both men know it. In that sense, the Zwirner projects look like the business equivalent of a married man conspicuously flirting with a dashing stranger just to remind his other half not to take him for granted.

Interestingly, Burns notes in her story that “it had been assumed that [Gagosian] was the only gallery with the space and structural capacity to show [Serra]’s large Minimalist sculptures, which can weigh hundreds of tons.” I may be squinting too hard between the lines, but that morsel certainly sounds like it could be the basis for Gagosian to have been leveraging a “Where else are you gonna go?” stance in response to some major behind-the-scenes ask on Serra’s part—to which Serra has now basically responded, “Zwirner. How you like them apples?”

Maybe the issue is some upcoming exhibition Serra wants to do at one of Gagosian’s spaces that will cost an even more exorbitant amount than usual. Maybe Serra has been pressing Gagosian to raise his prices, and Gagosian has resisted. Maybe this is all just payback on Serra’s part for something he disliked about the way his two current Gagosian shows came together.

The possibilities are as serpentine as Serra’s own Band. But having had plenty of firsthand experience with the in-house cold wars and mind games that can play out between blue chip sellers and artists, I wouldn’t be stymied if the Zwirner trifecta was all a tactic on Serra’s part to get Gagosian to cave or heel in some negotiation only they know about.

The key point is that, for Serra, there’s no downside to the strategy. Zwirner is now just as respected in the market as Gagosian, so even if this three-night stand does lead to the end of his longest-running gallery relationship, Serra can just throw a sarcastic peace sign behind him and vault overboard onto the deck of another equally well-appointed yacht—without leaving any money or prestige below deck. 

If Gagosian blinks first, though, then Serra manages to reset the power dynamic in their relationship—while at the same time getting another mega-rich gallerist to fund, publicize, and sell out a trio of shows Serra probably wanted to do anyway. Zwirner will have no hard feelings because he’ll get to pocket those juicy Richard Serra profits three times over. And everything else goes back to the way it was. Serra can’t lose. 

It’s rare for an artist to flex in public like this, partially because there are so few in the marketplace punching at Serra’s weight. But even that über-minority is normally content to stay in their respective corners when issues arise with their gallerists. I applaud Serra for not only recognizing his own power, but being willing to use it to his advantage in a harder-hitting way.

Too often in the industry, the gallerists and dealers run the show uncontested while the talent—their 50/50 partners—either pouts in private or shrugs their shoulders. It’s refreshing to see an artist who helped elevate his representation to the top of the field checkmate that representative at his own game. And it’s a strong, all-too-seldom-seen reminder that both an artist and the actual work he produces can still be integral to the art world order. 

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Abdulhalim Radwi, "Almadina Al Monawara" (1995). Image credit: Wall Street International.  

While I was cycling through Twitter Monday morning, I found my timeline being carpet bombed with moment by moment updates from Sotheby’s regarding results in their Doha Contemporary sale. I had zero qualms about the practice in general. After all, what else are a major house’s social media accounts for than to flog the monetary successes thundering off their auction block?

But one wrinkle to some of the tweets did catch my eye. That wrinkle was Sotheby’s touting certain sales results as blue chip artists’ “Middle East records,” i.e. the highest prices achieved by gavel for said artists during an auction physically held within the region. A couple examples: 

Now, I understand completely why Sotheby’s would publicize this idea. Fine art sales, as we know all too well, is an industry increasingly defined by superlatives: the highest prices, the top collectors, the most prestigious exhibitions, etc. Success is on some level a matter of optics. Go big or go extinct.

And this is particularly true in the auction sector—the only one in the market where explicitly broadcasting your sales figures is not only a virtue, but your core marketing tool for attracting future business. In that sense, Sotheby’s and its competitors have incentive to over-stuff their PR transmissions with as many new records as they possibly can, fat guy in a little coat style. 

But from an objective standpoint, the concept of a “Middle East record” strikes me as at least silly, if not outright misleading. So much of what’s furiously pushing the art market to its vertigo-inducing heights is globalization. I just wrote about one example of the changes triggered by that phenomenon last week, and the same upshot applies here as well: Because sales activity is no longer limited by geographical borders, internationally adored blue chip brands benefit, and lesser known local or regional ones suffer.

In short, the art world is flattening. And it’s flattening precisely because the top tier entities are crushing everyone below. 

That’s a wonderful development for a renowned auction house like Sotheby’s. Globalization means anyone, anywhere, with the resources to bid up their lots has multiple avenues to do so: via phone, via the house’s online BIDNow platform, via absentee bid form, via arranging for a proxy to physically represent her in the auction room itself. 

But this newfound commercial flexibility is precisely what makes the idea of a “Middle East record”—or a Chinese record, a North American record, or anything short of a world record—increasingly hollow. It’s technically true…but it’s also just as much an invention. Especially when it comes to branded blue chip artists like Hirst or Kapoor whose works have been desired, offered, and acquired worldwide for years.

Physical location is nearing irrelevance at the top of the market. The new owner of a Sotheby’s Contemporary auction lot is equally likely to be in a different time zone, a different country, a different continent from the auctioneer and the piece when hammer and rostrum collide. Hell, with an absentee bid or a physical proxy, the winning collector could be living out the rest of her life on a one-way mission to Mars. She could literally be dead. 

In a material sense then, the only party to whom a “Middle East record” matters is Sotheby’s. Their Doha office opened in 2008 but didn’t hold its first sale until 2009, meaning the house is still undoubtedly focused on legitimizing its presence in the region at this point in time. Building the narrative of “Middle East records” is an obvious way to help craft the perception of continued growth there. 

Still, from a higher altitude, I can’t help but compare the “Middle East record” to the increasingly ludicrous, increasingly qualified statistical milestones flooding your average major sports telecasts today—records like "most NBA free throw attempts by a player drafted from a Division II college" or ”longest homerun in an interleague MLB game by a switch hitter with a lifetime batting average under .250.”

Again, these are all facts if we strain hard enough. But do they matter? Or are we just filling space? 

It’s a question worth asking not only because of this one particular example, but because of the trend lines. While trying (and unfortunately, failing) to find the number of international bidders registered for Sotheby’s spring 2014 New York Contemporary sale, I found this press release summarizing the auction’s results. It includes such milestones as “record for a neon by the artist at auction,” “record for a photo installation by the artist at auction,” and “record for a work on paper by the artist at auction.” I have no doubt we’ll soon see even finer grained qualifications to manufacture even more personal bests.

In short, the record rampage is only just beginning to flood the art world’s airwaves. But while we may not be able to escape it, I’d advise everyone to stay vigilant about how much of the content is signal and how much is just noise. 

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Antoni Tàpies, “Les quatre croniques” (1990). Image credit: Lights Going On.

A couple of weeks ago, artnet ran a short piece about the proactive way in which a consortium of galleries in Spain’s artistic epicenters have been combating a severe cut in government funding. The article seems to have been triggered by the announcement of a 41% decline in the Spanish government’s 2014 funding commitment to the (yes, for-profit) gallery sector, dropping the total shell-out to a mere 101,000 EUR ($130,000) from 171,000 EUR ($220,000) in 2013—both of which look anemic in comparison to the 1.2M EUR ($1.5M) in total government assistance handed to the nation’s art sellers in a brown paper sack back in 2011. 

The galleries’ collective answer has been, if not exactly novel, definitely based on a solid model. That answer was to unite in order to create multiple citywide art fairs along the lines of Gallery Weekend Berlin, which has now been humming melodiously along for a decade.

The cause and effect here is that the evaporating handouts were specifically earmarked for the purposes of helping Spanish galleries promote themselves internationally, mostly through covering expenses for participation in pricey but high exposure art fairs like Art Basel, Frieze, and the Armory Show. Having very literally lost their tickets to those art world feeding frenzies abroad, the galleries responded by instead trying to create local events noteworthy enough to lure global buyers to them. 

Two of the resulting events—Apertura in Madrid and Art Nou/Primera Visió in Barcelona—just completed their third annual showings. Another, Abierto Valencia, just finished its second. And while artnet notes that we have no idea how many visitors actually contributed to the participating galleries’ bottom lines by acquiring work, the 2013 edition of Apertura allegedly drew 15,000 attendees—presumably, about 15,000 more than would otherwise have felt compelled to make the trip strictly for art that weekend.

There are two ways to read this story. The first is, save for the rightfully cautious conclusion about sales figures, the general thrust of the artnet piece: Here’s a group of small businesses showing some creativity and spunk to overcome adverse conditions imposed on them by austerity-minded bureaucrats. Take that perspective, and it’s a feel-good ode to “making it work” Tim Gunn-style despite the pols’ cinching the budget garter ever tighter to pull the country’s economy back into presentable shape.

But there’s a second, less rosy interpretation, too. And I think it’s much more indicative of the state of the art market—and the impending danger for not just these Spanish galleries, but a whole host of others operating at a less than blue chip level, both domestically and abroad.

The crux of the alternative reading is the globalization of the art market. Even 20 years ago, it meant something to be a locally or nationally respected Spanish art dealer. What it meant was that you could count on the business of wealthy Spanish collectors, and probably to a lesser extent, wealthy collectors in immediately neighboring countries.

Why? Because collectors bought what was available—and availability was still in large part determined by geography. 

That’s no longer the case today. Caked-up Spanish collectors not only want the same branded blue chip artists and burning young stars as wealthy collectors everywhere else in the world—they also have roughly the same access to them.

Whether through the major international art fairs that the Spanish budget hawks dive-bombed in to repel their gallerist countrymen from reaching so easily, or the rise of online and remote fine art sales (as I’ve been exploring at length in my Average Is Over series), or simply the incidental foreign gallery-hopping that comes packaged with vastly more frequent business trips abroad in our ever-flattening world economy, the local elites in any country have never been freer to acquire and indulge the same collecting tastes as their counterparts born within other borders. 

From an “efficient markets” standpoint, one could argue that this is all a positive. In theory, it means that regionalism is no longer skewing the profit potential for artists across the world map. Those whom art collectors judge to be the most desirable can become global superstars, while lesser lights who were sustaining careers only because they were the best available option in a geographically-restricted set of choices are much more likely to short out. Ask practically any economist at my alma mater, and they’ll tell you that’s a win for both collectors and the industry as a whole.

The problem, of course, is the infamous creative destruction involved in that process. What was once a locally renowned Spanish (or Russian, or Canadian, or whichever nationality) gallery suddenly becomes only a mid-tier gallery in the greater context of a worldwide market. And as I’ve written more than once, being a mid-tier gallery is an increasingly fingernail-gnawing long-term proposition given the industry’s trend lines. 

Please don’t misunderstand: I applaud the masterminds behind the Spanish fairs for wedging a crowbar into the world-economic trash compactor trying to reduce them to patty meat. But the pressures of globalization are only going to mount as time wears on, especially with e-commerce continuing to size up its market share.

Gallery Weekend Berlin might look like it suggests the crowbar could hold for the medium term, but with all due respect, Madrid, Barcelona, and Valencia are not Berlin—generally regarded as one of the world’s four most important art cities alongside New York, London, and Los Angeles. So if I were one of the sellers involved in Apertura, ArtNou/Primera Visió, or Abierto Valencia, I’d spend this stay of execution figuring out a more permanent solution—and fast. Because even if the light is leaking in for now, they’re still down in the dumps waiting to be crushed.

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Anish Kapoor, “Sky Mirror, Red” (2007). Image credit: Lisson Gallery.

Previously: Parts I | II | III | IV | V | VI | VII | VIII | IX

Having used Parts VIII and IX of this series to trace the gallery system’s life lines to a future of vertically integrated e-commerce and blockbuster-dependent programming, I want to continue the palm reading session by turning to the role of the emerging artist in this new structure. Because my prior two premonitions lead to a third that heavily impacts art makers’ career arcs at the industry’s upper echelons.

As explained over the course of the past several chapters, much of the consolidation I foresee in the art market owes to buyers’ responses to the new rules of online sales. With more work by more unbranded artists becoming more easily accessible than ever via the egalitarian exodus of e-commerce, total fine art sales volume will swell, and legions of new clients will become collectors.

But with makers’ emporiums overpowering the gatekeepers and dropping the drawbridge that used to separate art creators and art buyers, the ensuing frenzy of competition will inevitably drive down the average price for an unbranded piece. So even though the number of artists generating revenue from their practice will trend upward, it may look more like supplemental income or a meager living than a lavish cash-out. 

Meanwhile, high-end gallerists and high to ultra-high net worth clients alike will retreat together to the castle keep to conduct business in fortified seclusion from what they see as the unwashed, uncouth masses. Their joint interest in exclusivity will elevate blue chip prices further, and the drastic reduction in physical exhibition space enabled by full stack, branded online sales will motivate gallerists to restrict their few tangible shows to a small roster of blockbuster artists.

Together, the resulting market dynamic is what Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolffson refer to in their book The Second Machine Age as “bounty versus spread”: an unprecedented abundance of content available to all, but a gap of unprecedented dimensions between the high and low ends of the spectrum. In a sense, it’s Tyler Cowen’s Average Is Over thesis stated in slightly different terms. 

However, I believe in this macro picture of the art sales sector for another reason beyond collector demand. That reason is artist supply.

As we covered in Part VI, mid-level galleries are already being squeezed like an artisanal juice by these market forces. Anthony Haden-Guest, whom I mentioned briefly there, described the gallery landscape in April 2014 in almost identical terms to the blockbuster-reliant for-profit culture industries I discussed last time: studio movies, music, and books. (For a particularly striking match, flip back and compare the below to the merely two-months-older summary of the publishing industry I quoted from George Packer).

Haden-Guest wrote at the time:

One truism is that the market now governs the art business as never before and that the market is subject to the 99/1 effect, as most markets seem to be these days. What I mean by this is that there is generally one percent of winners in a market and then there is everybody else…

[I]t goes without saying that the difference that Big Money is making in the art market is one of degree, not kind. Ambitious dealers have always poached artists, knowing that if they don’t somebody else will. That said, pump up the degree enough and it becomes a change of kind too.

Now, Haden-Guest’s second point is not a new development in the art market. Elite galleries have been poaching their downstairs neighbors’ best, brightest, and buzziest talent for as long as the gallery system has existed—just as, to be fair, mid-tier galleries have been doing to low-tier galleries over the same span.

Yet if the top-down pilfering in this particular den of thieves has reached unprecedented levels, as he implies, the rampant kleptomania owes in large part to blue chip gallerists’ need to fuel the "More" Machine—a business model which, as I argued in the previous chapter, becomes not only inefficient but straight-up nonsensical in an e-commerce-heavy future.

This sea change in the sales structure twists the incentives for blue chip galleries vis-à-vis rising artists. Yes, middle tier galleries look like a fleet of sinking ships to me. In theory that makes it easier than ever for top-tier gallerists to sail by in their Jeff Koons yachts and pluck as many promising survivors off the life rafts as they want. 

But without the “More” Machine squealing and shuddering for sustenance below deck—in other words, with less gallery space to fill and fewer exhibitions to program—the question becomes: How many non-blockbuster artists does it really make sense for the blue chip galleries to bring onboard in such a consolidated market? And under what terms?

Yayoi Kusama, “Dots Obsession” (2000). Image credit: Eclectic Society.

It seems to me there’s a delicate balance to strike here. On the one hand, yes, gallerists will have to conjure far fewer tangible shows. On the other, I doubt that their total sales volume will significantly decline. In fact, even if, as I proposed in the last chapter, the market forces in play allow gallerists to escalate prices for their most prized artists—those who are still being honored with the rare physical exhibition—I expect blue chip art sales to increase in volume in the future. 

Why? All the data that I’ve seen clearly indicates that, even though the chasm between the rich and everyone else keeps yawning wider and wider, more people than ever are managing to soar across the Sarlacc Pit to wealth. Studies published this year show that the number of households with a net worth of $1M or more—both in the U.S. and worldwide—set new records, surpassing even the pre-recession highs. 

(Note: As economists like Cowen, McAfee and Brynjolffson, and most famously Thomas Piketty have clarified in their most recent books, society’s challenge from a macroeconomic standpoint is that the raw number of millionaires actually represents a declining proportion of the overall world population, which is growing at an even faster rate. In short, wealth is still consolidating at the top as upward mobility deteriorates.)

This trend suggests that elite gallerists will still have an incentive to supply more assets than their most celebrated artists can pump out on their own. True, top-tier galleries will still meet some of this excess demand by reselling owned inventory rather than strictly supplying primary market work, just as is done today. But secondary market inventory isn’t likely to be enough on its own.

Nor would either gallerists or collectors want it to be. Certain clients will always be interested in making more speculative, potentially higher-upside bets on emerging artists rather than simply clinging to the big names like an agoraphobic child to his mom’s leg in a crowded mall. For some, it’s a way to diversify their fine art portfolios. For others, it’s the guts of a venture capital-style collecting strategy in which a handful of major hits offsets a toxic sludge heap of misses.

For those reasons, unknown quantities will still have value to blue chip gallerists. That value just isn’t likely to include physical exhibitions. Not at first, anyway. Instead, rising artists will primarily be needed to fill out the supply of inventory on elite sellers’ e-commerce platforms and offer exponential growth opportunity to value-conscious collectors.

The outcome that makes sense to me, then, is the creation of a designated second tier of artists within blue chip galleries’ rosters—under terms even more favorable to sellers than the current standard. Think of them as the red chip artists, i.e. the second most valuable currency at the art market’s high stakes gaming table. 

While  top tier galleries’ most celebrated, most established artists continue to receive the privilege of physical exhibitions and the apex of the price pyramid, the red chippers would only be sold in the galleries’ independently operated digital storefronts initially. However, the gallerist would also entice red chippers with the opportunity to elevate to the exhibition-worthy blue chip tier—the James Turrell/Jeff Koons level—provided they’re sufficiently profitable online. 

The parallel would be to the way that a major retailer tends to roll out a new product: an exploratory trial in a small number of franchises, followed by expansion if sales are brisk. Put simply, it’s about proof of concept. Couching the process in those terms will undoubtedly make some people squirm like a colon full of tainted Indian food, but it makes perfect sense from a business standpoint.

Both today and in the past, that proof of concept would normally arrive in the form of profitable and well-received exhibitions at mid-tier galleries. But in a future where mid-tier galleries are an extinct species, blue chip gallerists will have to don their safari gear and patrol new proving grounds.

The logical territory for this hunt to take place in a future of robust fine art e-commerce would be the makers’ emporiums and artists’ own independently operated sites. Elite gallerists could identify and seduce the most successful and most sought-after independents, then plug them into the gallery’s own vertically integrated digital sales platform as a low-risk, potentially high-reward trial.

James Turrell, “Aten Reign” (2013). Image credit: DesignBoom.

Blue chip gallerists would thus maintain the ability to harvest promising younger talent while keeping their inventory sufficiently stocked and their overhead appropriately low. The bulk of the sellers’ resources, monetary and otherwise, would remain dedicated to the blockbuster artists on their rosters. And those bigger, safer bets would be virtually guaranteed to keep the profit nucleus intact. 

Broadly speaking, the process I’m describing is a natural evolution of the current system. The standard playbook is for a blue chip gallery to introduce their emerging talent in one of two ways—both of which only deviate from my predicted e-commerce-based, red-chip-to-blue progression in the sense that they all take place in physical spaces.

The first is a smaller solo exhibition that supports a larger one by a more established artist running concurrently in the same building—the equivalent of a Hollywood studio fronting their expected blockbuster with the trailer for a lesser known but highly promising flick also on their slate. The second is to include a recently signed artist’s work in a group show that mixes big names and emerging ones in the same context, providing the newly signed talent some shine by association—the equivalent of a hip hop megastar giving other artists in his crew feature verses on his next single. 

In both cases, gallerists also begin privately trotting out other available works by the new talent to interested clients in their back rooms as soon as the ink is dry on the representation agreement (you know, if anyone in the art world regularly signed contracts). Together, the strategy sets the stage for the freshly anointed artist prior to the moment the spotlight swings her way for her first grand solo under the gallery’s roof.

For example, David Zwirner took on Oscar Murillo in September 2013 and presented his avant-garde Willy Wonka solo exhibition, A Mercantile Novel, seven months later. I can’t confirm it, but I’d pledge to passively watch you vandalize my car if Zwirner wasn’t already trotting out Murillo’s paintings and other more traditionally commoditizable assets in his back room during the intervening months. 

But while the proof of concept playbook remains basically unchanged on a strategic level, the caveat for potential red chip artists is the term sheet they’re likely to receive in an e-commerce heavy future. With gallerists’ no longer needing them to supply physical exhibitions, and with their opening price points offering lower margins relative to their blue chip stalwarts, I would expect gallerists to add a heavy dash of bitters to the business arrangement. Most likely, that would take the form of an even meatier sales commission than the traditional standard—say, 60 or 65 percent rather than the typical 50 percent.

Faced with the chance to transition from the makers’ emporiums or their own hustle to the branded, consolidated galleries, artists with red chip offers would thus have to weigh the question of long-term growth potential.

Would it be better to net only 35 or 40 percent of a higher, branded gallery sales price, or 70 percent of a lower, makers’ emporium sales price? What about 100 percent of a deal closed on one’s own platform? Even with minimal resources devoted to her cause, a red chip artist could be primed for greater profitability and scalability strictly through the glow of a top tier gallery’s branding than through her more independent alternatives.

And even if that’s not the case at the jump, what if the more extreme red chip peonage is indeed only temporary? Assuming an artist does real numbers on a blue chip gallery’s digital marketplace, her seller then has the incentive to elevate her to the exhibition-worthy blue chip tier. That means more favorable margins—probably back to the typical 50 percent—on higher prices, and theoretically, somewhat more support and security than roaming the mountains as a lone wolf. 

The system I’m describing would create powerful motivations for artists to build their own brands in an effort to make themselves attractive to the handful of elite galleries capable of supercharging their careers. And such an environment, in turn, suggests to me that there will be an opening for a new (or at least, newly empowered) third party to carve out a niche for itself in this disrupted ecosystem. I’ll detail its identity and possible role in the next chapter. 

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Rainer Ganahl, “Use a Bicycle” (2006). Image credit: Rainer Ganahl.

"The best thing an artist can do is to work out how to survive without ever making money from their art."

According to the always excellent Melanie Gerlis of The Art Newspaper, the above quote came from artist Rainer Ganahl during this week’s freshly concluded Talking Galleries symposium in Barcelona. Based on my backtracking skills, he seems to have made the comment while holding court on a panel discussion called "What Do Artists Want From Their Galleries?" It’s an interesting and valuable topic to explore, and I wish I’d been there to hear the whole conversation—especially because, if I’d heard the idea in its full context, I’d feel better machine-gunning it the way I’m about to here. 

Nevertheless, Ganahl’s free-floating quote has been, as an agrarian friend of mine used to say in college, chapping my ass since I first read it on Monday. I expressed as much on Twitter immediately, but I feel like I need to address it at slightly greater length in order to salve the irritation once and for all. 

As Gerlis suggested during our brief exchange about the subject on Monday, I grant that Ganahl may very well just be polishing a persona here. If so, that makes him not fundamentally different from, say, an artist like Jeff Koons, who works overtime (sometimes nude, with a Vanity Fair photographer handy) in public appearances to cultivate a “purer than thou” aura—one in which the art market is irrelevant to his decision-making and his muse rules all. 

On a personal and business level, I have no beef whatsoever with that strategy, as I’ve written at length before. At least, not as far as it concerns the artists executing it and the audience listening with skepticism. 

However, I become Superfly TNT [NSFW] when I think about the prospect of desperate artists taking Ganahl’s quote at face value while searching the industry’s wilderness for guidance on how to survive and thrive. Because on its own terms, I think his concept is about as intelligent as trying to shave your pubes with a straight razor in your off-hand. 

Is almost every artist in every medium going to need to rely on an alternative revenue stream to support themselves for some time? Absolutely. Endurance, or more robustly, what Nassim Nicholas Taleb would call “antifragility," is essential to building and sustaining a career in the arts. 

Whether it’s a classic soul-splitting day job or the Wild West pandemonium of freelancing, the “dues-paying” portion of building a career is as necessary as it is ugly for anyone without a trust fund or pre-existing connections in their dream industry. Take it from someone who’s currently in the midst of collecting a check for ghostwriting about an over-the-counter British cold sore medicine: To give the work that truly matters time to develop and hit, sometimes you just need to find a way to extend the game—no matter how absurd the means.

My problem with Ganahl’s “advice” is the “ever” part, i.e. the implication that it’s wiser for artists to eternally moonlight than to risk somehow debasing their meaningful work by trying to monetize it. The simple truth of the matter is that every artist I’ve ever encountered has shared the same underlying dream: to make enough money making art that they don’t have to do anything else. Obviously, there’s a lot of variance in personal definitions of what constitutes “enough money,” but that doesn’t change the central point.

There’s a name for people who spend their entire lives toiling away on creative work that never pays them a dime. It’s called “an amateur.” And anyone who faithfully buys into Ganahl’s mantra at Talking Galleries is more than likely destined for that sad fate.

I’ve said it before, but it bears repeating here: At a certain level, working as an artist—by which I mean, producing creative work for a living—is no different than working in any other field. It all comes down to effectively monetizing a skill set. Conceiving and creating art is one such skill set. But unless you’re complementing it by figuring out how to interest buyers in what you want to produce, odds are you won’t be transitioning into an actual career as an artist anytime soon—or quite possibly, ever.

What separates the professionals from the amateurs is the ability to find the smiley-faced medium between what fulfills them and what convinces buyers to cut a check. Is it a delicate balance to strike? No doubt. But the surest way to spend your would-be career fumbling past it is to never try to engage with the challenge full-time. 

And I sincerely believe this is a good thing for both art and the people who love it. As I’ve said before, arguing the opposite means arguing that the world would be a better place if James Turrell had spent the past 50 years working 40 hours a week in a Duane Reade instead of focusing his days and nights concocting mind-bending, sublime light and space installations.

It’s certainly possible that Ganahl is one of the rare few who lucked up—someone whose sensibility somehow happened to magically align with enough clients and supporters to keep his artistic production funded without ever having to leave the confines of his own hall of mirrors. On rare occasions, it does happen.

But it’s not a strategy. It’s basically equivalent to handing your car keys to randomness and assuming it’s going to chauffeur you to the destination of your dreams rather than Thelma & Louise-ing you into a canyon. And despite the rare successful trip, the overwhelming majority of those arrangements end in anonymous tragedy.

As Chuck Close said, “Inspiration is for amateurs. The rest of us just show up and get to work.” That’s the attitude of a successful professional. And the sooner an artist starts fully dedicating herself to (thoughtfully) monetizing the work that matters, the better her odds of becoming one. 

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Mike Kelley, “The Past and the Future” (1980). Image credit: Juha van ‘t Zelfde.

While I was cruising Twitter yesterday, I caught a tweet from Sotheby’s advertising (and really, isn’t that the right word?) that a Mike Kelley work on paper called The Past and the Future had just hammered down at $305,000 in their latest Contemporary Curated sale in New York. The price qualified as a more than 6x multiple of the piece’s low estimate and more than 4x of the high ($50,000 - 70,000). And after looking at the subject matter in the larger context of Kelley’s work, I got to thinking about a unique kind of overpay that can happen in the market for an artist of his stripe. 

Say you replicated the face-palming “gotcha” scene in every lazy conspiracy thriller of Hollywood’s past quarter century by secretly tape-recording contemporary art enthusiasts’ candid opinions on Kelley. You’d come away from your bizarre sting operation flush with audio confirming two points of consensus: One, that he was hugely influential to a generation of artists working in multiple media, especially here in LA; and two, that the vast majority of his output is, frankly, hard to enjoy. 

The reality is that Kelley, who committed suicide in 2012 at age 57, was a perpetually tortured soul, at least in private. I’ve heard accounts from former students, studio assistants, and others who all portray that agony as a strictly inward-facing phenomenon—that to friends and collaborators, Kelley was a jovial, kind, engaging presence for most if not all of his adult life. 

Still, it’s flagrantly obvious from his work that the man contained a legion of demons intent on skewering him from inside out. I left his retrospective at MOCA this summer completely drained by both the onslaught of artwork and the distress it embodied. The exhibition contained over 250 pieces ranging from video to drawings to sculpture to mixed media, and few of them emitted even a single faint beam of sunlight. 

In fact, I think it’s fair to say that the lion’s share of the show—and Kelley’s lifetime output—oscillated between disturbing and openly transgressive. Piece after piece suggested that Kelley built his career on consciously trotting out his anguish and self-loathing for full frontal public exposure. I constantly felt as though he was explicitly challenging viewers to look away while secretly praying they wouldn’t be so callous. Emotionally and visually, I found it to be an exhausting experience. And I know I wasn’t alone.

But you wouldn’t know any of that by looking at The Past and the Future, a simple, even optimistic acrylic-on-paper diptych of the sun setting and rising over separate gestural landscapes.Compare it to something like Odalisque (2010), Eviscerated Corpse (1989), or the NSFW Sinister Forces (1976/2011), and the tonal contrast hits you in the retina like an expert sniper’s bullet. 

As those other three examples indicate, The Past and the Future is one of the rare Kelley works that a collector could install anywhere—her home, her office, her charitable foundation—and truly live with, without making herself or others vulnerable to the mud slide of dread that that he spent decades flooding the hillside with. 

I can’t prove it, but my hunch is that this is a big part of the reason a work like The Past and the Future blows past its estimate like Maverick buzzing the tower in Top Gun: A collector gets all of the art historical cache—and thus market juice—of a revered artist, but without incurring any of the psychic costs of the difficult work most responsible for his legacy.

If so, it’s a complete inversion of the market’s normal valuation rules. Every artist has particular works or series that are deemed more valuable than the others. But those “legacy pieces,” let’s call them, are generally the ones that best capture his voice, that most clearly embody his signature style and most clearly communicate his iconic themes.

The Past and the Future is not one of those legacy pieces. In fact, it’s not even characteristic of Kelley’s other black and white works on paper, most of which (from what I’ve seen) slide headfirst into the same tortured and profane muck of his mainstays. It’s an anomaly, a minor attraction, a misdirect.

And that’s the point. In the case of an artist like Kelley, there’s a very real chance that the most price-inflated assets in the commercial market will be the rare few that cut against the confrontational, disturbed grain that defined him: kinder, gentler pieces like The Past and the Future.

The resulting irony is that, for an artist who produced work at such a prolific rate, Kelley actually imposed a strange type of scarcity on himself. The total number of pieces he created was enormous. Yet the number of viewer-friendly ones within that mass is comparatively tiny—a few odd flowers managing to grow amid the carnage of a collapsed meat-packing plant.  

This is not to say that his more unsettling output doesn’t still fetch high prices. Kelley is firmly entrenched as a branded, blue chip artist by now, repped by the likes of Gagosian, Skarstedt, and Acquavella, with major solo museum exhibitions on his CV and works in prominent public and private collections across the map. His table in the VIP room is secure forever.

Plus, it would be naive to assume that every collector who buys work these days is actually going to hang it somewhere visible anyway. Even an unavoidably explicit Kelley piece like Three Point Program/Four Eyes (1987), a felt banner emblazoned with the text, “Pants Shitter & Proud P.S. Jerk-Off Too (And I Wear Glasses),” can’t trigger any offense if it’s tucked away in a climate-controlled  storage locker until its owner sees an opportunity to resell at a tidy profit. 

Nevertheless, the point is that the scarcity of approachable assets in Kelley’s body of work makes the few, the proud, the livable likely to be drastically over-valued relative to their significance in his career. It’s a market inefficiency that wrongly favors the attractive over the important. Consider it a rookie mistake.

But the insanity of the market isn’t driving the outcome by itself. In fact, from a viewership standpoint, the buyers are arguably acting at peak rationality. It’s just that, in paradoxical cases like these, the short supply of pretty assets tends to make them comparatively ugly investments.

Keep that in mind the next time an uncharacteristically tame work by a transgressive artist does backflips over its estimate. It will happen soon enough. Because in terms of certain collectors’ behavior, The Past and the Future is exactly that.

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Mike Kelley, detail/still from “Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruction #s 2-32 (Day Is Done)” (2004-5). Image credit: art21.

On Friday, Alexander Forbes of artnet posted a report titled 10 Things You Need to Know About Investing in Art. The list comprised his main takeaways from this past Wednesday’s Artfi, the now three year-old Fine Art and Finance Conference. And while I could probably write about his comments for days (and may), for now I just wanted to take a few moments to address the point that leaped out of the screen at me on my first read like the vengeful ghost in The Ring. 

To my sincere shock and surprise, the final item on Forbes’s roundup was, and I quote, “Greater transparency in the art world is going to benefit everyone.” I’ve made this argument at some length on this blog before, so it’s safe to that I agree with the concept. However, every indication I have is that it’s still regarded as something between radical and heretical among the power-brokers and decision-makers of the industry. That the idea appeared at Artfi at all, let alone in an aggressive enough form that it breached Forbes’s top ten list, bordered on the supernatural to me.

Initially, I thought there were only two explanations for why a pro-transparency faction materialized in those conference halls. One was that my thermal scanner for industry opinion had somehow short-circuited months ago, and the spirit of openness had been floating through the art world to a degree I hadn’t realized. This seemed about as likely to me as Obama getting through his next press conference without using the word “folks.”

The other explanation was that certain insiders had encountered signs—or at least felt fears—of some soon-to-be-externally-imposed regulatory change very recently, and that the rest of us just hadn’t found the telltale cold spot in the attic yet. Forbes’s comments suggest that, to the extent a transparency movement existed at Artfi, it was more a result of this motivation than any other, noting that “artnet’s own Cornell DeWitt quipped later in [one] panel, ‘It’s either us in the art media or it’s going to be the Feds.’”

In other words, at least some significant portion of transparency’s advocates at the conference backed the idea out of anxiety over some regulatory specter rather than a belief that openness is actually good business (AKA my continued position). And even if a misting of dread was in the air at Artfi, my impression is that it’s still not felt viscerally or widely enough to motivate real change to the status quo. 

In fact, Forbes’s ninth point is more evidence that the market is likely to get more opaque before it gets clearer: “Art exchanges and derivatized art investment products are coming but remain a distant prospect.” 

My feelings on the flaws of treating art as an asset class, at least by traditional Wall Street standards, are well-documented by now, so I won’t exhume that corpse again. Still, I’m not the least bit surprised that the world’s financial innovators are actively hunting for ways to commoditize, securitize, and collateralize artworks at a level even beyond art indices, art finance, and art funds (which Forbes also addresses as a trend on his list). 

The salient point isn’t about either my expectations or even the engineering of simple derivatives (like call options or futures contracts) on artwork. It’s about where the trend leads further down the hall.

To people who have been paying a gram of attention, it’s common knowledge that the financial crisis was largely a product of advanced derivatization of financial assets. The problem wasn’t futures or calls, though. It was the next level up: assets like CDOs (collateralized debt obligations), credit default swaps and the like. 

As Michael Lewis shows in The Big Short (as do other authors who have written at length about the crash), these assets were intentionally designed to be so complex that practically none of the investors buying and selling them would ever bother to try to look at the components they were actually made up of. With the assistance of the ratings agencies, that strategy allowed the banks to pass off fecal-grade assets as triple-A opportunities with barely anyone on the receiving end sniffing the problem.

How opaque were these assets designed to be? In probably the most famous case in Lewis’s book, one of the only characters willing to plunge himself into the filth and parse the advanced derivatives to discover what they really were was Dr. Michael Burry, whose willingness to do so is later identified as a product of previously undiagnosed Asperger’s Syndrome.

So if we’re moving in the direction of art derivatives, however slowly, that strongly suggests the art market is wading deeper into the information murk, not retreating from it. And if the takeaway from Artfi was that the transparency movement’s most powerful ally is the Ghost of Regulations Future, then the industry’s increasingly more enthusiastic mimicry of the financial markets is even more reason to discount a coming era of open books and symmetrically informed markets.

There’s arguably no better example that the enforcers are perpetually a step behind their targets than Wall Street’s activity over the course of the past decade-plus. And considering how much crossover there is between the art world and the finance world today, I find it hard to believe that the players involved in either are going to base their plans for the coming years more on the bogeyman of unprecedented regulation than the historically proven profitability of derivatization and its kindred spirits in the netherworld of financial innovation. 

Call me a cynic if you will. But to paraphrase a greater thinker, the problem with trying to abandon cynicism is that it makes you so much more likely to be wrong.

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Danh Vo, “WE THE PEOPLE (detail)” (2011). Image credit: e-flux.

If the recently revealed legal battle between collector Bert Kreuk and conceptual/installation artist Danh Vo wasn’t the story most passed-around the art world campfire last week, it was damn close. I’d recommend this carefully considered breakdown by Greg Allen to anyone who really wants to dive deep into the merits of Kreuk’s case—or in Allen’s view, the yawning existential absence of them.

For the more efficiency-conscious, though: Kreuk’s central accusation is that Danh Vo flaked on a $350,000 commission deal to create a new installation piece for him, deliverable in time to be included in Transforming the Known, an exhibition of Kreuk’s collection at the Hague’s Gemeentemuseum last summer. Danh Vo and his representatives contend that no such agreement ever existed, and that Kreuk is now effectively trying to extort the artist for about $1.2M and one of his gallerists, Isabella Bortolozzi, for additional damages.

The plot thickens from there. According to Allen, the court filings clarify that no money for the purported commission agreement ever actually changed hands between Kreuk, Danh Vo, and/or any of his gallerists. This fact at the very least coats even more pollen over the windshield separating us from what happened, and at most confirms that a deal was never finalized—as Kreuk’s inability to produce a contract, invoice, or other paper trail already strongly suggests.

Furthermore, it turns out that Kreuk sold 11 pieces from the Hague exhibition in a Sotheby’s auction within six weeks after it closed, then presented another 29 works in Just Now, a “selling exhibition” Kreuk curated for Sotheby’s in January 2014, with 25 of the artists on view there having been included in Transforming the Known, according to Allen’s count. 

In retrospect these moves could be interpreted as a market-savvy COIN (Collector Only in Name) engineering institutional shine strictly to resell his own works at a premium shortly thereafter. Especially since the typical auction timeline dictates that the consignment agreements for the November 2013 auction would have had to have been finalized at least 45 days prior to the sale date, AKA while Transforming the Known was still on view. (It closed September 29th. The sale happened on November 11th, and these agreements don’t get hammered out overnight, especially when international shipping is involved.)

When various art world media outlets (like artnet) and personalities (like collector Alain Servais) not only floated this general theory but applied the dreaded “art flipper” brand to Kreuk’s exposed flesh, he went on a PR offensive that culminated in this interview with Abigail R. Esman last week. And while that interview appeared in Blouin ArtInfo, it should be noted (as Allen points out in his breakdown) that Esman also blogs for Sotheby’s, the house which consigned Kreuk’s Hague works for sale while they still had that fresh museum smell. 

Instead of confronting this sloppy cyclone of litigation head on, though, I want to focus on one particularly shiny piece of debris swirling around its eye. That would be the following statement by Kreuk in his interview with Esman:

"The fact is, in the end, you have good art and bad art. Bad art does not become good by showing it in a museum."

In other words, the profits Kreuk raked in with the sales affiliated with Transforming the Known didn’t come from their or their makers’ having been shown at the Gemeentemuseum; they came from the pieces’ undeniable artistic quality. If the works were crap, the market would have said so via the hammer prices, regardless of where they had or hadn’t been exhibited prior to mounting the auction block.

It’s a snappy, clever barb aimed at his critics’ jugulars, and it positions anyone who disagrees as either a philistine or, at the very least, less of a connoisseur than Kreuk himself. 

Momentarily setting aside the myth of intrinsic value (which I’ve assaulted with a frying pan before), there’s only one minor glitch in the idea: It’s true in only the most surface sense.

Let me explain. Rightly or wrongly (and I think it’s increasingly “wrongly”), institutions are still regarded as being a cloud level above the dirty fray of the commercial art business: the unbiased arbiters of culture, the wise and objective judges of the art historical canon.

Their validation is perceived as an indelible rubber stamp on an artist’s career—and prices in the commercial market reflect as much. It’s the reason that every artist in the game specifically lists museum collections and exhibitions on her CV and every auction house presents the same in their catalog entries for lots on offer.

But the logic scaffolding the optics has to do with consensus-building, both inside the museum itself and outside in the larger market. I already covered some of the finer points of the museum acquisitions hierarchy here, so suffice it to say that precious few collecting or exhibition choices in the institutional domain are the product of a single person. And though it doesn’t apply to the Kreuk/Danh Vo knife fight, the pricier the piece being acquired—or the more resources and publicity being devoted to the show—the more curators and/or execs have to sign onto the decision.

For an artist’s work then, gaining access to a museum means literally being approved by a series of allegedly unprejudiced experts. That notion adds more gravity to institutional decisions than practically any other comparable event in an artist’s career trajectory. And just like in every other field, once someone gets that first “yes” vote—especially from a highly regarded and hypothetically objective body—it becomes orders of magnitude easier for others in the field to say “yes” too. 

The best parallel I can think of would be to proclaim that bad politicians don’t become good by getting elected to Congress: An expert might judge the field differently, but to the rest of the populace what matters are the few quantifiable results in an industry largely devoid of them.

Once someone gets into the club—regardless of their merits—their success has a tendency to become self-perpetuating. Just compare Real Clear Politics’s estimated 14 percent Congressional approval rating with this Term Limits for America list of current legislative tenures, especially those in the House. It’s a great reminder that the inertia of public opinion can keep (probably) undeserving incumbents happily on cruise control for years, if not entire careers. 

But the intra-museum approval process is only the final stage of consensus-building. The truth is that museum curators and execs rarely exhibit or acquire total “discoveries,” to borrow the parlance of Old Hollywood.

Instead, they’re almost always selecting from a subset of artists who have been brought to their attention by powerful gallerists, other blue chip artists, or—in Kreuk’s case—collectors with influence over the institution. Again, relationships matter at least as much, if not more, than the quality of the work itself. 

This game of art industry maneuvering happens out of the public’s purview—not because it’s sinister per se but because that’s the way the business of the art world is done. (Remember the Three S’s.) The museum’s co-sign is just the clear visible signal of the momentum gathered behind the scenes—the crowning ceremony for an accession already determined by the real power brokers. 

That doesn’t mean that the work being ushered toward the throne is necessarily bad. It just means that denying its claim often risks putting the museum in direct conflict with art world influencers who are probably going to get their way elsewhere regardless, thereby putting the discriminating museum on the wrong side of art history.

For example, there are major institutions which resisted opportunities to buy works by Modernist or early post-war artists in their era, only to watch those same artists become demigods whose prices now make it nearly impossible to rectify their lapses in collecting judgment. (My hometown Cleveland Museum of Art is one.)

So in a sense, one could argue Kreuk is right: Bad art doesn’t become good by being shown in a museum. But bad art can become good art via the chain of validation that gets it in front of the museum’s decision-makers in the first place. It’s a distinction without a difference. And once the validation chain has been forged, it can wag the dog for the rest of time. 

P.S. None of the above should be interpreted as an implied assault on Danh Vo’s work, which I actually like quite a bit based on what I’ve seen. 

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