I still owe you all the conclusion to my Average Is Over series, but I couldn’t let auction week in New York pass without saying a little something about the feeding frenzy. 

In the course of reading recaps of the various sales and other goings-on about town the past several days, I encountered this quote from Michael McGinnis, the CEO of Phillips, on their Thursday night post-war and contemporary sale (via Katya Kazakina of Bloomberg): 

“The bidding was much more vigorous than it’s been in a while. It means it’s a really deep market.”

In Part I of this series, I laid out my reasoning for the future dominance of art gallerists who act primarily as talent managers/artist supporters. In Part II, I explored how that market preference would affect the entrepreneurship and employment prospects of more classically sales-oriented players in the sector, likely by shoving them away from both working with artists at their own galleries and working for Leo Castelli type artist-nurturing galleries. Today I want to talk about what the first two sets of conclusions mean for the Castelli-esque galleries that remain after this shift. 

Yesterday, I covered the implications of Tyler Cowen’s “average is over” thesis for the responsibilities of future contemporary art gallerists. I concluded that, as collectors become ever more comfortable with the notion of online buying, the most valued gallerists will excel in a talent management/artist support role rather than pedal-to-the-floor sales. To frame the next phase of the discussion, I’d like to pull a Dickens and resurrect two ghosts of art sales past. These men offer a device that, like Scrooge’s own spirit guides, we can use to gain perspective on the sprawling totality of the issue.

Yesterday I finished celebrated economist Tyler Cowen’s most recent book, Average Is Over: Powering America Beyond the Age of the Great Stagnation. It’s bursting with big claims and thought-provoking ideas, but the core thesis is that we’ve entered an era in which the increasing power and prominence of computers in every industry will fundamentally change which skills are highly valued (and thus richly rewarded) in comparison to past generations. 

On Monday night, I scurried over to LACMA to attend the latest in their Director’s Series talks between Michael Govan and a chosen artist with a connection to the museum. This installment featured Light & Space O.G. Helen Pashgian. Although she hasn’t enjoyed anywhere near the attention as friends and contemporaries like James Turrell or Robert Irwin, Pashgian has been crafting innovative sculptural and installation work for roughly fifty years. She’s now having something of a moment thanks to the exhibition of Light Invisible, a twelve piece installation conceived, executed, and just recently acquired for LACMA.

I found Pashgian to be sharp, introspective, and forthcoming throughout the discussion. But the comment of hers that hit me squarest between the eyes had to do with the idea of creative evolution. 

Earlier today, specialist insurer Hiscox released a report on the state of the online art market (downloadable in full here). Its headline findings look monumental at first. Hiscox estimates that internet-based fine art sales eclipsed the $1B mark for the first time in 2013, cresting at $1.57B; and that based on this result, the industry’s online sector could reach $3.76B in sales by 2018. Surely, happy times are here for art e-tailers… right? 

The answer is a resounding, chest-thumping “Uh… probably, I guess.” As with so much else in the art world, it all depends on which telescope you’re using to view the landscape. 

Yesterday morning, Jerry Saltz wrote a piece that used James Franco’s Cindy Sherman homage/reboot/retread at Pace as a launchpad to question the problems of scale that bewitch "megagalleries,” or those at the highest end of the market who spread their operations over a number of lavish facilities around the world. In my opinion, Saltz dead-eyed the issue like Riggs at the shooting range in Lethal Weapon. I just want to help contextualize his argument a little further. 

The hobgoblin of the art industry is, and has always been, overhead. To gain market share, a gallery’s physical footprint must grow with its reputation to some extent. A blockbuster exhibition cannot be mounted in an attic space, and no gallerist can reasonably expect obscenely wealthy collectors from all corners of the Earth - western Europe, east and south Asia, Russia, the Middle East, the Emirates, et al - to consistently come to a single facility on her own turf, especially if her competitors are opening up locations much more convenient to those collectors’ homes. That inevitably means expansion: more spaces, more square footage, more polish, more money. 

Although I’m often pathologically resistant to popular thinking, I make exceptions when it comes to Michael Lewis’s work. So I recently joined seemingly the entire rest of the country in reading his new book, Flash Boys. If you’ve just been resurrected from a cryogenic slumber, Flash Boys is primarily a story about a motley crew of bankers, programmers, and technicians led by a man named Brad Katsuyama, all endeavoring to build an upstart, completely “fair” stock exchange to combat what they view as the predatory tactics of high frequency traders. 

Those scare quotes appear because the concept of fairness in the financial markets is, in my opinion and those of a lot of much smarter people, a dubious concept in itself. (I especially dug Josh Brown’s historical retort to Lewis’s widely publicized battle cry that the stock market is now “rigged.”) But I don’t want to get bogged down in that discussion. What I’d like to focus on instead is what Katsuyama’s example suggests about the possible long-term business upside to any gallery willing to go rogue and adopt a stance of radical openness in an otherwise opaque art market.

To coincide with the fact that taxes have been on everyone’s minds like a neurological fungus for the past week, media outlets have been publishing pieces left and right about the intersection of taxes and more interesting levels of life - which is to say, practically any of them. Art has been no exception. Two pieces in particular caught my attention. Although each is interesting on its own, considering them together led me to some ideas about how the arts and the IRS might be able to help each other. 

In my continuing Philip-Marlowe-with-a-laptop quest to track the convergence of the art world and the tech sector, I spent part of my Sunday reading through recaps of this weekend’s inaugural Silicon Valley Contemporary art fair. I found the most informative to be this one from Andrew Goldstein of Artspace. Although his thesis question is whether SVC could become the next Art Basel, my takeaway from Goldstein’s summary was that gallerists participating in the festivities treated the fair as more of a fact-finding mission than the traditional industry convention that established entities like Basel tend to be. I got a similar sense from a few of the other reports I read, and Goldstein agreed with my thinking when I asked him about it on Twitter. 

I’ve written about the friction between the art world and Silicon Valley before, so I wasn’t surprised to hear that the prevailing dynamic at the fair was one of cautious exploration. However, what did surprise me was how readily people were willing to admit it.