article for an upcoming conde nast car publication

We are facing an unprecedented confluence of international macroeconomic conditions that have collided with the unintended result of pushing prices for rare and desirable collectibles far into the stratosphere. Never before have these forces raged with such ferocity and velocity, bringing into alignment the disparate markets of art, classic cars, wine and property. Crystallizing the general malaise, there is the fear of inflation, uncertainty in valuing currencies, wildly gyrating stock markets (trending lower still), banks teetering, interest rates hovering near zero, sovereign debt bordering on worthless, commodity prices under pressure and dramatic political uncertainly and turmoil. It’s depressing just listing the plethora of negativity preoccupying world markets. So what better time to buy a pretty picture, a good bottle of wine, a nice set of wheels and a big garage to park it in?


Seriously, tangible assets have never before in history been so universally viewed as attractive and safe a harbor to park cash in. Coupled with an offsetting explosion in the generation of wealth in emerging markets over the recent past and you have all the ingredients in place to redefine the criteria for the valuation of collectibles. The beneficiaries are a $250,000,000 Cezanne painting and a $16,400,000 Ferrari. Sadly, with values rising so meteorically there is something tragic about the notion of paintings we don't hang, wine we don't drink, houses we don't occupy and cars we never drive. Other than an art collection of masterpieces, there is nothing to compare to the lineup of the RAC TT Race at the Goodwood Revival with Cobras and GTOs galore. Julian Treger, principal of Audley Capital, a fund the Financial Times called one of the world’s best last year, stated about art and cars: “They are both hard assets in a world of shortages of the best. Though art and cars have different collectors they have the same dynamics. Ferraris are very sculptural, but also incredibly well branded.” Where and when it will all end is anyone’s guess, but neither a $100 million car nor a $1 billion work of art would surprise me.


It may appear somehow wrong and that one should feel a sense of guilt enjoying the pleasures, delights and accompanying rising values of collectibles in the face of such seemingly universal hardship, but business has no moral compass. And although many remain skeptical, I am firmly of the belief that art and cars have inherent, calculable values. The factors driving escalating prices among art and cars coincide: rarity, history, provenance, and condition. The Supreme Court of the United States were asked to decide a case involving pornography and the Chief Justice replied he couldn’t explain it but he knew it when he saw it and the same applies with a great work of art or a sublime piece of automotive design and engineering. Only just recently, seven of auction house Gooding's top 15 Pebble Beach sellers were Ferraris: why does Ferrari above all other marques tend to dominate? Is it down to aesthetics, or provenance? Art and cars have become indisputable asset classes and Ferrari and Picasso are the gold standard against which all else is measured. However, markets are very unforgiving ecosystems so you had better know your stuff cold or stand a good chance of being run over, and separated from your money in the process. A Warhol from the same year and the same size can sell for $60,000 or $60,000,000 and a Ferrari is no different. There are better and worse Hirsts and Astons. Sadie Coles, one of the most significant and influential international gallery owners states that cars are somewhat easier to define value: “The valuation of a contemporary art work can be mysterious, subjective and unquantifiable. Rare cars are functional objects and however beautiful or rare they may be, they also have easier to define provenances - how many were made, during what dates, who owned them and how many miles they have.” I don’t entirely agree with the above reasoning and think there is as much disingenuousness and indeterminism in unraveling the mysterious, subjective and unquantifiable in cars as in art. Art is admittedly the last unregulated, multi-billion dollar business.


Though the high prices for art and cars can be hard for people to swallow, they are here to stay in at least the near term and with good reason. With art, its who’s buying, selling, writing about and exhibiting the work—these are all contributing factors playing into the notion of determining value. And it’s not all that different with cars; though, rather than which museum the car was exhibited in (this adds value too) its more a matter of which historic races the car was driven in and by whom. Whether cars are equal to art, and vice versa, depends on which is fuller, your walls or garage—it is more a condition of taste and opinion. Hardcore car lovers will say you can’t drive a painting, but art throws off a visual dividend and ease of coexisting beyond what cars can offer. True, you can't jump in your Van Gogh and race a Monet or head off to the country, but by the same token you can't climb into bed and drool over your Testarossa. Cars are the most ubiquitous form of industrial design and we see thousands per day, but we don’t see them when we are behind the wheel or when we park them up for the night. That really is unfortunate, as I have my cars in my office and under my desk, and if I could, I would have one under the duvet too.


There appear more and more crossovers between the bedfellows of cars and art, including the phenomenal Renzo Piano designed museum atop the Lingotto building and examples like BMW art cars and the recent sponsorship deal between Volkswagen and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Art and cars also share some not too positive attributes like the problem of liquidity: try and call your broker in the middle of the night to swiftly dispose of your car and/or art collections! Though art and cars are proven stores of value, nothing goes up forever, despite our strongest wishes. And there are those who climb into either category of collecting to ascend a social ladder, like nailing bags of money to the walls or stuffing notes into the garage and parading around like a peacock with fully exposed feathers.


With art and cars strictly as investment, divorced of aesthetics and functionality it all seems rather perverse. There have cropped up a number of classic car and art funds that look at both as nothing other than asset classes with untapped upside, stripped of use and enjoyment, but they are missing the point—art and cars are so great as investments because of the usability and joy, not just the reductive quality solely as appreciating assets. Shares, bonds and gold go into safes or drawers and draw no satisfaction other than the potential to increase in value. There is more to life— studies exist that say living with art (then why not cars?) can increase your life expectancy like having a loyal golden retriever. I can fully understand and appreciate the notion! Personally, I don't differentiate between a fork, chair, car or painting. Anything done exceptionally well shares qualities with art, and in the end its simply a matter of nomenclature, of naming and categorizing things that serve no purpose other than creating false hierarchies.


Richard Bremner, one of the UK’s foremost car writers weighs in on the art vs. car debate as follows: “For some, a car can be a thing of beauty, exquisite beauty even, and even the lowliest motor is the result of a creative process that has involved some artistry, no matter how modest. The vast majority of post-war cars, and some pre-wars too, were designed using not only the artistic skills of sketching and rendering designers but those of sculptors too. The result is an object that's quite capable of pleasing the eye that carries its own story, reflects the era in which it was conceived and the culture of the manufacturer that built it. As with art collecting, classic car acquisition can be about money of course, besides the displaying, coveting and hoarding of these things.”


An exceptional car is nothing to turn your nose up at, but there are many that would do the same with a work of contemporary art. Unfortunately regarding contemporary cars, over regulation and mass production sometimes aid in homogenizing design, which only adds to the values of classics. And in contemporary art, oversupply to feed demand can also lessen the values. There is nothing that can replace passion and connoisseurship in either endeavor including all the endless analysis a private bank could muster. Where will it end? Will it implode, like it did in the late 1980s, or are certain top vehicles now immune to the vicissitudes of the market? Though nothing is endless, art and high-end collector cars are not over leveraged like what might have been the case in decades past. For the most part, we are faced today with end users who have the wherewithal to stay in the game and not have to go prematurely running off the track.


Adam Lindemann, a highly noted collector and writer on art and design, who famously flipped a Jeff Koons sculpture for many millions in profit before it was packed off for shipping, told me that: “Cars are not at all like art, they are like ‘Design’. Buying a great car is like buying a great piece of Art Deco furniture. What matters is provenance and originality. There is no such thing as rolling art, there is however rolling design. The fact that we live in an age of computer chips, and technology molded into carbon fiber, means that the hand made machines of the last century will be valued objects of the future without a doubt. Over time the great cars can only go up in value, the question is deciding and sourcing the ‘great’ ones from all the other ones.” I find as plausible the thoughts of Kai Schachter (my 14 year old son and no car fanatic like his father) who said, “A car is a piece of art and even though you drive it around, it’s as fragile and delicate and needs to be cared for as much as any painting or sculpture.”


The downside in the public consciousness is that there is a bifurcation in the economy, a wider and wider chasm separating those that have from those that don't and many are dialing down their standards and style of living. The baby boomers are coming to the end of a party (and a good run It was) and facing the realization that someone is going to have to pay. Countries face the same harsh dilemma: debts are swallowing us all and it can’t go on and on and... It wouldn’t be the best of looks to roll into an Occupy Wall Street protest in your Ferrari with a Picasso in your tent. But let’s face it: since art came off the walls of a cave, it has been coveted and the same goes for life after the combustion engine—once it was invented and inserted into the bay of a car, we’ve had to have them. There is unparalleled seduction in a great car and artwork; the smells (even paint smells enticing), the feel, textures, and sight—a feast for all the senses. Unfathomably in a world wreaked by social, economic and political instability, it has been a record year for auction houses in cars and art, part of the ever-increasing acceptance of the rarity, preciousness and transcendent qualities of both: more so than anyone might have imagined in such recessionary times. We are only but custodians of things, charged with maintenance, preservation and appreciation of unrepeatable, glorious objects. And as we get progressively priced out of markets in cars, art, wine and property, the definition of what is desirable and covetable will only expand.

The Art Market is the Best Judge of Good Art. Debate at Saatchi Gallery, October 7, 2011

The Art Market is the Best Judge of Good Art. Debate at Saatchi Gallery, October 7, 2011; Position: Against.


We can end this before we start. The best judge of good art is simple and unequivocal: experience, education, scholarship, and passion. The market, and namely money which is what we are talking about, is a snapshot of current whims, fashions and fads. Oftentimes, the crowd leading the auction scene is not the culturally brightest bunch at the brunch. Not to mention the rampant manipulation, speculation and deceit that is part and parcel of the auction process, with all due respect to members of the respective houses. But that’s why we love the art market, the last unregulated multi-billion dollar business.


What is the best judge of good art? Art is a lifelong learning curve and the market is no substitute for putting eyeballs directly on it—smelling it, tasting it and touching it. You need to lift it, hang it, insure it, frame it, pack it, ship it, live with it, damage it, hate it and idolize it. And read it like a book, day in and day out. That is the best judge of art: experience and tactility. Honing your eyes is of paramount importance; people always refer in art to having a good eye, but I say one is not enough.


All markets are by nature, inefficient, at least at moments. When the stock market goes up, the good, bad and ugly follow suit, same when it goes down; and, it’s the same with art. Auctions die because of lack of confidence, and quality works are often the casualty, call it death by (un)friendly fire. Reputations go up and reputations go down, history is revised regularly, so why depend on any one signifier of value when in effect it is many variables that contribute to worth. Don't get me wrong I am a true believer in art and money and think they make cozy bedfellows, but the “market”, or rather dollar value, being just one determining factor.


Manet couldn’t find a gallery to sell his work or a collector to buy it early in his career so he was reduced to borrowing money from his mother to build a temporary structure to house a one person exhibit of his work as no one else would have it. Duchamp barely sold his own art so he ended up relying on interior decorating and art advising rich patrons; he also pulled off wildly unsuccessful and impractical entrepreneurial flubs, like cardboard optical illusions for children that spun on turntables and a shirt dying enterprise. Try to buy work by either now.


Consider Warhol’s market before and after his death. During his lifetime, his auction record was about $285,000 in 1986, a fact that disappointed Andy to the core: the painting, 200 $1 Dollar Bills, went to Greek born, London based collector Paulina Karpides who sold it in 2009 for close to $44m. When Warhol died in 1987 due to medical malpractice after what was routine gallbladder surgery at New York Hospital, he was more known for cheesy portraits of Pia Zadora, hanging out at a different type of studio—Studio 54, a guest appearance on the Love Boat, and handing copies of Interview Magazine out of a satchel in Soho. Hardly the glory days of the $100m painting where we are today. Which market characterization makes more sense?


In fact, the art market is incapable of judging anything about art other than what one person (not necessarily of sound mind) will pay for something at a given point in time. There are no assurances or guarantees that there is anything backing up a price other than capriciousness. There are countless instances of collectors, speculators and dealers getting fired up and excited about the day's soup de jour that turned into nothing, that is nominal scrap value or perhaps less. Rather than good, the market can be a very bad judge of markets—and value.


There are many, many instances of meteoric rises offset by swift declines: for example, since the early 80s, the markets of Donald Sultan, David Salle, Julian Schnabel; and the triumvirate of Francesco Clemente, Sandro Chia, and Enzo Cuuchi (I think Mr. Saatchi himself might have had a hand in their decline but let’s leave that to another debate, at another venue). They are not all bad artists, though some most assuredly are; the market certainly thinks so now—but it certainly didn’t think so then.


As much as I admire Damien Hirst and I do, the late 80s to mid 90s stuff anyway, in the art world it’s like admitting to reading the Daily Mail (that's another debate, I should do programming for the series). It is human nature to find something sexy knowing an artwork is worth a lot of money, or we wouldn't be so obsessed. But the Qatari’s, the alleged purchasers at auction for $19m of some metal shelving laden with garish tchotchkes: you have been forewarned. Beware of ever-decreasing insurance valuations.


In today’s terms, think of the most glaring recent examples of market madness. There is the $250,000,000 paid for Cezanne’s The Card Players, the highest price ever for a work of art, fittingly about gambling; $105,000,000 for Giacometti’s Walking Man to Lily Safra, call it gilding the gilded lily; and $150,000,000 for Jackson Pollacks and Willem de Koonings, and that’s meant to be plural. My question is for the market-equals-value pundits: couldn’t the money be put to better use even in the age of zero sum returns on cash, from charities to investments? Where is the upside from outer space?

"Gold and Picasso: Going Topless", for the Fall 2011 issue of Marc Faber's Gloom, Boom & Doom Report.

Gold and Picasso: Going Topless.


Sotheby’s (BID), the world’s largest publicly traded auctioneer said second-quarter earnings rose 48 percent for its best quarter ever, though the share price is, at the time of this writing, down over 40% since May 2011. It has been repeatedly pointed out that about every time the shares experience such a decline (and precipitous may be too gentle a description in this instance), a spike in the same direction for the art market in general is all but certain. That would not seem to portend a happy fall season for the upcoming spate of auctions, fairs, private treaty sales, exhibits, etc, etc. More like a happy fall in the loopy prices seen in the market of late, like the purchase for $250,000,000 of a Cezanne painting, the Card Players. Throw in the downgrading of the USA—how they deserve even an AA+ beggars belief, if I performed as badly surely I’d struggle for a B-; the imminent collapse of Europe; and the summer sacking of the UK in riots that witnessed mass pillaging and worse. It was always clear if widespread hardship rendered people unable to buy food, they’d ultimately take it. Rice was among the items depicted in the arms of London looters. Thus, all the ingredients would seem to be in place for the ideal recipe for the death knell of the art market as we know it.


Guess what? Not for the sake of being a gratuitous contrarian, but I am still bullish for the upcoming 2011-12 art market, and foresee records tumbling, not to the downside but rather falling upwards as new highs will be achieved before there is any palpable correction. Talking about fundamentals, the factors fueling the recent frenetic art market activities are only becoming magnified in the face of such worldwide jitters and uncertainly. Shares? If 500-point intraday swings don’t make you queasy, I am sure there are some strategic opportunities on the horizon. Currencies? I don’t think anyone in their right mind would proffer a guess as to the short term gyrations we are about to experience, other than the Swiss Franc seems poised to continue to behave like a balloon freshly filled with helium. Property? Still a mixed bag, with only the best of the best in the top regions performing, and there are less top regions by the day. Commodities? A whipsaw investment not for the unwary as speculation about the sustainability of China’s continued growth, pressure on demand, and spiraling costs. Interest rates seem to reside full time in the doldrums, unless you find zero an exciting number. Cash is going to earn negative returns for the next two years according to Bernanke’s statement last week and bonds can’t go much higher—and there is no sovereign default risk with Picasso. In a macro sense, the USA appears to be morphing into the new Japan, according to Bill Gross (more or less), who runs the world’s biggest bond fund at Pacific Investment Management Co. quoted on Bloomberg.com. Such a grim scenario gives new meaning to the doom and gloom in the GBD Report, which perhaps should consider dropping the boom in favor of a few extra heaping portions of gloom and doom.


But every cloud has a gold lining, if you are an art collector or holder of physical gold, which seems to have been going topless all summer. Where will it stop? I can imagine $2,400 to $2,800 an ounce in the short term, in the same fashion as I can comfortably accept that sooner rather than later the $250m Cezanne record will be eclipsed, pushing further into the clouds the stratospheric value placed on unrepeatable trophy art. Gold equals Picasso, and Picasso = gold. Picasso is the measure of value against which all else in the art market is compared, not to mention Warhol hasn’t been faring too badly either, thank you very much. Let us put to rest the notion that art is an erudite, unknowable, illiquid vehicle seen as a frivolous pursuit of the wealthy to impress upon their friends. Previously I would have said it was a pastime led by the Greenwich, Connecticut hedge fund elite, but markets and investigations have pretty uniformly battered them all of late. Art is a store of value, a systematic, objectively (for the most part) measureable asset class viewed in such a way by more and more collectors, investors and institutions, even. As a whole, art has never been as liquid, global and covetable as it is now, from China to Brazil, New York (still) to Russia, and India and Europe (still). These are good times for art and will continue to be so, for at least the next year or two. Baring some unforeseen, unspeakable tragedy all things art will trend up, but even a cataclysmic event can add to art’s allure. People want art so badly nowadays they are literally prepared to steal it; there's been a spate of art thefts, it's that desirable.


Some rather curious art world manifestations (shenanigans?) that have come to light recently are the notion of a Special Purpose Acquisition Company (SPAC) to list on the London Exchange’s AIM, somehow involving art works and SplitArt, an actual art exchange to buy and sells shares in specific works of art. In their own (not entirely convincing) words: “SplitArt will operate the first regulated market for art, indeed the company is in the application process to obtain its license from the CSSF (financial sector supervisor of Luxembourg) and thus establish an electronic trading platform for art securities (MTF Multilateral Trading Facility) that will offer a wide audience access to a new transparent and potentially liquid market with low transaction costs.” I am not so sure how many people would be lining up to have their Picasso’s fractionalized like a time share in Florida, but one you can’t use for holidays. But stranger things have happened. Also, there are more and more funds with tangible collectibles as the core of their holdings like cars and wine, and more banks willing and eager to jump on board, from lending facilities to advisory services. These are all telltale signs of a maturing market with wider breadth and acceptance than at any prior stage in history. In my estimation, the plethora of new art initiatives, even the far-flung and unorthodox, is ineluctable evidence of the concept that art is more, much more, than a pretty picture. In effect, art is flying off the shelves faster than electronics in a London melee. We are in an age of art's rising economy; call me the voice of Boom amidst the chorus of Gloom & Doom. The right art is a safe harbor in today's rocky waters and a great place to dock cash.

$12 Million Drivel: What a Cow

“Bright colors do better than pale colors. Horizontal canvases do better than vertical ones. Nudity sells for more than modesty, and female nudes for much more than male. A Boucher female nude sells for ten times the price of a male nude. Figurative works do better than landscapes. A still life with flowers is worth more than one with fruit, and roses are worth more than chrysanthemums. Calm water adds value (think of Monet’s Water Lilies); rough water brings lower prices (thin maritime pictures). Shipwrecks bring even less.


Pure-bred dogs are worth more than mongrels, and racehorses more than cart horses. For paintings which include game birds, the more expensive it is to hunt the bird, the more the bird adds to the value of the painting; a grouse is worth tree times as much as a mallard. There is an even more specific rule, offered by New York private dealer David Nash; paintings with cows never do well. Never. “


I always read books non-linearly, and started Don Thompson’s “The $12 Million Stuffed Shark” from the back. With an ending like that I am beginning to wish I never started. Even from someone who appreciates the comfy bedfellows of art and money, I find this drivel, even if true, a bore.

hong kong art fair: a feint whiff (of business and ai weiwei)

Judd Tully provided excellent HK art fair coverage for artinfo.com. He noted that In the first few hours of the preview, one dealer sold to a European collector she already knew. Another gallery that featured a Chinese star “fielded significant interest” at $2 million and then sold a print for $15,000. A New York gallery sold Asian art to a US museum and NY collector, well worth the trip, I am sure. But there was an actual sale to an actual Chinese: a watercolor for $5,000. So the good news is that there truly is a burgeoning Asian art scene…if your goods are $5,000 or less. In the coming years though, it seems all but certain the machine will gear up to join the international parade assimilating wave after wave of art. I was surprised Judd didn’t mention Ai Weiwei which must have been like a stale cloud hanging over the fair; or maybe, with business as usual there was nothing more than a feint whiff.

The Sun-Herald, Sydney, Australia Interview by Andrew Taylor

Last year, you predicted that we would soon see a billion-dollar work of art. How many years away do you think that is? 

I say confidently in 3-5 years a painting will sell for $1b.

Who do you think is likely to shell out that amount of cash? 

Someone worth more than $1b. An obviously very rich man or woman, probably in a filed such as commodities, shipping or inherited wealth.

Do you think it would be made public or remain a private transaction? 

In the facebook days we live in, nowadays every time you fart its Google-able. I don't even believe the concept of private information is any longer possible or viable.

We've seen $100 million + paid for a Picasso at Christie's, $110 mill for a Jasper Johns flag and $104m for a Giacometti sculpture. And you've wrote about the $1 billion block sale of Andy Warhols. How do you explain this art price arms race? 

The art arms race is being driven by a few things: unheralded unencumbered wealth from natural resources as much as from the formation of information behemoths like Google, Microsoft et al. Then throw into the equation China, India, Russia, South America, and the Middle East and you have more than an arms race, a veritable feeding frenzy. To top it off, there will be no more van Goghs, Monets, Picassos, Warhols or even Basquiats.

In the competition to acquire art, who is winning? Do public galleries have any hope of competing? Who is winning? 

Not Charlie Sheen. Collectors who had the courage to go out on a limb with no collective consensus and buy art prior to high prices or even those that bought at high prices! Anyone with great art is winning. Many museums had the foresight to buy great stuff and continue to not only support new art but help define what get's canonized. Sure they can't compete in the $100m arena, but who says taste at those precipitous levels corresponds with quality? There is plenty of art around at all price points.

What single piece of work do you think will achieve the $1 billion price mark? An old Master like Da Vinci, such as Lady With An Ermine, or Picasso? Or a modern work? 

The $1b picture will be Picasso: after van Gogh cut off his ear and created the cult of personality, no artist has had as much far reaching impact and influence coupled with a degree of virtuosic achievement in a such a stylistic array. This feat has never been equaled not to mention the colorful and grand life-and tragic if you were married to him, his child or his grandchild. Unless maybe it’s Warhol, who in addition to creating such a multitude of masterworks, was shot and survived! 

Is the art market a bubble comparable to the US property market? 

The art market is no bubble, none at all. The difference form the late 80s runaway boom; 2007's frothy contemporary art speculators; and today, is that now we are faced with end-users fueling market activity. These are worldwide accumulators; whether for vanity or pure passion is not the issue, they are there and in force.

Will it burst? 

I see nothing on the horizon, short or intermediate term, to change the trajectory of the art market. The train will roar ahead.

Is acquiring art a trend that will be overtaken as the wealthy find other ways to spend money and show off? 

With ever increasing art prices, art will always be a handy place to show off. What better way to nail a few hundred million to the wall for the benefit and enjoyment of friends, family and associates? Art has the historic gravity and gravitas to please, entertain and amuse for ages and ages-and ages to come.

Do you have nay thoughts on which Picasso could fetch $1b?

Unfortunately, i don't know enough about the specific oeuvre of monumental paintings by Picasso to predict which, he painted so much, and I am far from an expert.

Are there any in private hands that could potentially be sold in the next few years?

There is zero doubt that every billion dollar painting that will hit the market in the coming years, and there will be more than one, is in private hands now. I heard George Soros is predicting a setback in art market in the short term; yes admittedly one would be stupid to lock horns with Soros, but if he could, he wouldn't make billions this time shorting the art market, I believe he is flatly wrong.

more crap on the artmarket: a lecture on art as asset for a bank.

Alfred Barr, the first curator at one of the very first museums of modern art (that would be the Museum of Modern Art in New York, which opened in 1929), stated that art is more important than war. I think that is a profound and telling statement especially in light of the worldwide political upheaval today at the same time as the attention for art and the higher and higher prices it seems to garner.


I consider art and the voracious collecting so much in the press today, a healthy disease, and a profitable one at that. I left my family in the Bahamas yesterday which was a 22-hour trip to be here today. That shows how desperate I am for a forum to think and speak more about art, or the fact I wanted to get away from my kids. There’s also an art fair in Cologne tomorrow, another in Brussels at the same time and a few client’s to see in Switzerland. So please excuse my jet-lag!


But art has long been about money from a fund set up in Paris in 1904 to speculate on paintings – they quadrupled their money in 10 years, to the $54m that was paid for Van Gogh’s Irises in 1987 and $82.5m in 1990 for the portrait of his doctor, Dr Gachet.


High prices for art is nothing new. It’s just the breadth of the market that has exploded and the price levels. I should say markets, as there are many distinct offshoots. And the explosion has been to the tune of billions. The contribution from developing markets like China, India, Russia, the Middle East, and South American play a big role in this phenomenon.


It’s been some time since we have been inching closer and closer to what I predict will be the onset of the billion dollar single work of art, something I have been thinking about for a few years now. I only just got a call this morning from the Sun Herald in Sydney about this notion.


Here is a bit of inside information: A Cezanne painting, The Card Players, recently sold privately for the largest sum ever recorded for a painting: $250m. Try today and raise $50m for a private equity deal or property transaction vs. selling a 1960s Warhol. For the Warhol, I could raise twice the amount in half the time. I know as I recently offered the sum of an office building for one and was summarily turned down. In fact, its more a problem today that great art is so valued that no one wants to sell (the good stuff, anyway) which partly accounts for why prices have been going up so swiftly.


I also recently tried to pry away the entire contents of a very high profile private collection for an unimaginable sum in the stratosphere, but the reply to my unsolicited offer was “not even tempted”.


This sentiment, bordering on shocking, hits the nail on the head: Where else can you put your money today and look for steady and healthy returns? What are the alternatives? Stocks, banks (with near 0% interest), gold, oil, property, cash? So much for the old adage that cash is king, today cash is like a hot potato: nobody wants to hang onto it for too long.


Amazingly, not even billions could tempt owners of vast private collections today: art is seen as a safe harbor in times of continued economic uncertainty. Namely, the returns they have achieved in the past and, as importantly, continue to expect to achieve in the future. The most distinguishing part of some of today's mega collections are that they reside in freeports, outside the jurisdiction of taxing authorities, and are viewed (not with eyes but) strictly as a fully fledged asset class.


There has been a mad dash with money flowing into tangible assets such as collectibles of all stripes ahead of expected inflation. But there is something a bit sad about the situation when people buy cars they don’t drive, wine they don’t drink, houses they don’t live in and art they don’t see. In my case, you trip over it in every corner of my house, thankfully my kids not only respect it they appreciate it and I have proven more likely to damage it (through carelessness) then they or their friends.


I have lectured on the subject of pricing art at both Sotheby’s and Christies which have accredited institutes of art in both New York and London. I am probably the only person participating in the market that will admit that most artworks have different prices depending on the knowledge of the prospective buyers in front of it. That’s one of the characteristics that differentiates art for the uninformed and uninitiated and why pricing knowledge is so important. Services like Artnet.com and Artprice.com provide the capacity to research past pricing history at auction so that is one clear way to avoid being caught out.


There are speculators trading virtually around the clock in Warhol’s with their noses against the screen like on a trading floor. A 40-inch square painting is like a 60s Ferrari - a market I still don't understand though I collect cars too, one similarly scaled painting can sell for $60k or $60m, and same with the cars. But that is also why there is something to be said for an artist like Hirst-with so much production floating around there’s plenty of goods to feed an ever-growing market. Not to be cynical of course.


I tried to internet research the numbers for the British Rail Pension Trust which put together an art fund across many different collecting categories in the 70s to hedge against inflation. With returns achieved in excess of 11%, they handily accomplished their goal. The funny thing was that the info was contained in a prospectus from an art hedge fund fully illustrated by a series of technical analysis graphs depicting how art has historically outperformed everything from stocks to gold! The times have changed.


I had dinner recently with some friends in finance and they expressed popular misconceptions about art and the market. The first was that art is illiquid and the market miniscule. Maybe in the recent past (i.e. just about 10 years ago where markets didn’t constrict, they evaporated during downturns), but that has demonstrably been proven not to be the case this time around in the latest down cycle. Art has outperformed the expectations of most everyone involved.


Another misconception is that if a person buys art in depth, it’s enough to move a market. I am afraid art is a mature enough market today with more than enough breadth to far outweigh the intent of any one person or small group to manipulate things on a grand scale. People only wish they could impact markets like the Hunts did with the silver market in the 70s, and perhaps people like Saatchi did in the 1990s.


But this is clearly no longer the case. Sure there is some market manipulation where dealers or big collectors try and drive up prices at auctions to protect and bolster their inventory, but that could end up being a very expensive proposition. And I doubt someone pays $40m for a Warhol with such an end in mind. Though I admit, art remains the least transparent, and just about totally non-regulated multi-dollar business.


Another fallacy in art market perceptions is that art has no inherent value. This again I believe to be blatantly false. My point is that quality is not an elusive concept, that art, good art, has a provable and sustainable value. Since it came off the walls of caves it’s been coveted. And will continue to be so, well past many current and future wars. Which is a good thing. I sound like a preacher or worse, politician.


Appreciating, collecting and investing in art is pretty much like anything: you have to develop a feeling for it, a sense gained by taking the time to look and read; and, if you do so, it’s a never ending road of continuing education but one of the most enjoyable. Going to galleries is the only free lunch left in town. For me, the beauty of art is that it is all so largely undefined as a practice, career and even the market itself; and, that it morphs quicker than the latest ipad model.


If you like art and have a feeling for it, or a trusted advisor, it is also a pleasant way to make good money. And the dividends-which in case of art are visible- are there in good times and bad. Art could be a very lucrative holding, but you must be in the know to prosper, as it’s a competitive world and not for unwary


I was asked to address a few bullet points:

• Why do collectors collect? Because they can. And its an enjoyable, possibly lucrative way to make great returns, both in the short and long term.

• Is art a real asset class to invest in? Yep, and more.

• What are the main categories? There are too many to recount; from first edition early Superman comics to old masters, Scandinavian Ceramics, Chinese, Indian, African, Middle Eastern classic and contemporary art, as wide a net as the imagination can cast.

• How do you buy and sell? Know your markets cold before you venture to buy and or sell in galleries and auctions.

• Examples of returns (vs inflation if possible). You can safely beat inflation and possibly the stock market indexes buying quality art at present market values.

• How do you value art? Highly. I just follow the market: past, present and my idea of future value.

Art from A-Z. GQ Magazine, Art Special - May 2011

Art from A-Z. It’s a Mad, Mad World: the Market and Machinations from Soup Cans to Nuts 




Artists: There are many wonderful things about the arts and artists, especially the childlike innocence involved in the act of making things as a career choice. Artists have license to spend a lifetime involved in childlike creativity; they never have to leave the sandbox, let alone they get paid handsomely for it. A dose of mischievousness and eccentricity is not only encouraged but rather expected. Slicing off your ear is considered a run of the mill hazard of the profession not to be questioned as out of the ordinary. The Korean video artist Nam June Paik said he became an artist so he could sleep in.

On the other hand, artists can be a capricious and self-serious lot. Correct me if I am wrong in assuming art never cured a strain of cancer. Some artists certainly carry themselves in such a fashion like peacocks with their feathers in full display. Some years ago I bought two artworks from a struggling artist who had been given the works as gifts. When I tried to sell the pieces years on the results were astonishing: both artists independently declared the works not to be art. In fact, both pieces were more “art” then the art they normally exhibited—but both artists made efforts to preclude me from selling the works I bought in good faith. It boiled down to issues of trying to control perceptions of the artists and their works.

Only in art can someone equally state that an object lifted off the street or appropriated from a newspaper or magazine is his or her creation and simultaneously declare that something made the old fashion way is garbage. Among the American artist Richard Prince’s most prized and valuable works are a series of photographs “re-photographed” from a Marlborough advert. I bet the original photographer of the ad was less than amused that he got a stipend for his efforts while Prince has been and continues to be paid princely sums (well into the seven figures) for his efforts. Anyway, I sold both disputed works of mine at auction as the houses don’t seem overly concerned about the intent of the artist when it comes to what is or isn’t art.

Auctions: Auctions, like gallery and fair openings were not always the glamorous, star-studded events they are today. Art and auctions were largely ho-hum enterprises peopled by professionals in the trade. Nowadays, auctions are very public social forums where some love nothing better than waving around their paddles like swinging dicks in the most public displays of consumption.

But when it comes to buying and selling at auction, you had better know what you’re doing as you are invariably up against the savviest purchasers in the world. And these days that really does mean the world over, as we are truly in an interdependent, global environment after years of lip service to that effect. In the past, dealers banded together at public sales to keep prices artificially low, and then bid amongst themselves after a given sale. Today it’s the reverse, or so it is said. But even if you own buckets of Basquiats and you obscenely bid one up auction to bolster the market, nevertheless he who he who plays with a paddle pays.

Bloomberg: Bloomberg.com is the new art magazine of the 21st century in the money obsessed world we reside in. Most people in art only look at the pictures and adverts in traditional art magazines unless they or their artists are themselves written about. To read, learn and discover more about today’s art forget specialist magazines, try websites, like the FT, Wall Street Journal—the financial press and fashion magazines (and er, GQ) do a much better job covering the territory without trying to impress with unknowable art speak so often encountered in the art journals.

Commissions: Commissions can range from 50% to a gallery when they represent an artist or 2% if you sell a £25m painting. Auction houses today greedily grab 25% on the buy side—you must add that to your winning purchase price, not a good thing to forget during bidding. Not to mention they take a sizeable chunk on the sell side too. Who said you can’t get it both ways? But its all a giant gray area when it comes to percentages in art transactions both public and private where the rule of thumb typically is: get what you can. There are certain galleries, without mentioning names (hint: one has been involved in several landmark lawsuits), that don’t just go after a slice of the sale proceeds, but make a grab for the whole lot. It never seems to be enough, which fact is rarely if ever communicated to the collectors or for that matter, the artists.

Collectors & Connoisseurship: Sadly, there appears a diminished amount of passion in the art world (for the art anyway) as the days of connoisseurship are mostly behind us; old school collectors who never sell and artists with no regard for private planes and Hello Magazine belong more and more in a display case in a natural history museum. Mind you, I find nothing wrong trading the multi-billion dollar Hirst market—the fact that you can rather pleases me, but let's not confuse the big money deals with appreciation.

Having no means has never been an impediment to a true collector. In the past ten years there has been more growth in the worldwide art market than in the previous 100 years. The first time contemporary art entered the realm of high-end, expensive evening sales at auction was in 1997 when a children’s heart specialist went to jail for embezzling money from a surgery fund in order to feed his collecting habit. Such is the fervor that grips collectors that one could even steal money from the hands of dying children to fulfill the desire for more acquisitions. That’s what I call a hardcore collector.

Strangely it’s not unusual today for some collectors to buy with their ears rather than eyes; as who’s buying art seems for some to eclipse what it is they are actually purchasing. But whereas in the past it was critics and collectors like Saatchi that were moving markets, today it’s more likely to be what’s in the shopping carts of Prince, Koons and Hirst that collectors are tripping over themselves to emulate.

Contemporary: No one could ever have imagined how art fared so well in light of the crushing recession that brought the world’s economy to its collective knees. But clearly trends have shifted today—in the recent past, $25m Jeff Koons sculptures were being flipped like burgers on the resale market before the crates were even unpacked, and at the same time, you couldn’t give a Monet away. Today, contemporary art is a long way from selling for the prices of office buildings but Picasso’s, Monet’s and Van Gogh’s are reaching dizzying heights as we are in the midst of a flight to quality, with art viewed as a safe harbor in uncertain economic times.

Nevertheless, even contemporary art is gradually clawing its way back to (obscene) 2007 levels. Cash is king no longer holds any credence with most of the financials still resoundingly in the toilet: in effect, things are king, and art of all stripes looks better and better to more and more. We are even seeing a return to waiting lists and deep six-figure price tags for the soup de jour, today’s latest hottest young thing. Whether that’s a good thing I leave to you to decide.

Critics: Another casualty of the recent transformation of the art world into a vast money pit is the slow death of the critic. To make an impact today, an art writer has to become a judge on a reality TV show. Over the years, the balance of power has shifted from critics and dealers who used to be able to make or break a career to artists and collectors (and artists that collect, see above) who are now ruling the roost. Even a negative article by critics past was capable of moving markets up or down, those days are way behind us. Soon critics may be viewed as a quaint profession of the past replaced by the glossies and movers and shakers that rule the roost of the market.




Design Art: This is an artificial term recently coined by an auction house to market high- end furniture like art. Design aped the art market releasing objects in editions, usually of 12 for no rhyme or reason, and in the process raised the bar of what you can get away with charging for a chair. And it worked: Marc Newson, the poster boy for design art shows at Larry Gagosian Gallery and has sold one for $2.5m: Conran eat your heart out. But in the recession, the design market plummeted, suffering from premature ageing disease where tragically a small child goes through an accelerated process ending up with the characteristics of an 80 year old before reaching their teens. Only in its infancy, design soared then hit the floor, though look for it to steadily recover over time.




Death: Death is welcomed and embraced on all fronts in the art world. Firstly, its handy for prying masterpieces out of long held private collections (as is another “D” word, divorce), secondly it’s a surefire way to lift an artists market out of the doldrums, imagine there finally being a definitive cause for no further spot paintings? As for content in art, death like religion goes a long way to make an artist look as serious as mature.

Equality: Or rather the lack of equality for females and minorities that still exists in the art world in relation to opportunities in galleries, museums and moreover, the effect in the marketplace. If Mary Heilmann, one of America's leading abstract painters had a penis and Brice Marden's looks, perhaps the disparity in their auction records wouldn't be, respectively, $182,500 vs. $9.6m.

Experts: Not only are most curators, advisers, and dealers professionally non-qualified (many unqualified too) but also art is the last bastion of unregulated, multi-billion dollar business activity in existence. Perhaps curator and adviser are among the most misused descriptive words in the art world after the over-use of the word important in relationship to describing art works.




Emin: Since moving to the UK some six and a half years ago, I have read no fewer than 1,297 magazine features on Tracey Emin and another few thousand on Sam Taylor Wood. The endless media fascination boggles the mind; in the States, over the past 10 years prior to my departure there have been maybe a handful of articles in the popular press about contemporary artists, though that has admittedly changed over the recent past with the advent of art and artists as media fodder worldwide. Must be the press has run out of other things to obsess about—you can only report on reality TV stars so much I guess. The Daily Mail on a Sunday devoted an entire page 3 to Tracey’s recent relationship status and Taylor Wood’s widely reported social exploits give new meaning to the “boy” in boyfriend. It’s just a reflection of the mainstreaming of artists where in the past art was considered erudite and for the few, now its like open season for grouse.




Frieze: Art fairs, most of which I have actively participated in at one time or another (and been thrown out of, hard to imagine), are the most effective and convenient way to do reconnaissance about what is afoot at any given time. They are wonderful information gathering affairs as well as the closest the art world gets to fostering a sense of community; we all travel to the same destinations and socialize with many of the same people across multiple time zones. But the fairs are also deeply hierarchical enterprises. The decision making process as to who gets to have a booth, and in which section that booth is located in are based largely on political factors. Even who gets admitted as a guest and when (there are earlier entry slots for the VIP VIP’s) are status-laden choices by the powers that be. When you go to an emerging art fair like Frieze, I would guess fully 85% of what is on view will become worthless over time. Perhaps more.

With the nonstop attendant social flurry, the Miami Basel fair is undoubtedly number one on the charts for schmoozing the art party circuit. However, in hot market times at fairs there is competition to purchase new material, and fast, which in such a public forum is not the ideal way to understand and participate in the market. Art should be a slow burn, a contemplative process, not an ad hoc, spur of the moment, decision-making experience.




Gagosian: Safe to say most artists and galleries are like cottage industry entrepreneurs except for a gallery business model like that of Larry Gagosian who appears intent on nothing less than world domination, establishing beachheads far and wide, from New York to Athens via Paris, London and Rome. There is no one in gallery land in his rearview mirror. You could make a flow chart of the prominent families from which his entire staff hales.




Giacometti: People are still endlessly speculating that this artist is overvalued and what that artist is making is not even art. But then again, there are also awful Picasso paintings. In the breadth of an artist’s career you encounter a bell's curve of what is good, bad and ugly; but that is a good thing as it creates access points for people to enter the market at differing price levels. For instance not everyone could afford a Giacometti sculpture (the last public record of £75m didn’t help) but you can find what is considered a less prized etching that is almost as gripping.




Galleries: Sterile places where are you are judged from head to toe by well-dressed adolescents regarding your status and prospective wallet capacity. They also display art and usually have a uniform architecture composed of clinical white walls and cement floors. Though you cannot dismiss the vital role of galleries in presenting art, archiving the activities of their artists and disseminating the art far and wide to collectors and institutions, why do most have to fulfill that role with such snobbery? Galleries are also about control and sometimes do not have the interests of the artists they represent at heart when at times they forsake opportunities by keeping the works close to their chest rather than facilitate sharing (commissions) with other galleries by spreading works to additional markets.




Hirst: For better or worse and to a greater extent than anyone before, Damien Hirst has done more to spread the word about contemporary art to all corners of the globe from New Jersey to New Delhi. From humble beginnings by pure chutzpah, determination and raw talent, he has risen to the status of global brand and made zillions in the process. Living in London in art, not a single day goes by that his name doesn’t pass often-pursed lips. He tackles the big issues of the day such as life, religion and death and everything between. Though he repeats himself endlessly and without fear that alone cannot detract from his vast accomplishments. His spot paintings refer to pharmaceuticals and most of us don’t get up in the morning without having a personal relationship to popping a pill of one sort or another. And his animals suspended in formaldehyde are the natural conclusion of the traditional still life. Hirst has made his cake (or had it fabricated) and is eating it all the way to Coutts & Co.

His most famous work is the floating shark caught between inciting terror and trembling, between life and death, entitled “The Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living”. With Bono in tow, Hirst has become an international celebrity too, with bona fide rock star status and the cash flow to match. There was even recent coverage in the Economist solely on the past, present and future financial outlook of his oeuvre. As for the wrongly long- term bearish sentiment in the article, I forecast in 10 to 15 years, the market for Hirst fakes alone will total billions. Though his latest foray abandoning his legion of assistants and attempting to make paintings by his own hand flopped, if he sticks to this long enough, I am sure he will master it as well. Measuring one’s life and accomplishments against Hirst is a no- win situation engendering a new sentiment, namely: “The Impossibility of Damien Hirst in the Mind of Someone Not Him”.




Haggling: The difference between neophyte art collectors versus a jaded buyer is that a newcomer thinks they are buying something with a designated price requiring payment. A professional collector is like someone negotiating down the price of a container of milk, not paying for it for two years, and then canceling the deal because the milk went sour. Newbies have no idea what they can get away with in the snake pit of art. They are our favorite dupes. Just kidding.

Hedge Funders: When the market for hedge funds crashed, and crash it did, the traders picked up where their funds left off, trading in art. Stevie Cohen among the most renowned has accumulated what I call an encyclopedia collection, everything he buys, usually for about $158,000,000 each, is the iconic, stereotypical image you would expect to see depicted in a reference book.




Insiders: There are various ways to legally insider trade in the art world including front running major museum shows prior to public announcements. This entails being privy to information on the programming of a major museum (or gallery) ostensibly through board members or employees, as to who will be featured in upcoming shows and then buying (and selling) on such non-public knowledge for quick profit. I wouldn’t dream of it.




Impressionists: What people don’t realize is that when the Impressionists were first exhibiting their sun-dappled effusions of color and light they were considered cutting-edge contemporary and unanimously derided by the public and critics alike. That was before they became surefire means for cash strapped museums to bring in a crowd and multi-million dollar trophies to impress upon your peers.




Immortality: The notion of evading death by making lasting marks for posterity endlessly serves as the motivation and content of artists and art.




Juries: The mostly arbitrary groups making arbitrary decisions about who wins arbitrary prizes like the Turner. Once you do a certain amount of weeding to separate wheat from chaff, art is a personal, transcendent thing, not a sports competition. In the end, these events are nothing more than marketing schemes to reel in more bodies to hapless institutions.




Kenny Schachter: Born overweight and alienated in the suburbs of New York with no notion of art or the commercial structures surrounding it. Since then, like an idiot savant, I've come to curate shows at some of the world's most prestigious museums, written books on the subject and taught on the graduate level at institutions such as Columbia University, NYU and the Royal College of Art. If your skin is thick enough, art truly is a (relatively) democratic realm with a (relatively) low entry threshold. Go ahead and give it a try.




Koons: The (self-created) myth goes that he was a commodities broker who went from hawking them on the trading floor to creating them for collectors. Koons’ work has always expressed a color-filled world of childlike wonderment for life, perhaps aside from the “Made in Heaven” series where he is depicted having explicit sex with Ciccolina, his former porn star wife, in just about every orifice imaginable. Today, Koons is best known for his sculptures of inflatable pool toys cast in aluminum and elaborate shiny fabrications of balloon dogs, hearts and flowers, made at a cost of millions and sold for many times more. One of his most notable pieces, entitled Three Ball Total Equilibrium Tank (Two Dr J Silver Series, Spalding NBA Tip-Off) from1985 consisted of three basketballs suspended in a tank which besides suspending belief, in all probability spawned the vitrines of Hirst.

Leisure: Art is a fun, social, life transforming experience not to mention a great way to kill a few hours. It’s also a rare instance when shopping without spending can actually be enjoyable. One can peruse galleries and spectate without getting bogged down by the responsibility and overtly physical thing-ness of collecting and owning art. There is so much new stuff to be learned every day by reading about and viewing art. It’s not all about money; art is the only free lunch left in town as galleries and most museums generally don’t charge admission.




Liquor: The art world has moved on from absinthe to abstinence. Gone are the freewheeling days artists were seen as reckless characters brawling in bars and living a life of bohemia, now its tea and teetotalers. There are paintings entitled “The Absinthe Drinker” from Manet, Degas, and Picasso as well as tales from the legendary Cedar Tavern in New York half a century later where de Kooning, Rothko, and Pollack drank in a dank setting before most were banned from returning for bad behavior. It’s also the place that cemented the Abstract Expressionist school of painting. Skip forward another 50 years and there are colorful stories of the YBA’s going on week long benders, waking in parks, prisons in puddles (of pee). There was Tracey drunk on TV and Damien serving up his willy on a tray to unsuspecting Groucho patrons. Yet today, artists are too preoccupied tending to their careers, stock portfolios and manor house gardens. I’ll drink to that.

Money: Art used to be more like a religion, with educational, historic, technical, analytic and cultural aspirations; but over time, as most religions came to be dominated and replaced by the blind pursuit of material wealth, art followed suit, and swiftly at that. Forget Pop, Minimalism, Conceptualism and any other -isms you can conjure, most art now is all about Economic-ism.




Museums: The museum sphere, more mid-level than Tate or Serpentine scale, resembles small town politics, with little money and little opportunity to make a sizable impact. In a time when even the biggest institutions such as the Metropolitan Museum in New York, have been so strapped for cash they can’t paint the walls between exhibits, museums are losing their capacity to make an impact. Being in such financial straits has in turn reduced the scope and adventurousness of public museums programming capabilities and thereby removed the stinger of these venues. Many times, they can no longer afford to make a difference, instead opting for easy to swallow, crowd pleasing events (see Impressionists above). With less and less funding, and more and more cuts, there is sadly less at stake for institutions across the board.




Networking: From the endless parties, openings, fairs, auctions and biennials, it’s all rather exhausting and nearly impossible to keep up, but keep up one must: out of sight out of mind. That is not even taking into consideration online social networking sites: facebook, Twitter, blah blah, blah. Its enough to make one long for the simple days when there were a mere 6 contemporary art galleries in the world, but there is no going back, if anything it will only get worse.




Old masters: Art is a world of specialization akin to medicine; each niche has its own language both visual, visceral and verbal. There are antiquities, renaissance paintings, British modernism, American painting and so on and so forth. There is no such thing as generalizing when it comes to art that one can have an umbrella understanding of the overall field without a great deal of studying and acquired knowledge. To think one can jump across genres and make the leap from an ability to grasp meaning of one aspect of art to another is foolhardy. For instance, Old Masters is a language I just do not understand, I wouldn’t know a Holbein from a Holiday Inn painting, and I’m not afraid or stupid enough to think otherwise. When it comes to contemporary art, I feel an intuitive relationship with the works enough to render a judgment before there is a collective consensus by other professionals. With so many experts in the field you had better know your stuff or you will be left with your pants down.




Pricing: Funny enough, the same piece of art can have as many prices as the depth of knowledge and experience of the particular buyer permits. A collector off the street might not be aware that discounts are built into the asking prices of art as they are taken for granted by long term collectors (see H for Haggling). Because galleries and the creeps that work for them can be so intimidating, potential purchasers may not venture to ask for any savings off the asking price or timidly attempt to shave as little as 5 or 10% off. But the bold and beautiful collectors are not beyond asking for anything and everything up to 50% or more off the ticket price! It never hurts to ask. But with the market firmly in rebound mode, we are almost back to the point where you are lucky to achieve a 10-15% savings vs. the 20-25% that was only recently available.

In the not too distant past, a dealer could ostensibly buy a work at public auction, as previously mentioned these were sparsely attended professional events, and turn around the next day and quadruple the price in the gallery or at an art fair. There was no way to know, no system of checks and balances. This was radically changed with the advent of widely accessible Internet pricing databases like Artnet or Artprice, which are cheap pay-per-search tools that have revolutionized the way art business is conducted. These services entail researching sales results in the worldwide auction markets and can be conducted according to parameters such as titles, dates, sizes and mediums of specific works. Buying a work of art has never been the same.

Visiting the Basel Art Fair in Miami last year I eyed a Warhol portrait on canvas for a client when a friend called spotting serious dialogue going on with another potential buyer in front of the work I admired. I quickly made my way to the booth of the dealer and noticed he was in serious conversation with a doctor and medical entrepreneur I had only just had breakfast with that day. The art community is like picking up a rock and finding 300 intertwined worms underneath, it’s that incestuous. I parked myself behind my “friend’s” back and began my surreptitious counter-negotiations. Unbeknownst to the good doctor, due to my friendly relationship with the dealer, I was told what was offered on the painting but that the doctor wanted a further day to conduct due diligence on the price history for such a work. I was in turn offered a price six-figures less if I pulled the trigger then and there, which I did and made my way completely unnoticed during and after the ordeal.

Picasso: Picasso said anyone can learn to paint but it takes a lifetime to learn to paint like a child. Picasso is the benchmark, the gold standard against which all levels of creativity are measured. A prodigious life and output produced countless works in a multitude of media. He went through styles as quickly and thoroughly as he went through the woman he depicted. Picasso was among the first market savvy practitioners well versed in the value of his art and not shy about manipulating things to achieve vast material wealth during his lifetime. Picasso was not above pre-dating his recent output to reflect the fact his earlier works fetched more money than the later ones. Clearly Koons and Hirst could stand to learn from the master and do not have a monopoly on schemes and shenanigans in their capacity to print money.

Private Museums: Although it used to be that museums were museums: independent, quasi-objective, publically supported institutions with posterity at heart, today they are being replaced by private vanity enterprises resembling ornate bonnet ornaments atop a wealthy patron’s prized automobile. Private museums are becoming arbiters of taste and in the process, market value and credibility boosters. Or at least they are trying hard to have such an impact.

Prostitution: When it comes to making, buying, selling and presenting art we are, to a certain extent, all hookers of one stripe or another, which I readily acknowledge. But I know an art dealer of sorts, always surrounded by a bevy of girls, unfailingly gorgeous. When I questioned him about the somewhat seedy appearance of such a mélange, he replied: “How did we meet?” True enough, I did ask him to fix a friend up (yes, a friend), though it never occurred to me he’d be chartering for the occasion. He went on to relate how many billionaire collectors he made business with out of his procurement activities in the escort sector. As Malcolm X put it, by any means necessary.

Quotes: When a dealer entered Picasso’s studio, viewed a new painting and queried: “What is that painting about?” Picasso shot back, “About 50 grand to you.”




Reserves: When you put up an artwork at auction there is a high and low estimate of what it is expected to achieve on sale; as a seller, you are held to your reserve that cannot exceed the low estimate, so you must take care. The last sale of Impressionist and Modern sales in New York saw some extraordinarily high estimates, which bordered on avarice and resulted in very public, horrible failures. When art doesn’t sell at auction it becomes burnt (publicly scorned and hard to resell). In art, its seller beware!

Sculpture: Objects are inherently more difficult to collect than paintings as they take up more space and are not as portable. There was an article in the Wall Street Journal years ago to the effect large paintings will always be worth less due to the real estate necessitated to exhibit them. Nevertheless the art world is always after the next new thing and now sculpture is the new painting.

Students: The mindset of many students in today’s art academies seem to be as much about seeking tuition in PR, self-promotion, and networking as about learning to draw a nude accurately. After Marcel Duchamp put a urinal in an exhibition and declared it art in 1917, the Yellow Pages have became an integral tool of the artist. The readymade, Duchamp’s term for plucking an industrial object out of a catalogue and re-contextualizing it in a gallery setting and calling it art had been replaced by what I call the had-it-made—where a few calls to a fabricator can overcome any shortcomings in virtuosity. How many art stars of today could draw other than a stick figure (including Hirst)?

Also, the caution and conservatism you see at the graduate level in art is mindboggling; they are often no different than business or law departments, a professional finishing school readying the mini entrepreneurs to crack the art market. One student during critiques I was giving told me that a known visiting contemporary artist told her not to use a particular material for a work, which assertion in my estimation had absolutely no foundation in logic. The visiting artist probably couldn’t think of anything else to say, though I admit you really are on the spot in some of those critique sessions having to think on your feet all day to needy young artists. So what did the artist do? Of course she trashed and remade her work. At the grad level at least, it’s about connecting with guest lecturers and visiting artists and paving the way to a lucrative niche of one’s own.

Skulls: Damien Hirst has forever ruined the impact and desirability of the representation of the skull by flogging it to death in the form of diamonds, prints, shirts, jackets, paintings, sculptures…




Saatchi: When it comes to certain collectors and supporters, you can't deny someone like Charles Saatchi his due for his relentless mining of artistic talent; it’s a full time job and a physically strenuous one at that. Constantly chasing young, new art (with my bad sense of direction) is more than a fulltime job way too exhausting and expensive to think about. But in the process, he rather foolishly dealt away masterpieces that would have permitted him to trade into retirement in perpetuity. Instead, Saatchi horse-traded his way into a lower tax bracket. The saying rings true that you sell art to make money and keep it to make wealth.

Traders: Art has become a fully-fledged asset class. If you want to get seriously involved you had better know what you are doing and have great access to information, as there are hordes with their noses constantly pressed against their computer screens trading art like so much corn.




Undervalued: When the market resembled a crazed crack addict short of a fiver, I abstained for 3 years refusing to pay historic prices for art with no history. Today with lots of heat still whirling around so much art, I find prints and drawings to be inherently undervalued by the general flashy art collecting public and a great way to roll up your sleeves and jump in.




Value: People believe that art is only subjective, and lacking inherent value—though I can on one level understand why it entails a certain leap of faith to fathom paying tens of millions and more for what amounts to £6.86 of pigment, canvas and stretcher bars. But what cannot be overestimated is the point that once art came off the cave walls, it’s been covetously and conspicuously collected. Calculable measures exist that can be systematically applied to ascertain the inherent values of art. There is a laundry list of things that contribute to constitute value in the art world: who’s selling (the gallery and it’s reputation, and auction exposure), who's buying (the stature of the collectors), who's writing about it and which museum is exhibiting, or rather, whose private museum is supporting it.

A friend in finance, at the onset of the recession, said he’d hoped I realized the works I yearned for and dealt in would be rendered valueless. He obviously wasn’t the type to beg, borrow or steal for art. Though the recession has clearly and concretely caused a shift in what is sought after and effected values, we are today at historic high levels for art. For every bust in the art market lurks a bigger boom down the horizon and vice versa. The art market is a lovely, endless cycle, but one that seems to grow and grow over time with no bounds in sight.

Sure there continue to be plenty of naysayers and party poopers that moan that it’s an artificial bubble bound to burst. And true enough, there are many people in it for the wrong reasons, but this is also a good thing, as it only contributes to broaden the markets and create spillover opportunities for the various segments of art. With 1000-point intraday swings in stocks, interest rates at historic lows, banks teetering and companies uneven at best, art has never looked like a better place to be. And the dividend it throws off in good times and bad is the visual pleasure gained by looking. The continuing international economic instability is a major factor driving today’s market for art. And the ever increasing worldwide attention—there are more people today making, looking at, writing about, showing and buying art then at any previous time in history.




Van Gogh: He cut off his ear in an act of desperate, creative, destruction for reasons still little understood today; and, with one swift act of self-harming, he launched the cult of personality as we know it today in the world of art.




Vitrines: What began as a glass display box in a history or science museum became the signature framing device masterminded by Koons and Hirst to confer value on worthless basketballs and road kill.

Websites: As previously mentioned, forget art mags, there is artnet.com, bloomberg.com, artsjournal.com, artinfo.com, theartnewspaper.com, lindsaypollock.com, artforum.com. In fact, there’s barely any reason to go out of the house anymore.




Warhol: Andy Warhol dreamt about money, made art about money but never made the money he fantasized about till after his death. His auction record during his lifetime was a mere $385,000 in 1986 for a piece fittingly titled “200 One Dollar Bills” purchased by Paulina Karpides and recently sold by the same collector for $43,762,500, also fitting. For all his aspirations, Warhol was like George Best or American baseball player Hank Aaron: they expanded the audience to mass while opening future doors for athletes to earn corporate executive salaries, though Warhol was never able to sort it for himself like HIrst managed. The difference between Andy Warhol and Damien Hirst is that with Warhol it was all about fame and money; fame he achieved, wealth only posthumously. But there would be no Damien without dear old Andy.

X-rated: I am no prude but I find the countless art seen today comprised of frontal, explicit tits and ass in art in all manner, shape and form to be gratuitous and calculated to titillate. I’ll pass, thank you very much. That is what the internet was invented for.



YBA’s: Young British Art was once a significant art movement (perhaps the last) that put Brit art on the map. It was cemented by the triumvirate that saw Hirst make the art, Jopling exhibit it, and Saatchi buy it. Most of it was made to shock and that it did, if for if only for about 5 minutes, before seen more as schlock. Now the artists are no longer young and the statement by Jopling that the only significant art today is being made in London is as stale as the formaldehyde in the first (of many) tanks.

Zoo: Zoo was once an art fair for young, affordable, undiscovered art and artists, but since the art world came to resemble a zoo in the frenzy of primal, animalistic activity surrounding the market, it is now extinct.

the merchant is the enemy

“Le marchand—voila l’ennemi”, the merchant is the enemy, said Picasso (Making Modernism, Picasso and the Creation of the Market for 20th Century Art, Fitzgerald, 1995, University of California Press). If that was the case, it gives new meaning to sleeping with the enemy. In the same book, Picasso was quoted that he’d “like to live like a poor man with a lot of money.” In the grandeur he grew to inhabit, that is an expansive notion of poverty. Lastly, Renoir stated: “There’s only one indicator for telling the value of paintings, and that is the sales room” (ibid). You get the feeling he’d be fabricating today.

Cash is Crap, Sell the Kids, Buy Art

An executive at a top art insurance company told me that a Cezanne painting sold privately for $250m - that stands as the highest price ever paid for a single work of art to date. Not bad for some pigment on a bit of canvas. Many would say that such a lofty number is a ludicrous concept in a time of great political unrest and systemic poverty worldwide. I say why stop there; that the benchmark will steadily rise and in no time at all we will live to see the day of the $1-billion dollar painting. I can hardly wait. I feel entitled to have forged a life in aesthetics, and that you can now attain such high levels of remuneration only makes it that much more pleasant. So, in the age when cash is crap, not to mention the toxic dollar that has become the currency of choice for short sellers, the 1988 Christopher Wool painting Apocalypse Now sums it up perfectly: “SELL THE HOUSE, SELL THE CAR, SELL THE KIDS”. And buy art!

Art and Alcohol from London

I heard on the radio this morning that 200,000 will die in England from cheap alcohol; does that mean freely available or poor quality? Or both. Then I arrived at Heathrow at 7am and they were handing out samples of Baileys and it all became clear.


According to Kelly Crow in today’s Wall Street Journal (the 21st Century art mag), $375m of Richter’s have been sold since 2005 at auction. After recent London results of $11.5m and $5.1m for abstract paintings both small and large that went to China and Russia respectively, at the risk of exposing myself to (further) scrutiny and potential ostracism...I still think they are cheap.

walk like an egyptian

In the wild west of the art world, the last unregulated billion-dollar bastion of business, they do it like Egyptians with hands extended at 90 degree angles in opposite directions. In other words, they get backhanders and fronthanders.

sothebys 2011 feb auctions london

For a change, the biggest prices went for the smallest works; a bacon, dali and freud-14, 13 and 5 inches respectively. Finally, something matters more than size alone.

$1b baby.

An indisputable source reveals a painting recently sold for $250m, a Cezanne; not far from my prediction of a one billion dollar work of art.

first tier works

arguments aside about the marriage of art & economics, i read about a collector who only believes in the market viability of "first tier works"; but, oftentimes the greatest values lie in drawings and lesser paintings of well-known artists. the best works have what could be non-remunerative premiums built in at today's levels (i.e. $150m pieces).

Love is blind, money blinding.

“A&F (Art & Farce?) Markets proposes a new, centralised and liquid marketplace for art. Through its unique structure, A&F Markets allows investors to buy and sell ʻsharesʼ in major artworks (www.artfinance.fr)”. Sounds like a surefire measure to moneterize unsellable dogs in closets. Is this what we have been reduced to? Apparently.


The founders of the IGA Automobile Fund, hoping to raise $150m to buy and sell classic cars and predicting annual returns of 15%, claim classic cars have “outperformed almost all other commodities (Ingear, The Sunday Times, page 5, January 10, 2011)”. As much as I love cars, can anyone other than the CEO of IGA verify that?


Houses you don’t inhabit, wine you don’t drink, art you don’t see, and cars you don’t drive. Not to mention a $330,000 truffle—which you were meant to eat, but at that price I’d rather put it in a vitrine or bronze it. Is it 2007 all over again; can our memories be that short? It’s missionary materialism run amok. Love is blind, money blinding. Don’t get me wrong, I am in it deep.

It’s a Mad, Mad Art World: the Market and Machinations from Soup Cans to Nuts

Andy Warhol dreamt about money, made art about money but never made the money he fantasized about till after his death. His auction record during his lifetime was a mere $385,000 in 1986 for a piece fittingly titled “200 One Dollar Bills” purchased by Paulina Karpides and recently sold by the same collector for $43,762,500, also fitting.


The difference between Andy Warhol and Damien Hirst is that with Warhol it was all about fame and money; fame he achieved, wealth only posthumously. Hirst has made his cake (or had it fabricated) and is eating it all the way to Coutts & Co. With Bono in tow, today’s successful artist can become a celeb too, with bona fide rock star status and the cash flow to match. For all his aspirations, Warhol was like George Best or American baseball player Hank Aaron: they expanded the audience to mass while opening future doors for athletes to earn corporate executive salaries, though Warhol was never able to sort it for himself like HIrst managed. One could not exist without the other.


Art used to be more like a religion, with educational, historic, technical, analytic and cultural aspirations; but over time, as most religions came to be replaced by the blind pursuit of material wealth, art followed suit, and swiftly at that. Forget Pop, Minimalism, Conceptualism and any other -isms you can conjure, most art now is all about Economic-ism. Over the years, the balance of power has shifted from critics and dealers who used to be able to make or break a career to artists and collectors (and artists that collect) who are now ruling the roost.


People believe that art is subjective, and lacking inherent value—though I can on one level understand why it entails a certain leap of faith to fathom paying £75,000,000 for what amounts to £6.86 of pigment, canvas and stretcher bars. But what cannot be overestimated is the point that once art came off the cave walls, it’s been covetously and conspicuously collected. The first time contemporary art entered the realm of high-end, expensive evening sales at auction was in 1997 when a children’s heart specialist went to jail for embezzling money from a surgery fund in order to feed his collecting habit. Such is the fervor that grips collectors that one could even steal money from the hands of dying children to fulfill the desire for more acquisitions. That’s what I call a hardcore collector.


Calculable measures exist that can be systematically applied to ascertain the inherent values of art. There is a laundry list of things that contribute to constitute value in the art world: who’s selling (the gallery and it’s reputation, and auction exposure), who's buying (the stature of the collectors), who's writing about it and which museum is exhibiting, or rather, whose private museum is supporting it. Although it used to be that museums were museums: independent, quasi-objective, publically supported institutions with posterity at heart, today they are being replaced by private vanity enterprises resembling ornate bonnet ornaments atop a wealthy patron’s prized automobile. Private museums are becoming arbiters of taste and in the process, market credibility boosters. Or trying to.


Funny enough, the same piece of art can have as many prices as the depth of knowledge of the particular buyer permits. The difference between neophyte art collectors versus a jaded buyer is that a newcomer thinks they are buying something with a designated price requiring payment. A professional collector is like someone negotiating down the price of a container of milk, not paying for it for two years, and then canceling the deal because the milk went sour. Newbies have no idea what they can get away with in the snake pit of art. They are our favorite dupes. Just kidding.


Visiting the Basel Art Fair in Miami last year I eyed a Warhol portrait of Mao on canvas for a client when a friend called spotting serious dialogue going on with another potential buyer in front of the work I admired. I quickly made my way to the booth of the dealer and noticed he was in serious conversation with a doctor and medical entrepreneur I had only just had breakfast with that day. The art community is like picking up a rock and finding 300 intertwined worms, it’s that incestuous.


I parked myself behind my “friend’s” back and began my surreptitious counter-negotiations. Unbeknownst to the good doctor, due to my friendly relationship with the dealer, I was told what was offered on the Mao but that a further day to conduct due diligence was requested, which nowadays entails doing price research for comparable sales in the worldwide auction market on Artnet, a cheap pay-per-search tool that has revolutionized the way art business is conducted. I was offered a price six-figures less if I pulled the trigger then and there, which I did and made my way completely unnoticed during and after the ordeal.


Sadly, there appears a diminished amount of passion in the art world (for the art anyway) as the days of connoisseurship are mostly behind us; old school collectors who never sell and artists with no regard for private planes and Hello Magazine belong more and more in a vitrine in a natural history museum. Mind you, I find nothing wrong trading the multi-billion dollar Hirst market—the fact that you can rather pleases me, but let's not confuse the big money deals with appreciation.


When it comes to certain collectors and supporters though, you can't deny someone like Charles Saatchi his due in his relentless mining of artistic talent; it’s a full time job and a physically strenuous one at that. Constantly chasing young, new art (with my bad sense of direction) is a fulltime job way too exhausting and expensive to think about. But in the process, he rather foolishly dealt away masterpieces that would have permitted him to trade into retirement with impunity. Instead, Saatchi horse-traded his way into a lower tax bracket. The saying rings true that you sell art to make money and keep it to make wealth.


Not only are most curators, advisers, and dealers professionally non-qualified (many unqualified too) but also art is the last bastion of unregulated, multi-billion dollar business activity in existence. There are various ways to legally insider trade in the art world including front running major museum shows prior to public announcements. This entails being privy to information on the programming of a major museum (or gallery) ostensibly through board members or employees, as to who will be featured in upcoming shows and then buying (and selling) on such non-public knowledge for quick profit.


Perhaps curator and adviser are among the most misused descriptive words in the art world after the over-use of the word important in relationship to describing art works. Correct me if I am wrong in assuming art never cured a strain of cancer. Some artists certainly carry themselves in such a self-important manner like peacocks with their feathers in full display. But I admit there has been research to the effect that living with art can contribute to prolonging your life. I must admit I tend to agree—they say having dogs increases life expectancy so why not the same for looking at and appreciating art too? Besides, I’d much rather have a painting, or better yet, a dog hanging from the wall.


When it comes to making, buying, selling and presenting art we are, to a certain extent, all hookers of one stripe or another, which I readily acknowledge. But I know an art dealer of sorts, always surrounded by a bevy of girls, unfailingly gorgeous. When I questioned him about the somewhat seedy appearance of such a mélange, he replied: “How did we meet?” True enough, I did ask him to fix a friend up (yes, a friend), though it never occurred to me he’d be chartering for the occasion. He went on to relate how many billionaire collectors he made business with out of his procurement activities in the escort sector. As Malcolm X put it, by any means necessary.


As far as buying and selling at auction, you had better know what you’re doing as you are invariably up against the savviest purchasers in the world. And these days that really does mean the world over, as we are truly in an interdependent, global environment after years of lip service to that effect. In the past, dealers banded together at public sales to keep prices artificially low, and then bid amongst themselves after a given sale. Today it’s the reverse, or so they say. But even if you own buckets of Basquiats and you obscenely bid one up auction to bolster the market, nevertheless he who he who plays with a paddle pays.


In New York in the 1940’s, the amount of what we know as contemporary galleries could be counted on the fingers of one hand. What is merely a short time later there are a plethora of commercial venues worldwide. Also, for the first time in history, we are in an age of so many billionaire dealers and collectors, and what is more, dealers and collectors who are billionaires from art, including such legendary hoarders as the Nahmad’s, Berggruen’s, Mugrabi’s, Ernst Beyeler (recently deceased) and Bruno Bischofsberger, amongst others.


Safe to say most artists and galleries are like cottage industry entrepreneurs except for a gallery business model like that of Larry Gagosian who appears intent on nothing less than world domination, establishing beachheads far and wide, from New York to Athens via Paris, London and Rome. There is no one in gallery land in his rearview mirror.


A hedge fund friend at the onset of the recession said he’d hoped I realized the works I yearned for and dealt in would be rendered valueless. He obviously wasn’t the type to beg, borrow or steal for art. Having no means has never been an impediment to a true collector. In the past ten years there has been more growth in the worldwide art market than in the previous 100 years. Though the recession has clearly and concretely caused a shift in what is sought after and effected values, we are today at historic high levels for art. For every bust in the art market lurks a bigger boom down the horizon and vice versa. The art market is a lovely, endless cycle, but one that seems to grow and grow over time with no bounds in sight.


No one could ever have imagined how art fared so well in light of the crushing recession that brought the world’s economy to its collective knees. But clearly trends have shifted today—in the recent past, $25m Jeff Koons sculptures were being flipped like burgers on the resale market before the crates were even unpacked, and at the same time, you couldn’t give a Monet away. Today, contemporary art is a long way from selling for the prices of office buildings but Picasso’s, Monet’s and Van Gogh’s are reaching dizzying heights as we are in the midst of a flight to quality, with art viewed as a safe harbor in uncertain economic times.


Sure there continue to be plenty of naysayers and party poopers that moan that it’s an artificial bubble bound to burst. And true enough, there are many people in it for the wrong reasons, but this is also a good thing, as it only contributes to broaden the markets and create spillover opportunities for the various segments of art. With 1000-point intraday swings in stocks, interest rates at historic lows, banks teetering and companies uneven at best, art has never looked like a better place to be. And the dividend it throws off in good times and bad is the visual pleasure gained by looking. The continuing international economic instability is a major factor driving today’s market for art. And the ever increasing worldwide attention—there are more people today making, looking at, writing about, showing and buying art then at any previous time in history.


People are still endlessly speculating that this artist is overvalued and what that artist is making is not even art. When you go to an emerging art fair like Frieze, I would guess fully 85% on what is on view will become relatively worthless over time. Perhaps even more. But then again, there are also awful Picasso paintings. In the breadth of an artist’s career you encounter a bell's curve; but that is a good thing as it creates access points for people to enter the market at differing price levels. For instance not everyone could afford a Giacometti sculpture (the last public record of $104m didn’t help) but you can find what is considered a less prized etching, almost as gripping.


Most people in art only look at the pictures and adverts in art magazines unless they or their artists are themselves written about. To read, learn and discover more about today’s art forget Frieze and other specialist magazines, try bloomberg.com, the FT, Wall Street Journal—the financial press and fashion mags (and GQ!) do a much better job without trying to impress with unknowable art speak so often encountered in the art journals.


There was even recent coverage in the Economist solely on the past, present and future financial outlook of the oeuvre of Damien Hirst. Though this analysis was flawed (you need specialists entrenched in the field of practice for meaningful insight) it reflects that the times they are not a changing, but they have changed and forever. Too bad Warhol didn’t live to experience a time where there are charts and graphs depicting an artist’s price performance and aesthetic economic indicators and buy/sell signals; chances are it all would have ended up as grist for his canvases. And as for the wrongly long- term bearish sentiment on Hirst in the Economist, I forecast in 10 to 15 years time, the market for Hirst fakes alone will amount to billions.


Art fairs, most of which I have actively participated in at one time or another (and been thrown out of, hard to imagine), are the most effective and convenient way to do reconnaissance about what is afoot at any given time. They are wonderful information gathering affairs as well as the closest the art world gets to fostering a sense of community; we all travel to the same destinations and socialize with many of the same people across multiple time zones. But the fairs are also deeply hierarchical enterprises. The decision making process as to who gets to have a booth, and in which section that booth is located in are based largely on capricious, political factors. Even who gets admitted as a guest and when (there are earlier entry slots for the VIP VIP’s) are status-laden choices by the powers that be.


With the nonstop attendant social flurry, the Miami Basel fair is undoubtedly number one on the charts for schmoozing the art party circuit. However, in hot market times at fairs there is competition to purchase new material, and fast, which in such a public forum is not the ideal way to understand and participate in the market. Art should be a slow burn, a contemplative process, not an ad hoc, spur of the moment, decision-making experience.


The mindset of many students in today’s art academies seem to be as much about seeking tuition in PR, self-promotion, and networking as about learning to draw a nude accurately. After Marcel Duchamp put a urinal in an exhibition and declared it art in 1917, the Yellow Pages have became an integral tool of the artist. The readymade, Duchamp’s term for plucking an industrial object out of a catalogue and re-contextualizing it in a gallery setting and calling it art had been replaced by what I call the had-it-made—where a few calls to a fabricator can overcome any shortcomings in virtuosity. How many art stars of today could draw other than a stick figure?


Also, the caution and conservatism you see at the graduate level in art is mindboggling; they are often no different than business or law departments, a professional finishing school readying the mini entrepreneurs to crack the art market. One student during critiques I was giving told me that a known visiting contemporary artist told her not to use a particular material for a work, which assertion in my estimation had absolutely no foundation in reason. The visiting artist probably couldn’t think of anything else to say, though I admit you really are on the spot in some of those critique sessions having to think on your feet all day to needy young artists. So what did the artist do? Of course she trashed and remade her work. At the grad level at least, it’s about connecting with guest lecturers and visiting artists and paving the way to a lucrative niche of one’s own.


Fifteen years ago I bought two artworks, one by Janine Antoni and another from Glenn Ligon both from a struggling artist who had been given the works as gifts. When I tried to sell the pieces years on the results were astonishing: both artists independently declared the works to be not art. In the case of Antoni, the piece was hand-painted plaster casts of her nipples that formed the basis of a later work made in gold. In fact, this was more “art” then the art she normally exhibited. And even more baffling, the Ligon works I purchased in good faith were classical charcoal renderings of some kids involved in a famous rape assault in Central Park at the time. Both artists made efforts to preclude me from selling the work I rightfully owned. It boiled down to issues of trying to control perceptions of the artists and the works. Only in art can someone equally state that an object lifted off the street or appropriated from a newspaper or magazine is his or her creation and simultaneously declare that something made the old fashion way is garbage. Anyway, I traded one and sold the other at auction as the houses don’t seem overly concerned about the intent of the artist when it comes to what is or isn’t art.


The museum realm, more mid-level than Tate or Serpentine scale, resembles small town politics, with little money and little opportunity to make a sizable impact. In a time when even the biggest institutions such as the Metropolitan Museum in New York, have been so strapped for cash they can’t paint the walls between exhibits, museums are losing their capacity to make a bang. Being in such financial straits has in turn reduced the scope and adventurousness of public museums programming capabilities and thereby removed the stinger of these venues. Many times, they can no longer afford to make a difference, instead opting for easy to swallow, crowd pleasing events. With less and less funding, there is sadly less at stake for institutions across the board.


Another casualty of the recent transformation of the art world is the slow death of the critic. To make an impact today, an art writer has to become a judge on a reality TV show to make themselves heard like New York Magazine’s Jerry Saltz. What Saltz did do that will have lasting repercussions is utilize facebook to transform criticism as we knew it into a democratic participatory sport, and a contact one at that. I still remember quaking in my boots over 20 years ago every time his illustrious wife, New York Times writer Roberta Smith, visited a show I curated; her reaction could reduce me to tears—not to mention the joy (to my bank account) she could equally dispense with a favorable review. Those days are largely behind us. Even a bad article by Smith was capable of moving markets.


Don’t get me wrong, I am no cynic, but rather an art making, buying, selling, critiquing, presenting and collecting hypocrite. There is no place I’d rather be personally and professionally, mainly due to such ambiguities and gray areas that still exist in the wild, wild world of art. For the uninitiated, the art world has its very own language, but don’t be daunted. And it’s not all about money either; art is the only free lunch left in town as galleries and most museums don’t charge admission. Go on and try it.