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Money Talks: You Should Buy Art
00:45:31
Author and journalist Bianca Bosker peels back the canvas of the high-end art world.
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- [00:11]
A
Hello and welcome to Money Talks from Sleep Money. I'm Felix Salmon of Axios, and I'm here with Bianca Bosker.
- [00:23]
B
Thank you. So happy to be here.
- [00:24]
A
Bianca, introduce us of who are you?
- [00:27]
B
I'm Bianca Bosker. I am an author and a journalist. I'm a contributing writer at the Atlantic magazine. The author of the book Corkdork and the author, most recently, of the book get the Picture.
- [00:37]
A
So for your first book about the wine world, you immersed yourself in the wine world, and it's all very first person and all about how you learned about it. This book is basically the same, only it's about the art world, and you immersed yourself by working with gallerists. You worked with Julie Curtis, who's quite a famous artist. You worked at a very famous museum, the Guggenheim. So we're going to talk about all of that coming up on Sleep Money. You were here in this very studio, I believe, when Cork Talk came out, and we had a great time talking about wine. And then you emailed me to say you were doing a follow up about the only thing I love more than wine, which is art. And I'm like, okay, we need to get Bianca to come on and talk about art. And as you know, this is a money show. We're gonna talk a little bit about the financial side of things because it's always pretty tight, right? I mean, there are a handful of famous gallerists, collectors, artists who seem to have millions of dollars. But you spent a lot of time in this world and it wasn't obvious that people were getting rich from it, right?
- [01:54]
B
Well, I should say that, you know, so for me, this book was first of all similar to Corkdork, incredibly immersive. I mean, I threw my. And you know, I ended up working at galleries selling art. I was helping artists in their studios. I was working as a security guard at the Guggenheim, and a lot more. But all of it is part of this journey to understand why does art matter and how do any of us engage with it more deeply. I certainly felt like I was not engaging with it deeply. And that was something that really began to bother me. And when I embarked on this journey, you know, I very quickly gravitated towards the up and coming side of it. You know, I think a lot of books, a lot of coverage tends to focus on the same big names, the big price tags. But to me, really, this up and coming side of the art world, you know, the term is emerging artists, is to me, the highest stakes and least covered part of it. You know, these are artists who are, you know, spending all their money on their studio and scrounging on their own rent so they wake up covered in cat pee on a friend's couch. You know, these are gallerists who are maxing out credit cards to show hunks of sculptures they believe can change the world. These are people who are, you know, doing mental math to figure out if they can afford a bagel, but doing it because they believe so passionately in what art does for our lives. And I couldn't see that. I think I really couldn't see that from the get go. And so that was what possessed me to throw myself in, right?
- [03:18]
A
This is not the, you know, fake Leonardo's selling for $400 million. This is not Larry Gagosian's private jet.
- [03:26]
B
This is the ground level of where art history begins. And that, I think, is so interesting. I think we hear a lot about the sort of fairy tale of how it happens. You know, the conquering heroes like to tell us that the process by which an artist goes from, you know, unknown individual to, you know, celebrated genius is flawless and works perfectly every time, but it's a mess, really.
- [03:47]
A
I don't think anyone says that, but, I mean, statistically speaking, if you look back on art history and there's a lot of it, it goes back for many centuries. For most of it, in most decades, there will be, I don't know, three or four, like, great artists who stand the test of time. And you are here in the emerging contemporary art world looking at hundreds, thousands of artists who, statistically speaking, probably zero of them are going to wind up standing the test of time and being remembered in 200 years time, in order to understand how to look at things, in order to understand what art can really do, wouldn't it make more sense to look at the stuff that everyone understands is unambiguously great, rather than a lot of stuff that might be just.
- [04:37]
B
Here today and gone tomorrow, so backing up a bit. You know, I think that for me, where I started this journey was really from a place of ignorance, really. I mean, you know, I felt like I didn't understand how to do art right. I would go to galleries and museums, and I felt like I was, you know, two tattoos and a master's degree away from figuring out what was going on. And it wasn't until I actually discovered this trove of drawings my grandmother actually inspired by her time as a Holocaust survivor in a displaced person's camp after the war that I began to ask myself some rather difficult questions about why I felt like art wasn't an important part of my life, and I started trying to reconnect. You know, it had been a while since I had worked up the guts to. To go and really see art on a regular basis. And so I tried again. I thought I was older, I was wiser, and in fact, I was not any wiser. I still didn't figure out what was going on, but the people around it really enthralled me. I mean, their level of obsession, as I mentioned before, you know, I'd never met a group of people that was willing to sacrifice so much for something of so little obvious practical value. And I just got obsessed.
- [05:47]
A
Or financial value, for that matter.
- [05:48]
B
Right, or financial. Right, but I mean, financial is practical. I think it does buy you things like shelter and food. And I just. My mind kept turning and turning around this question of, you know, why does art matter? And how can any of us get more out of it? How can I get more out of it? And at the same time, these people had really behaved like they'd accessed these trap doors in their brains. I mean, their reality operated according to totally different rules of nature that I was not used to experiencing. And it made my own existence feel very claustrophobic. And so I think that it just lodged this nugget, it lodged this seed in my brain that convinced me that I needed to figure out if I could see not only art, but also the world the way that they did.
- [06:33]
A
This makes perfect sense, actually, because you've been going to galleries and museums all your life, and it's perfectly possible for.
- [06:41]
B
People, or being dragged to them or going because it was the polite thing to do.
- [06:46]
A
And it's possible to do that, you know, ad nauseam without getting anywhere. Clearly, if you're going to be devoting your life to something, there's some way of looking, some way of seeing that makes it all worthwhile. And if you hang out with those people who look and see in that way, then you. Well, I mean, spoiler alert. Ended up kind of learning what it was that they were doing, what it was that they were seeing. But it took you a while to get there.
- [07:11]
B
It took me a while to get. I mean, getting access in the art world was the most difficult thing I've ever had to do in my career as a journalist. I mean, I've done reporting in China, which is not an easy place to be a journalist. And, you know, getting access in Chengdu is nothing compared to Chelsea, let me tell you. And that also was intriguing to me. I was coming in with what I thought were relatively basic questions, you know, how do you do art? Right. Like, why are you doing this? Like, why does this matter? And even to these questions, you know, people were throwing up walls. I mean, I got threats. I had, you know, people telling me that if I knew it was good for me, I would back away. Now people going off the record at every turn to share, you know, pretty anodyne platitude.
- [07:52]
A
Yes. This is the first rule of the art world is people, like, sway you to secrecy and then tell you something. Yeah.
- [07:58]
B
Utterly banal. Right.
- [08:00]
A
Why? And the answer to that question or that question of why are people so scared? Why is it so opaque? I'm interested in. Because I have. I've always had two different theories about this. One is just to kind of preserve a sense of mystery around the whole thing. But the other one is more financial. The other one is that especially when it comes to art galleries and art dealers, they make all of their money, or most of their money from secrets from information, asymmetry. They make their money because they know who the collectors are and what the collectors own and what the collectors want and what they want to buy and what they want to sell. And that information is how you make money in the art world as a, as a gallery. And what you need in order to be successful is to have information that no one else has, or at the very least an artist that no one else has and that people want. And so it's all about these kind of rival goods, these things where like, only I can have it and you can't have it. And that good is often just information. So people are naturally incredibly secretive, although they are also naturally, as you will attest, insanely gossipy.
- [09:17]
B
Yeah, I think you're right. I mean, I would also expand on that. I mean, I came to think that that secrecy stems first of all from, like you said, the art world's tendency to wield strategic snobbery at every turn. Right. There is this idea that through the secrecy you build mystique. And I tend. I came away from this experience thinking that that's unnecessary. I do think that art, the power of art, can stand alone on its own two feet without all the velvet ropes and made up language. I think the other part of it that you didn't mention is that there is this sort of mafia like omerta that exists as well, where there are things that go on in the art world that would pass for insane, absurd, criminal just about anywhere else. And if you don't swear an oath of Silence. To maintain that secrecy, you're considered a risk. And so as someone coming in, as a journalist, which I am wanting to talk about what goes on, that was not always welcome.
- [10:14]
A
Okay, so let's rip off the veil of secrecy, since we have nothing, we have no reason to protect these folks. I hear this a lot. There's stuff that goes on in the art world that would shock you to your core. And I always kind of struggle a bit with, what is it? Is it money laundering? Is it like, tax evasion? This all seems a little bit picayune, right?
- [10:40]
B
I mean, I think, you know, as someone one of my sources described to me, it's like the art world sort of takes the world and just magnifies it, right? It's like things that go on. It's this total universe of extremes, right? I mean, look at the extremes of wealth, for example. I mean, look at the, you know, importance of privilege, of connections. I mean, sort of the things that go on in the everyday world also go on in the art world, but to this kind of heady extreme. One of my reasons for putting myself in the center of the action and learning by doing was that I really wanted to understand the decisions that get made around the art. I really wanted to see how does an artwork go from being the germ of an idea in someone's studio to this masterpiece that we fawn over at a museum? And that's because I think that all the decisions that shape an artwork are ultimately decisions that shape us, right? Our idea of why does art matter? Why do we bother to engage with it? Who makes it? What art is fundamentally, which is not an easy question. And I do think that getting a front row seat, you know, it's one thing to understand these things in generalities, but for me, I found it really eye opening to have a direct glimpse at these things happening in action. So, for example, I ended up working with a gallery, Denny Dimmin, and going with them to sell art during the bacchanal that is Art Basel Miami Beach. And during the VIP day, there was a museum curator who had a gaggle of donors that he took around the fair. And, you know, they stopped them by our booth and, you know, explained the artwork to them. Then he took them to the next one. And later that afternoon, one of the donors came by our booth and basically said, you know, I'll take two editions of the same photograph. So the same photo, just, you know, two different. On two different pieces of paper, essentially. And I want you to ship one of them to the museum and I want you to ship one of them to me. And I found, just bearing witness to that, something that really transformed my understanding of the way that collecting works, of the way that museums work. I mean, there's nothing criminal about that, as people like to say. Insider trading is totally legal in the art world. But nonetheless, there's something that I found off putting about that. This idea that philanthropy in the art world, for example, you know, it's a nice way of saying a little bit of a polite corruption. Right. I mean, in the sense that buying an artwork for a museum is going to inherently make its value go up. And now you own that photograph, so the value of the photograph that you own also goes up. And, of course, that's just one example of many and one occurrence of many that goes on all over.
- [13:13]
A
Quick break and we'll be straight back. The slogan I like to trot out is that collectors collect art and museums collect collectors. Because museums in general, especially in America, are not rich. They don't have a lot of money on their own or of their own, and especially smaller ones are quite acquisitive. They want to acquire more art. And so what they do is they get board members who are rich to give them money. But one of the things about being a board member is you have control over what museum does. And of course, what that board member is going to do is encourage the museum to buy the kind of art.
- [13:55]
B
That they like, or vice versa, or collect the kind of art that the museum likes, that they now own and appreciates and value.
- [14:03]
A
Yeah, I think it's more. I mean, one of the things that does tend to happen is that museums wind up being filled with the kind of art that rich white billionaire men like, because rich white billionaire men are the kind of people who give a lot of money to museums. And you spend a lot of time in, you know, the emerging art world in downtown New York, in Brooklyn, where there are very few rich white billionaire men. And it's. It's very diverse and very woke. And the vast majority of artists and galleries in that world are, you know, never going to make a huge amount of money and be successful financially in that sense. And there comes a point, I think, when you start spending a bit of time in the art world, you start realizing that the kind of acclaim that surrounds artists and art that appear in museums and that sell for enormous amounts of money is not entirely or even mostly a function of some kind of inherent quality, but it's just a function of this is the kind of thing that rich people like to buy. And then everything kind of sort of trickles down from there. And you. I think one of the great things about your book is that you, you know, develop an eye and you start appreciating stuff often that might not be for sale at all.
- [15:29]
B
One of the things that drew me into this world was this idea of developing an eye. And an eye in the art world isn't just an organ. Right. It's considered this, you know, capital E I. Right. This painstakingly cultivated outlook that allegedly enables you to see a lot that doesn't meet the eye, like, who's going to be the next Andy Warhol? Or, you know, what's transcendent about a sculpture of limp vegetables on a stained mattress. And I eventually got brought on as an assistant at a gallery right around the corner from here, actually, where my boss, Jack, really seemed to share my concern that I was, you know, an uncultivated rube and kind of helped make it his joint mission to help me build my eye. And what I found really surprising is that so much of the information that I thought was extraneous data that shouldn't affect my view of an artwork. You know, where the artist went to school, who owned their work, who they dated, who their friends were. All of that information, I thought, really should have no bearing on my experience of an artwork. I was quickly made to understand, in fact, is crucial to fully appreciating an artwork. In other words, that having an eye among connoisseurs in this day and age means having an eye for context, where context means sort of that web of names that surrounds a work. Right. Again, what museums have shown it, who owns it, what galleries have shown it, the name of the grad school they went to, who the artist is friends with, all that. And we can talk about the art historical reasons why that's become the case, why context has become so important in this day and age.
- [17:06]
A
To be clear, it is also kind of bullshit. I mean, it does. It is true in a certain part of a certain subset of the art world.
- [17:15]
B
Yeah. Well, I think also this idea that you can't fully understand an artwork without understanding its context also almost definitionally creates the need for experts to tell you what you're looking at. Right. It sort of creates this idea that, like, oh, you need a professional, you need a gallerist, you need a chaperone to be able to have a relationship with art. Right. Like, you can't just go out and look at things on your own. No, no, no. And that also didn't sit well. With me. And so I ended up going. And it was really later, when I spent time working as a studio assistant to the artist Julie Curtis and also several other artists, where I felt like I was able to finally, like, fan away that fog of context and look art in the eye and in the process, develop my own eye. I came away from the experience thinking that, you know, when it comes to buying art, when it comes to appreciating art, developing your own eye is, first of all, the crucial first step. But that really happens between you and the artwork, right? I don't think that there's, like, everything you need to have a meaningful experience of art is there right in front of you with a piece, you know, of course, that's not to say you can't understand new dimensions of it through art history or through, you know, reading about provenance or what have you. But, you know, working with Julie and being in her studio and seeing the way that, first of all, art making is a much more athletic process than I think we give it credit for being. Made me see that really just following the decisions that an artist made with a piece offers you a path into the work. And when I say that, what I mean is when you go to galleries or museums for the last hundred years or so, there's been this enormous emphasis on the idea that what really matters about an artwork is the idea behind it, right? The thought trumps the thing. We can talk about Marcel Duchamp and, you know, sort of his role in all of this, but what you get is, I think, this sort of dismissal of the physical craft, of the technical skill. I mean, there's this idea right now that teaching drawing is an outdated skill. I remember there was a. There's a administrator at an art school who dismissed teaching drawing as being this outdated skill. And as Julie said herself, an idea is not a painting. And being in her studio and watching as she, you know, literally wrestled with the materials, right? I mean, I got blistered and bloody. I lost patches of arm hair to a sculpture. I mean, putting an artwork together really is this exercise of wrestling with the elements, of wrestling with the forces of nature, of making things stick, stay, lie. And I think that at least transformed for me, my eye and my experience of looking at an artwork where now, you know, I go to a museum, I go to a gallery. And what I am focused on, like I said, is the decisions that an artist made. Each of those things, even if it appears sloppy, even if it appears slapdash, those are decisions, right? Someone decided to leave that part of the canvas blank decided to leave the drips of paint there. And there's a world that opens up in the life of an artwork when we let ourselves linger and focus on those. And I think, also I will say, I think developing our eye gets us away from the necessity of outsourcing our opinion to the hive mind of outsourcing idea of quality, to the rich white billionaires, to the tiny posse of people who have made it their job, you know, to sort of decide what's important. You know, with our, with an eye, we can decide that for ourselves.
- [20:39]
A
And you did talk a little bit about purchasing and I wanted, I did want to talk to you about this because it's, it's really super fundamental to the whole world because ultimately all of the money in the art world in one way or another, well, except for maybe just, you know, gallerists who, who lose their trust funds is coming from people buying art, taking money and turning it into art and making those decisions. And those people may or may not have, you know, have a range of different tastes and eyes and all the rest of it, but what they almost without exception do is they spend time with the art that they buy and they live with it and it grows on them over time and they learn to appreciate and some pieces grow on them more than other pieces. And you have a long section of your book about spending hours in the Guggenheim museum with certain pieces and just giving them lots and lots of time and letting the art reveal itself to you over time, which almost perforce like it by necessity, if you're an art collector, has to happen after you've bought it. I mean, you know, galleries will let collectors, you know, borrow a piece of art and put it above their sofa to see if it looks good for a couple days. But ultimately that whole experience of living with something is only something that happens after you buy it. And that is an interesting tension to me that you never really know when you buy an art, how much, how good it's going to turn out to be.
- [22:14]
B
That's true. But I think that that idea of slow looking, while it's something that you can get by buying a piece of work, certainly you don't have to spend money on a piece of work to do that. Right? I mean, so part of the reason I was attracted to working as a security guard at a museum was partially because I was very curious to know how would looking at art for hours and hours every day with no opportunity for escape change my relationship with the art? And it seems very obvious to say, like well, you get more out of art if you spend more time looking at it. But the question then to me is, well, then why don't any of us do it, right? Like, there are studies that show that, you know, the average amount of time that a museum visitor spends looking at an artwork is something like, you know, eight seconds. And maybe four of those are reading the wall text, or we should say glancing at the wall text. I think there's another study that found it was maybe 17. But even that, I think arguably skews high, because that study only counted people that actually bothered to stop at an artwork. When I was working as a guard, I won't lie. I mean, there were times where it was deathly boring, right? Like, I would just pray that someone would try and touch an artwork so I could tell them not to, right? Like, I got so good at recognizing, like, the crinkle of a water bottle moments before it would open. Because you're just. You're so alert. You're looking for things to do. You know, I'd radio in a stray leaf just because something had to break the monotony. And I gradually started giving myself these looking exercises to break up my time on post or in the vacuum, as we described it. And one of those was to spend 40 minutes, which was the time on one post before we rotated to the next one, was to spend that full 40 minutes staring at one artwork. And I had never done that before. I mean, kudos to all of you out there that are much more disciplined and have uncorrupted attention spans, but having spent many years of my life on the Internet, that wasn't me. And the only time that I had spent 40 minutes looking at a piece was never. Basically, it took the threat of getting fired and God knows how many security cameras to get me to do it. And what I found is that while I would give myself that exercise of looking at a piece for an uninterrupted 40 minutes, I kept challenging myself to notice something new. And I was surprised to find that with so many of these artworks, I could, right? I could keep looking. I could keep discovering something new after 40 minutes, after four days, after four weeks. And each time I came to them, they changed, or I changed, but they weren't the same, and they just kept giving. And so I think that, you know, I haven't had the experience of spending, you know, four decades living with a Picasso that, you know, I got from the studio. But I am here to say that I have spent, you know, four hours, probably 40 hours, right, with Certain artworks. And there are those that begin to wear on you. There are those where you only keep falling further in love. And then there are those where, like, with other humans, you have a really complicated relationship. And there were days where I just found myself, I mean, on a physical level, almost like, you know, to, like a lover, where you get butterflies drawn to this horrendous Francis Bacon triptych that was on one of the ramps. And then there were where, like, it just turned my stomach to even look at it. And so, you know, I think there is this amazing opportunity for an evolving relationship with an artwork if you give it room.
- [25:40]
A
Have you purchased any art since you wrote the book or while writing the book, or like, in. In the wake of this immersion.
- [25:50]
B
In terms of purchasing artwork, I tried to follow the guidelines that are set up for me as a journalist with the publications that I work for, which is, you know, to say that you don't want to be writing about things in which you have a financial value, because it's a conflict of interest. And so I wasn't out shopping for artwork, but at the same time, I kept coming across, almost on a daily basis, works of art that I was just desperate to bring home with me. And that was also part of what changed for me. I think that, you know, I'm. I have become a huge advocate for the idea of really buying emerging artwork. And I think the. The art world, the art industry is really, I don't have to tell you this, like a winner take all business model, right? There's a small number of people that make a lot of money, and yet there are way more people who deserve to be making a living from their artwork than are currently supported by the current system. And, you know, I think part of the reason for that comes from. From this outsourcing of our taste, from not taking the time to develop visual literacy, which was a huge complaint from artists. I heard. You know, people were like, people are not looking. I kept hearing from artists, you know, we have to develop our visual literacy not only to get more from art, but simply because not doing so, as they described it, is essentially an existential threat in an era where we're so bombarded with images. And it's true, right? I mean, we get images, you know, howling at us from Instagram, they're yelling at us from billboards. I mean, images surround us all the time, and they're not neutral, right? They're all trying to influence us and get us to do something. And building your eye is one way to fight back against that. But I do think that. I think another argument for each of us building our visual literacy is that maybe in the process we can build a better art industry. We can build a system where it's not a small number of people fighting over the same limited quantities of artwork, but where people can trust their own taste. They can have really their own personal relationship with artworks, independent of what gallerists or curators tell them what to like, and in the process, buy art or fairly support art with their attention from a much wider population of artists.
- [28:01]
A
And I love this. I really, really love this idea. I think this is an awesome goal for everyone to have. But it raises a couple of big questions which I'd love to ask you. The first one is, let's say I'm out there and I've taken your advice and Bianca says I should go out and buy art from emerging artists. So I'm going to do that. The first one is, given the way in which art evolves over time with looking at it, and given how slowly art is, how slowly art reveals its secrets, and how you see things four years later that you never saw when you first looked at it, how do you know what's gonna do that and what isn't? How do you stop yourself from buying something superficially clever but that has few, if any, secrets to reveal?
- [28:51]
B
I don't think you do. I think you make mistakes. I think this is a question that I grappled with as well, because I felt like, you know, I got to this point where I had basically turned my entire life over to art. I mean, I was working at a gallery several days a week, you know, spackling walls, writing press releases, selling art. I was doing studio visits, I was working artists, studios. I mean, I was a deadbeat to everyone that I loved in my life. And I really began to suffer this identity crisis in matters of taste, right? Because I did feel like there were so many things that I had always loved implicitly that suddenly I was questioning, right, whether it was like articles of clothing or some photographs that my husband and I bought on our honeymoon. And that was not a comfortable experience, right? It's not a great feeling to, you know, think that you've shelled out hard earned money for things that you can no longer stand to be around. And I started to really wonder, you know, what is good art, right? Like, what is? How do we know?
- [29:48]
A
But it is personal. And I love this idea of making mistakes, and I love this idea of taste, of which, of course, it does in wine as well. Almost no one loves the same wine at, you know, age 60 that they loved when they were 20.
- [30:00]
B
Right. But I think I came to see taste as less a goal and more as a journey. Right. I think that there I came into it this idea of, like, there is a right answer, right? I will get the right answer if I do my homework, if I just talk to the right people, if I like, if I bring a painting under the harsh lights and like, badger it with questions like, eventually it will reveal up the secret of whether it's good or bad. And was working with Julie, with the artist Julie Curtis, that really helped me understand that taste is not a destination. It's this continual exercise of just pushing yourself, of exposing yourself to new things. Right. You know, she described this experience of developing new tastes as building a new self. And so I do think that when it comes to buying art, first of all, I was under the impression that it was sort of impossible to buy art unless you were ready to take out a second mortgage. And in fact, it's not. Right. There's many different places where you can buy art for $20, $150 every place, everywhere. From places like the Spring Break Art Fair, which features up and coming artists, to there's online galleries, a lot of artist run spaces, Tiger Strikes Asteroid, Good Naked, but also galleries. I worked with Denny Dimmin Gallery, where you could buy a print from them for 1:25, $150.
- [31:14]
A
Like, again, we run into the secrecy thing here, right? Which is I can totally afford to buy a print for $125 from Denny Denim. I can totally. Well, I can walk into that gallery because I have a certain amount of, like, confidence and I can look, you.
- [31:32]
B
Have cool blue glasses. You're edgy.
- [31:34]
A
I'm edgy. I'm cool. I own a bunch of art. I know what I'm talking about. I know the difference between a Picasso and Matisse. But like, I walk into that gallery, there's art on the walls. Nothing ever has any price tags. How the hell am I supposed to know that there are prints here for sale for 125 bucks? My assumption walking into a space like that is that everything is $20,000.
- [31:58]
B
Yeah, same. I hear you. Absolutely. And I think that's where I would love to see the art industry change. I mean, look, I gravitated towards people like Elizabeth and Rob, who ran Denny Dimming Gallery, who did list their prices, you know, who were excited to sell someone their first piece of artwork. As Rob himself said, like, we need to see the industry open up. To survive. I think for me this book is part journey to learn how to live life more expansively and part a user guide to the hidden logic of the art world. And I really got a crash course in it in a way that was utterly disorienting at first. But I do think that, you know, what I, what I learned was like I say, I did have this experience early on in my time working as an assistant of realizing that I was not crazy for feeling like the art world was alienating because I was beginning to understand all of the techniques that the art world adopted to essentially be alienating. It's strange. I mean, it is strange to me that you could run a gallery and profess to want to show art that will change the world and and yet locate your gallery in such a way that you also seek to discourage, you know, quote unquote, ground level foot traffic from coming inside.
- [33:17]
A
Heaven forefend the normies should even look at this art.
- [33:22]
B
But I do think that I at least found it very empowering to at least understand the way the rules work because then you can sort of invent your own.
- [33:32]
A
We have to take a break, but we'll be back after this next question about buying the art of emerging artists. Big question. Is it important to buy art from galleries or is it just as good, if not better, to buy it directly from artists and they get 100% of what you're spending?
- [33:54]
B
So it depends and I think it's important to spell out within your question for those who don't know, in general, what happens is if you buy an artwork from a gallery, typically the gallery will split the sale 50, 50 with the artist. The proportions vary depending on the contract, depending on the artist, depending on where they are in their career. But that's the sort of industry standard which is a big cut, right? The gallery takes a big cut. Now of course you can also buy artwork from artists directly, but again it depends. I mean galleries are part of the ecosystem. Certainly it's not a perfect ecosystem, but nonetheless, like I do think that you should feel very good about being buying a piece of art through a gallery, even if the gallery takes 50% and gives 50% to the artist. And that's because galleries play a crucial role in this ecosystem. For one thing, they are places that are open to the public, where an artist's work gets to exist sort of in the public sphere. And that is very important for artists for a career. They play a key role in sort of helping to steward and shepherd artists careers. And so I do think that you know, buy from the galleries, buy from the artists. Buy art every day of the week. However, you can buy it.
- [35:04]
A
Oh, no.
- [35:05]
B
And buy it. But buy it.
- [35:05]
A
You know, they're halfway through Tuesday, and I haven't bought an art yet.
- [35:08]
B
Hurry.
- [35:09]
A
So then the next question is, if it's great to buy art from artists and it's great to buy art from galleries, what about buying art in what is known in the industry as the secondary market? Buying art either at auction or from a dealer who's, you know, bought it from someone else who has it on consignment from someone else who'd bought it. Basically, an art where 0% is going to the artist rather than either 50 or 100%. Is that generally a bad thing to do? Because then you're really not supporting the artist at all.
- [35:47]
B
Look, I'm not here to say that there's any bad way of buying art. I mean, you know, like, the art world has enough rules as it is. Like, I'm not here to make new ones. I think that it is important to understand how the flow of money happens in those situations. So, for example, while I was working with Julie, I was there at a really interesting point in her career where she was going from sort of a more emerging artist to someone who was skyrocketing in prominence and popularity. And it was this moment where her work was suddenly starting to sell for thousands of times more than it had initially it was going. You know, there was a piece that she had earned about $600 for that while I was there, sold for something like $400,000, of which she saw basically zero, maybe, you know, depends. Right. Some. Some auctions, I think, in the UK and overseas, you know, have a clause that some percentage of the sale goes back to the artist, but still, It's. It's not 50% of the $400,000. And I think that's important to recognize that, you know, the artist is not seeing the financial upside directly from that.
- [36:58]
A
Sale, but they do see it indirectly. Right. Like, insofar as if I'm a collector and I want a Julie Curtis and I'm willing to pay $400,000 at auction, then presumably I'm willing to pay at least $150,000 fresh off the canvas, Right?
- [37:14]
B
Certainly. Right. And that's why I think what's very interesting is that there is this almost like a scary story repeated around a campfire that gets repeated over and over in the art world, which is this idea of when a young artist's work starts selling very quickly for A lot of money. That this is the first symptom of a terminal disease that's infected their career. Essentially, your career will be like a souffle and sort of collapse, right? That collectors, as many gallerists like to repeat, are sheep, that they will look around and they will see that people who have just bought an artwork a year or two before are flipping it very quickly because they don't believe in the longevity of an artist's career. They essentially say, okay, like, this seems like the high of the market. I'm going to sell it. I'm going to get out now. And I don't believe that this artist has longevity.
- [38:01]
A
By the same token, you know, if the person who is selling it doesn't believe in the longevity, or maybe they're just selling it because of, you know, One of the three Ds, death, divorce, debt. And they have to sell it because they need the money. But by the same token, there's a buyer, right? There is a buyer out there who really wants that painting so much they're willing to spend an insane amount of money on it. That's gotta be a huge vote of confidence, right?
- [38:25]
B
And I came to think that this fear was somewhat overblown. There's this notorious story of an artist whose work started selling for, you know, exploded in value, but then suddenly no one wanted to buy it on the secondary market. And, you know, he had retired because he could know at the ripe old age of 4 because he could no longer afford his studio. And people described it as a career wipeout. Fast forward. You know, I look into this artist. He's still making work, he's still represented by galleries. As far as I can tell, he is still selling work on the primary market. And I think that this goes back to this very complicated relationship that the art world has with money where, as one person described it, to me, you know, it's considered somewhat distasteful, right, for art to be selling for too much money in the minds of certain curators and trying to build up the value, the monetary value of an artwork in a way that sort of appears accidental, but is, of course, highly calculated.
- [39:20]
A
This comes at the core of what I think of as the contemporary art market. We had Julia Halperin on this show a couple years ago talking about the art market, and she basically came out with the. I think the most important number that you need to know in the art world, which is $500,000. That is the point. And if there is any, obviously these things are fussy, but more or less roughly speaking $500,000 is when art starts becoming investment grade. $500,000 is when you start expecting art to retain its value and it starts to become an asset class. Below that, it's a consumption good. You've spent your money, you own a painting, and you know that's that. But what you do find in a large number of galleries selling art for much less than $500,000 is this idea that prices only go up if they represent an artist. Every time that artist has a show, the price has to go up a little bit from the last one. The price can never go down. There is this kind of convention about pricing, which is super important. No one ever prices of quality. No one ever says, you know, there are eight paintings in this show and obviously this one's the best. So this one costs more. No, they all cost the same. And then we place the best one with the collector that we want to, you know, kiss up to the most.
- [40:43]
B
Where place means sold, just to translate. Yes.
- [40:46]
A
And possibly even, you know, give them a 20% discount because we really want them to own the piece and so on and so forth. But there is this financialization of art as an asset well below the $500,000 range, where galleries are really worried about, like this idea that art might fall in value, it turns out, as your anecdote shows. Or you can just look at someone like Damien Hirst, who's really prime example. You know, his auction prices probably peaked in 2008. Doesn't matter. He's still making hundreds of millions of pounds selling art to people who want to buy it. You know, he doesn't need a secondary market. And you can be a successful artist and you can have, you can be a successful artist with a volatile market which goes up and down. But there is this fear of volatility.
- [41:34]
B
I think you've captured, you know, a key part of the market and a key reason that we buy art. Right. Which is there is this idea underpinning all of the lofty talk about mark making and, you know, spatial and non spatial and all these, you know, kind of heady terms is this sort of unspoken agreement, I think, that often occurs between a buyer and a gallery that like, they're going to spend money for this thing and that money's not going to go away. They're going to, you know, this artwork is going to appreciate in value and they're going to be able to see that many that money back on the back end. Even though that may never be said.
- [42:09]
A
Yeah. I mean, for bigger galleries, certainly they do have an unwritten rule that if you do want to sell it, then they will probably buy it back from you, at least for the amount that you paid originally. Maybe small galleries don't do that because they can't afford to.
- [42:30]
B
Right? Look, I'm not in the business of buying 500,000 paintings, so I can't speak for that mentality and the sweat on your palms going into that decision. But what I will say is, I. Let's not forget that an investment is really only one of the reasons to buy an artwork, right?
- [42:47]
A
It's the worst possible reason to buy an artwork.
- [42:49]
B
Like, I was really struck by the way that Julia and her husband, the artist Clinton King, live with artwork. And I would. While I was working in Julia's studio, I would go home to her apartment for lunch. And I realized that, like, my idea of living with art was all wrong. I mean, I had been thinking in this, like, narrow, very pitiful way, which is this idea that, like, you know, you kind of fill the space over the couch and you stop when all the walls have a thing on them. And Julie and Clinton, I mean, their art was everywhere. I mean, it was over the range, on the stove. It was over the clock, over the window. It was, you know, I remember going to go pee in her bathroom, and I peed with, like, with my butt in a sculpture on the toilet tank with my elbow in a painting, you know, being watched over by a painting on the medicine cabinet, staring at another one on the wall across from me. And it was just. It was alive, it was dynamic, it was exciting. It was like living with all these rambunctious roommates. And there's this term in the art world that gets thrown around rather dismissively of couch art, right? And couch art is synonymous with colorful painting. And it gets uttered with a lot of disdain, right? Like colorful paintings, like, oh, it's this the pretty thing. It's the easy to sell thing.
- [44:05]
A
It's couch to jump in here for people who don't speak art world and explain that the word painting is often couched in derision, right?
- [44:16]
B
It's sort of synonymous with, like, capitalism.
- [44:18]
A
And painting is the most boring and capitalist and bourgeois form of art.
- [44:22]
B
Right? Right. And colorful painting is the. The most, you know, in this taxonomy, but really, you know, as another artist put it to me, like, people deride the idea of an artwork hanging over your couch, but it's a damn beautiful thing, right? This idea that you're looking at this piece day in, day out, and it's seeping into your consciousness. Is incredible and magical. And I think that that could happen with a Van Gogh print of sunflowers. Or that could happen with a weird ceramic sculpture of a guy jacking off with his hand in a bag of Cheetos, which is a piece that, against my wildest expectations, I ended up falling in love with when I saw it at the spring break art fair.
- [45:05]
A
Pianobosca, thanks so much for coming on.
- [45:07]
B
Thank you.
- [45:08]
A
This has been amazing. It was a pleasure. Newly renewed with a with a joy of looking. Many thanks to Jared Downing for producing this here show. And we will be back on Saturday with a regular slate. Mass money.