Selling at the Top

Fellow appraiser Martha Peck, ISA AM sent me an interesting article from the New Yorker magazine about selling art at the top end of the market.  The article is lengthy, but worth reading.  It looks at selling art through leading galleriest David Zwirner and Art Basel in Switzerland.

The New Yorker reports

Prior to the official opening of Art Basel, the annual fair in Switzerland, there is a two-day V.I.P. preview. In many respects, the preview is the fair. It’s when the collectors who can afford the good stuff are allowed in to buy it. After those two days, there isn’t much left for sale, and it becomes less a fair than a kind of pop-up museum, as the V.I.P.s, many of whom have come to Basel from the Biennale in Venice, continue on, perhaps to London for the auctions there. The international art circuit can be gruelling, which is why pretty much everyone who participates in it takes off the month of August, to recuperate.

The Basel preview began at 11 a.m. on a Tuesday in June. The meat of the fair was in a gigantic convention center on the east side of the Rhine. The dealers’ booths were arrayed along two vast rectangular grids, which enclosed a circular courtyard that resembled a panopticon. The fair occupied two floors. The bottom one featured blue-chip art, offered by the powerhouse dealers; Picassos and Warhols could be seen among more contemporary work. Upstairs, for the most part, was younger work, exhibited by smaller galleries.

On the morning of the preview, after a champagne breakfast in the panopticon, the V.I.P.s gathered at the doors, under the watchful eye of guards in berets and dark crewneck sweaters. Through a window in the door, you could see, down the hall, the dealer David Zwirner, with his sales staff huddled around him, as though for a pep talk. The Zwirner booth was just past the Fondation Beyeler’s. (The Swiss dealer Ernst Beyeler, who died in 2010, was one of Art Basel’s founders and its presiding spirit.) Zwirner comes in force: he had about a dozen salespeople with him, a mixture of partners, directors, and associates, as well as a platoon of assistants and art handlers. A few minutes before the doors opened, they took up positions in a sales-floor spread defense. Bellatrix Hubert, a Zwirner partner, pantomimed a gesture of being slammed by an incoming flood. The doors parted, and the buyers poured in.

Within moments, most of the Zwirner directors had paired off with collectors, as at an officers’-club dance. Some strolled over to this or that work of art. The Zwirner booth was about the size of a couple of shipping containers, with work mounted on both sides of various walls. There were paintings by Elizabeth Peyton, Neo Rauch, Martin Kippenberger, On Kawara, Yayoi Kusama, Luc Tuymans, and Lisa Yuskavage, among others, and sculpture by John McCracken and Donald Judd.

 The article continues

In recent years, the big galleries have expanded aggressively, opening outposts around the world. Gagosian alone has a dozen galleries. (Zwirner has three.) This expansion has put tremendous pressure on medium-size operations: artists gravitate toward the scale, pricing power, and full-service treatment of the top gallerists, and buyers, perhaps insecure in their tastes and susceptible to the lure of the familiar, herd along. It’s hard for smaller galleries to afford the overhead or the relentless circuit of international fairs, the hubs nowadays of transactional activity. Meanwhile, many of the most established and esteemed gallerists (Marian Goodman, Barbara Gladstone, Paula Cooper) are over seventy. Gagosian is sixty-eight. These people control many of the world’s best, or best-selling, artists, and someone will eventually inherit them. Very few galleries have thrived into a second generation. Pace is trying, Marlborough is fading, and Knoedler & Company went under, after it sold multimillion-dollar pieces that turned out to be forgeries painted by a Chinese immigrant in Queens. Zwirner’s “industry” has really never been much more than an assembly of improvised and ultimately ephemeral ventures. Dealers come and go, their names and enterprises soon forgotten. All that survives is the detritus of their influence and taste—what they sold and whom they sold it to. The biggest dealers are like Ice Age mega-glaciers, leaving behind vast moraines of art work they’d borne aloft and finally deposited in mansions and museums before melting away.

Last month, ArtReview published its annual list of the most powerful people in the art world. Zwirner was No. 2, after the sheikha who runs the Qatar Museums Authority, which reportedly spends a billion dollars a year on art. Gagosian, who was No. 2 last year, dropped to No. 4. Zwirner’s recent prominence is a product of many things: new gallery spaces, an expanding program (as a gallery’s stable of artists is called), canny brand management, and a latent void in the marketplace. Earlier this year, three Gagosian artists appeared in Zwirner’s exhibitions, which occasioned suggestions that Zwirner was poised to challenge Gagosian’s place at the top. In this scenario, there was both signal and noise. The volume of Gagosian’s business dwarfs that of any and all comers. He doesn’t lie awake at night fretting about David Zwirner. And the threesome was circumstantial. One was Richard Serra, who merely coöperated with Zwirner on an exhibition of his early work. Another was Yayoi Kusama, the Japanese painter, who had been looking for new representation. The third was Jeff Koons, peerlessly lucrative and famous and therefore empowered to be as free an agent as he’d like. Koons wanted to do a show of new sculpture, and Zwirner was happy to fund it. (Koons’s production costs are notoriously high.) That Zwirner’s Koons show coincided with another show of predominantly older work, at Gagosian—well, it was hard for either man to maintain that this was a coincidence.

Source:  The New Yorker