Do You Have to Be Rich to Make It as an Artist?

Art is a self-starting, entrepreneurial activity, and what is true of entrepreneurs in general is perhaps true of artists. “[T]he most common shared trait among entrepreneurs is access to financial capital—family money, an inheritance, or a pedigree and connections that allow for access to financial stability….,” Quartz recently explained, debunking the cult of the entrepreneur as visionary risk-taker. “When […]

Emerging Art Cools Down

LONDON — The art market is a notoriously opaque business. And over the past couple of years the highly speculative trade in emerging artists has given off plenty of heat. In 2014, recently made works by young abstract painters like Oscar Murillo, Lucien Smith, Alex Israel, Mark Flood and Christian Rosa were being “flipped” at […]

Take Your Time – New painting at the Museum of Modern Art.

Don’t attend the show seeking easy joys. Few are on offer in the work of the thirteen Americans, three Germans, and one Colombian—nine women and eight men—and those to be found come freighted with rankling self-consciousness or, here and there, a nonchalance that verges on contempt. The ruling insight that Hoptman proposes and the artists […]

The Worst: 10 Terrible Art World Moments of 2014

Putting aside any petty concerns for bridges burned, here’s an incomplete list of the most despicable moments in 2014’s art world, as viewed by Scott Indrisek of Blouin Artinfo.com.  From from candy factories to soggy concerts, there are two sides to every story, right?

The 20 Most Powerless People in the Art World: 2014 Edition

While other art publications sing the praises of the rich and powerful, we like to look at those who are largely overlooked (or worse, exploited) in order to understand the real state of the art world and its discontents. So, here you have our annual assessment of those below the most powerful. And yes, we’ve finally unhitched […]

Buy! Sell! Liquidate! How ArtRank is shaking up the art market

Controversial website ArtRank treats art like a commodity – tipping investors off about who’s hot and who’s toxic. Site founder Carlos Rivera talks bubbles, bonuses and backlashes. A few years ago, Carlos Rivera was a virtual unknown, even in the art circles where he earned his living. He was just another gallerist, running a West […]

Zombies on the Walls: Why Does So Much New Abstraction Look the Same?

For the past 150 years, pretty consistently, art movements moved in thrilling but unmysterious ways. They’d build on the inventions of several extraordinary artists or constellations of artists, gain followings, become what we call a movement or a school, influence everything around them, and then become diluted as they were taken up by more and […]

Art Collectors of Our Time: A Field Guide

In the cultivated wilds of the art world, one complex beast—omnivorous yet finicky, gentle-seeming yet quick to strike—sits at the center of the ecosystem: the collector. Often found at watering holes known as art fairs, where they feed on champagne and aesthetic goods (often shiny ones), these curious specimens of fascination come in many discrete […]

Hot New Artists, Getting Hotter

If the market for contemporary art is in danger of overheating, the first canary in the coal mine will surely be those fashionable young artists whose prices have been driven up by speculators over the past few years. Midseason auctions of affordable works by emerging names are telling temperature gauges for the contemporary market. Phillips’s […]

Saltz on Stefan Simchowitz, the Greatest Art-Flipper of Them All

The past year has seen collectors and auction houses creating their own art market. They’re essentially bypassing dealers, galleries, and critics, identifying artists on their own, buying works by those artists cheaply in great numbers, then flipping them at vastly higher prices to a network of other like-minded speculator-collectors. Thus, we’ve seen the rise of […]

The Sacred Cows of the Art World (Or, Why Everyone’s So Nervous About Stefan Simchowitz)

The herd is spooked. That’s one interpretation of why there has been so much outrage over the the borderline heretical views that the collector Stefan Simchowitz espoused in Artspace‘s recent interview with him—what he said has evidently struck a chord that resonates jarringly with collectors, dealers, artists, curators… everyone, really. A collector who has amassed a hoard of recent art, […]

Cultural Entrepreneur Stefan Simchowitz on the Merits of Flipping, and Being a “Great Collector”

If you bring up the name Stefan Simchowitz in the company of art dealers, collectors, advisors, or other professionals, you are bound to get a vigorous reaction. A producer of Hollywood movies like “Requiem for a Dream” and a co-founder of MediaVast, the photo-licensing site that was sold to Getty Images in 2007 for $200 million, Simchowitz is one of […]

Art World Places Its Bet

LONDON — Before a standing-room crowd at Christie’s here last month, the bidding opened on an abstract painting filled with black scratching, “Burrito” scrawled across the top in bright yellow. The auctioneer announced that there were already 17 telephone and absentee buyers vying for the canvas, made three years ago by Oscar Murillo, who just […]

On the Money at the London Auctions

The truth of the art market is that art sells better at auction than it does in the galleries. This is primarily due to the “new buyer” phenomenon, which for the time being is what rules the day. All hail the rule of the auction season! Here’s my take on the recent sales in London. […]