Contemporary Art World -101

“It is much easier for an art dealer to find new artists for old clients than it is to find new clients for old artists” – Peter Plagens on What Drives the Contemporary Art Market

I read this in the New Art Examiner in the late 70’s or early 80’s and it struck me then – as it does now – as a  logical explanation of why the art world takes some lucky number of kids straight from MFA programs and makes them overnight art stars.  Articles in the Times talk about how art dealers hang around the studios at Columbia, or Yale – about how a particularly promising pick has 3 or 4 dealers competing for him, like a football scouts hanging around high schools.    But it was always thus.  When my gallery (and I) were very young in early 80’s, there were always collectors who went straight to the artist’s studio and bought lots of work for little money.  The artist’s were thrilled to get a chunk of cash and the collectors hedged their bets by buying lots of art by lots of artists cheaply,  hoping that a few of their acquisitions would pay off.  Invariably some of them  – enough of them did.

It makes sense to continuously look for fresh blood in the football biz because the life of a professional football guy is so fleeting.  A serious artist, however, walking around with a rich stream of ideas, has a life’s worth of painting ahead of him.  But he’s not young forever and a new crop will take the limelight.  The collectors will say – oh yes, I’ve already got one of his works – don’t need any more – , and because it is much easier for an art dealer to find new artists than new collectors (there are many, many more of them), the dealer will look for the  new artists to sell to the old clients.  So what happens to the artists as they grow out of their whiz kid phase?  Their life experience is enriching their art,  which is getting better and better as they are getting older and older.  And yet the market ignores them as it requires new blood.  One of these days we’ll have the new cult of the Old.   Can’t wait.