Re-Framing the Art Market

Alexander Zemlianichenko / AP Photo At the 21st-annual Art Show in New York, purchases have slowed, as gallerists try to make artwork precious again—but not overpriced. Judith H. Dobrzynski reports.

The crowd was cordial, happily sipping from glasses of Champagne, white wine, and soda. Big collectors like Marty Margulies, Agnes Gund, Frances Bowes, Don Marron, and Helen Schwab roamed the art-filled aisles. As everyone walked around during the gala opening of the annual Art Dealers Association of America art fair in New York last week, they were smiling, laughing, pausing frequently to chat and to look at the art in the gallery booths.

What they weren’t doing, despite valiant new strategies by some dealers, was buying much art.

“We need to get away from the notion of art as solely a commodity, and back to the language of art,” says Roland Augustine, of Luhring Augustine Gallery.

The annual Art Show has never been a “gentlemen, start-your-engines” competitive drive to buy art, the way Art Basel and Art Basel Miami Beach are. But the uncommonly leisurely—and pleasant—atmosphere last Wednesday night couldn’t veil the crestfallen spirits in the old Seventh Regiment Armory on Park Avenue in Manhattan, which has hosted this show for 21 years. Like chronic hypochondriacs, everyone there was trying to take the art world’s temperature—and the size of the crowd, much diminished from years past, told the tale. Instead of squeezing in and out among the throngs, you could easily make your way from booth to booth, not just early on, when tickets cost from $500 to $2,000 and the quiet was eerie, but even after 7:30 p.m., when the gala’s entry price dropped to $150. The art market is hypothermic.

The mood at the 2009 Art Show was more sedate than it was in the early-1990s recession and the year after 9/11. “We did OK in January,” said Hildegard Bachert, a director of Galerie St. Etienne, which specializes in German & Austrian Expressionist and outsider art, an area that has suffered far less than contemporary art. “But some of our colleagues here are telling us gloom-and-doom stories.” As another dealer put it, “it’s dead.”

Well, not quite. At the gala, David Tunick sold a $250,000 etching by Winslow Homer, and Per Skarstedt sold a photograph by Cindy Sherman priced at $600,000. At the booth of Acquavella Galleries, director Michael Findlay proudly said, “I sold a painting”—and pointed to a 2008 work by James Rosenquist. The asking price was $550,000, and Finlay says he got nearly that from a New York collector.

But elsewhere around the cavernous drill hall, transactions were sparse or small—as they have been ever since October, when it felt like someone flipped a switch and turned off art-collecting.

It was about that time that many dealers began to plan what to bring to this small, gem-like fair, populated by blue-chip dealers and low-flash collectors. Most years, galleries tend to bring a sampling of their works—putting up a Matisse drawing here, a Diebenkorn abstraction there, and a Richard Misrach photograph there in hopes of attracting as many kinds of collectors as their inventory allows. It’s a trade-show approach.