Hope & Dread, Episode 11: What We Talk About When We Talk About The Art Market

In the second of two episodes dedicated to the art market, Charlotte Burns turns to her series co-host; the richly experienced art advisor, critic and curator Allan Schwartzman, as he offers his understanding of where the market sits now—and how it may look in the future. Drawing out trends, strands, opportunities and obstacles, this program represents an intimate insight into an ever-fluctuating industry.

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Courtesy: KÖNIG GALERIE, Berlin, 303 GALLERY, New York, and Galleri Nicolai Wallner, Copenhagen; Installed at National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia; Photo credits: National Gallery of Victoria

Transcript:

Charlotte Burns: 

This is Hope & Dread. I'm Charlotte Burns.

Allan Schwartzman: 

And I'm Allan Schwartzman. This is a program about the tectonic shifts in power in art.

Charlotte Burns:

We want to hear from people who are making change and people who are resisting change. Today's episode is a special one, in which we bring production back to basics. We'll be talking about the art market, but instead of our usual format, today it's just Allan and I. 

Allan, I was thinking if there was a subtitle for this episode, I think it might be “Greed and Despair”. I want to explain to you what I mean by that, and see if you agree; and you can bring some nuance to my more journalistic take on it. 

It's never been so easy to sell art. Someone said to me, "Anyone who's been in this business for 10 years or more, we're all pinching ourselves because it's never been so easy to sell art." Another dealer said: "Two years ago, we thought the roof was going to fall in. No one feels that way anymore, but everyone's so greedy right now." There's this really short-term activity. People are making a lot of money, but they're behaving like it might all end tomorrow. 

Allan Schwartzman: 

So, is it dealers who are saying there's a lot of greed right now?

Charlotte Burns:

Yeah. Dealers are saying that, and a lot of people are saying that, that I've been talking to, not just dealers. It's like an art system thing. There's this sense of things being grabby.

Allan Schwartzman: 

Well, as you say, there was anxiety at the beginning of COVID about the market. Dealers were cautious about reaching out to collectors initially because it seemed inappropriate. Once they became more comfortable with it, what they discovered was that you had a lot of collectors at home who had a lot of time on their hands, and they were thinking a lot more about their collecting. And so, there was a massive amount of art that was being purchased, especially in the primary market and especially up to a few million dollars.  Buying escalated during COVID, particularly the work of much younger artists, of a new generation emerging, a generation that probably wasn't visible as recently as four years ago. 

The idea of there being a sense of urgency or desperation to it, it's really quite accurate, and I see it from a different perspective. The market has grown so much, you have so many more buyers seeking a similarly limited supply of material. Even when it comes to a new generation of artists, there are many, many more people who are seeking to get in on the ground floor, so to speak, that it's throwing off the ways in which the primary market knew how to behave and react and try to build sustainable markets. 

And by the way, there were things that were selling for $50m and $150m, early on in COVID as well. There were just fewer of those instances. The higher price levels depend so much on either the theater of presentation and time pressure of an auction, or on seeing something in the flesh. As we saw with the Macklowe's sale at Sotheby's, work sold extraordinarily well. When the market could get back into operation, there was great depth of buying for the most part.

You have a particular approach to collecting works at the top end of the market. And that is that you have more people who are seeking to buy the exceptional works by very known and proven artists. As a result, people are willing to pay more than they may think something is worth. I think that there's not the same thought or discussion about those two elements, because it is about desire. 

Charlotte Burns: 

I just want to talk about the collectors and this idea that people are coming into the market and they're focusing on known names. That's something we've been talking about for years; this idea that the focus of the buyers has become much more trained, and that people have more of a shopping list. There's a professionalization of collecting in that way. And something that I've been hearing about during the pandemic is people are coming in, they want to work with advisors, and everyone wants the same kind of material, but people don't want to go on retainer because supply and access are so fraught and fought over. 

That idea that you're going to work with someone for a long time and you're going to be on retainer with them, they're going to help you build a collection, that's also challenged,  especially for younger advisors; they can't pull in those retainers. And so there's a lot of commission-based buying, and that is part of what's fueling or propelling this sense of grab, because people are making their income in a different way. They're making it from these short-term commission sales. 

And I want to ask you about that because, obviously, you run an advisory firm and done so for years and years. Are you seeing changes in the way collectors want to work, that newer generation coming in?

Allan Schwartzman:

No. We are working with more people who are new to collecting than we did 20 years ago. Some of those collectors want to work on the basis of a percentage of acquisitions, as opposed to a set fee but, in the instance of our clients, that is because they just don't know where they're going with it and how far they will go, so we can't really come up with a clear, dependable fee. 

I mean, in reality, most people who collect art are not honest with themselves as to what their budget is. And so, as one gets more engaged, oftentimes, there's more money that becomes available.

So, often, in these newer relationships with younger collectors, they will want to start on a percentage basis, and then if the relationship is successful and their buying sustains itself and at levels that they can understand more clearly, then it makes a lot more sense to switch to a retainer basis, which we have found has enabled us to maintain much longer-term relationships with collectors. 

Charlotte Burns: 

Another piece of this puzzle that I'm trying to frame in my mind is how the consolidation in the market affects the access to the supply. Before, there used to be a lot more galleries. There's been a consolidation in galleries; there's been a consolidation of the big mega-galleries taking up more and more artists. They have more and more staff working for those artists. Lots of those staff used to run galleries of their own and have their own mailing list. So, something I'm hearing from dealers who've gone into other businesses than the ones they used to work for or run, is there's then a negotiation over clients.

So, that's a negotiation happening internally in the galleries, but I also wonder how that's affecting the supply and access side, because, if there's so many more people there representing so many more artists, that access must be different because there's so many more points of contact.

Allan Schwartzman:

Well, that depends a lot on the gallery and how their business is structured. I can think of one mega-gallery that has, in general, more directors than works to sell out of most primary market shows. So that becomes a great engine for that gallery to have a high rate of sellout shows. You just have more directors with their own relationships seeking to place work than work you have to place. And then within that, there's usually a pecking order. First, there's the highest priority of the primary clients of the owner of the business, and then of the senior most directors, and so on.

There are other galleries where one checks into a computer and there's a database of what's available, and whatever's available is there for someone to put on hold. 

There's yet another way of working in which there are individual directors overseeing the work of particular artists, and they become the gatekeepers for those artists.

So a lot depends upon the structure of the business and not necessarily the practice itself. 

Let's talk separately about the secondary market for the work of very known artists and the primary market, especially for emerging artists. So in a market for known artists, there are more and more people who are willing to pay exceptional prices for exceptional works than there are to pay bargain prices for average works.

What usually happens in an art market is that when things get too tight or things get too heady in an area, or if things happen in the world that cause shifts in taste or in behavior on the part of collectors, you then see shifts in attention.

And so while we're at a very active market for a very select number of people for those very exceptional quality works and high-priced works, there's also the possibility that that market becomes much larger than the ability to feed it, which can then ultimately cause it to atrophy. It could sort of freeze. And so, if that happens, does that mean that there are more buyers that emerge for the mid-level works that became almost unsalable? At the very highest points, does it shift attention to different artists?

And the reality is all of these things are possible. But I do think, in the strongest places of the market, you also have potential for great vulnerability, simply because of these limits of being able to fulfill need.

Charlotte Burns:

Yeah. I think that's really interesting. Another thing a dealer said to me was they have a show. They said they're selling out, everything's sold. And then they said to me, "Is it great art? I'm not going to comment, but people are buying it." 

And their complaint wasn't that people were buying it. The thing that really annoyed them was the fact that the artist was this young artist that they don't really believe in. And they're like, "They want every work in a museum." And it's like you're not going to get every work in a museum, but the artist is now saying, "I want you to place..." They're reading about in the press, buy one, get one free. And they're like, "I want you to — 

Allan Schwartzman: 

— or buy one for an institution.

Charlotte Burns:

Exactly.

Allan Schwartzman: 

And get one for yourself.

Charlotte Burns:

Exactly. No, it's not buy one, get one free. 

Allan Schwartzman: 

Give and get.

Charlotte Burns:

Give and get. Yeah. And the opposite of cash and carry. And the dealer is saying, "The artist, because the market is so strong for this somewhat mediocre work, they're like, "Oh, I want to be in an institution."" And the dealer doesn't think it's really possible. But collectors are saying, "Oh, well, I'll do it if I can get access to the work." And so that's another tension point in the market that's having a wider impact.

Allan Schwartzman: 

I can say a few things about this. First, as a kind of overview, what we're seeing in all different aspects of whether it's art collecting, museum exhibitions, is saturation, which then can have its consequential results into the future.

But museums are at a point where they're recognizing that they've accepted so many gifts, that there's a teeny fraction of what they own that will make it to the walls of exhibitions, and that there is a massive amount of money that goes into storing, conserving, examining works of art. So yes, most museums are becoming much more precise in what it is that they will accept as donations to the museum. This happens to coincide with a great increase in the number of artists that have emerged over the last few years for whom there's great interest in the marketplace. 

There are better ways and worse ways of communicating certain things. A best dealer is somebody who—even when they have eight works to place, and 20 of their top collectors who want to buy the work and 50 others that are serious clients and collectors who they'll never be able to give a shot at for this work—a great dealer is someone who leaves you feeling good about yourself when they can't fulfill your need.

At the same time, we're seeing this phenomenon where an artist who was introduced to a few people in the market by somebody who saw the work in the studio at prices ranging from, let's say $4,000 to $8,000, that within, let's say less than a year, there's a first exhibition at a gallery. Quite frequently, by the time it gets from birth into the first exhibition, demand has increased so exceptionally—because there are so many people now looking to collect at the low end, the promising end of the market that's looking toward the future—that it has completely changed the capabilities of collectors to gain access to materials. It’s become much more wild.

The most serious collectors can often have no opportunity to buy something if they've shown up a few months too late. But what we're seeing now is that an artist, at the very first show, we're seeing more and more PDFs where virtually every work is labeled as “museum acquisition only”. And there may be the demand for the work that they can actually achieve that, but the way it gets communicated is—

Charlotte Burns:

Obnoxious?

Allan Schwartzman: 

— has become such a marketing tool that it's really alienating a lot of collectors. It's just dealt with in a very coarse way. And there's an appearance of such great hubris there behind it. So the development of relationships that has been at the core of the establishment of new artists in the marketplace is part of what seems to be dramatically shifting, and oftentimes by people who just don't know differently. But the demand has just increased tremendously.

Charlotte Burns:

I think in a way it's like the primary market's been infected by the behavior of the secondary market to some extent. So at “Talking Galleries” last week, one of the dealers was saying the role of a primary dealer is to be steady and gentle. And you raise the prices over a period of time, and it's a gradual thing. 

And there's a kind of push-pull with auction there. And we heard about this a little bit in the last episode, when we talked about what it feels like for an artist to go through that market glare. It's a complicated thing, but you don't want a market to run out of your control and auction will often explode a market like a firework, and whether it burns it or not isn't really the auction's focus or care. Whereas a dealer will take things more slowly. 

And I just wonder, from your perspective, how much of that is this sense of secondary market behavior. We know that happens in auctions. We know that happens on the secondary market in the private sales. But primary market dealers have mostly been holding tight on that older, slower way of doing business.

Allan Schwartzman: 

My experience is somewhat different. My experience is that the vast majority of artists who have emerged in the last few years are exhibiting works that are priced at a much lower level than their counterparts of, let's say six and 10 years ago. So the entry point is much lower. And therefore, when there is great demand, substantial increases in prices by percentage are not so often great increases in price in terms of the actual price or its effect on somebody's budget.

Charlotte Burns:

Right.

Allan Schwartzman: 

I'm seeing a lot of work by really interesting, promising artists priced at anywhere between $4,000 and $15,000. In the past, these would've been artists who by the time they got to their first exhibition would more likely have been $25,000 or more.

And by the way, we're seeing more of that because we're seeing a lot more galleries that are focusing on younger artists, that are themselves run by much younger dealers. And so they start at a comfort level which is very low and they look to the market to set it.

But I would say further that the history has always been the primary market, yes; it increases slow and steady, even when the secondary market and the demand is greatly increased. And what started happening maybe a little bit 15 years ago, more so 10 years ago, was that certain galleries showing the work of living artists were increasing the price of primary market works to be much more in line with the secondary market. 

And on the one hand, that immediately throws out high speculation. But it also creates a lot of strain on the artist. For the artist who may not be as consistent, or for an artist who's experimenting and looking in new directions, when a buyer is paying a top level price, you have much more selectivity and much more discipline that's exercised.

So in a few instances, we've also seen several markets that have stalled or that certainly have become challenged. And I do see that potential within this market for the artists who emerged in the last few years who are then taken on by a more senior gallery at an earlier stage than they would have been in the past. And therefore, we sometimes see more dramatic increases in price from the original gallery to the larger gallery.

Charlotte Burns:

Yeah. Overnight. Joining one of those bigger dealers, all of a sudden, it's sometimes a tripling.

Allan Schwartzman: 

Well, and sometimes that's still a bargain. And sometimes, it's not. And in the cases where it's not, it can often slow things down. Now, in many situations, that could be a good thing. If you have an artist who is consistent and doesn't produce a lot of work, you'll always have a demand that you can meet, even if there's less of a demand.

I think the bigger challenge to this market, particularly the primary market, and especially for the work of younger artists, is that you have such a crowded space of people wanting to collect that work, that you simply have lost the capacity to build collections in known ways from the past that did create stability and some kind of order and organization. So in certain ways, it's an open new world. And I don't know if many people have really begun to think through how does one adjust to an over-demand for work.

Charlotte Burns:

I want to get into taste and the future. And let's begin with the future that's happening now. So you just discussed the impact of the market right now on future collections. Obviously, in tandem to this growth in the physical object market, you're seeing a massive growth in NFTs. NFT sales reached $17.7bn in 2021, up from $82.5m in 2020. That's a jump of more than 200 times. Web3 is meant to be a $10 trillion dollar industry in the next four years.

As someone said to me the other day, it's a bit complicated, but they were talking about the object market and they were talking about capitalism and Marxism and saying Marxism only ever came about because of the object, because you create something physical. Entire societies are shifting away from that, and some of the richest people in the world are putting their money into moving the world even further from physical objects into a digital realm. The art world still very much is in the business of physical objects. And the way I want to sort of bring that down to earth is Rothko. I was laughing this morning at a Twitter thread about art. And someone was saying, "Let's argue about art today." And someone posted a picture of anime and Rothko and said, "This Rothko sold for $39.5m. That's disturbing."

And there was this whole thread about how this flat image, this object, this sort of anachronistic thing, was so fetishized from their point of view. So I just thought that was really interesting, because you're seeing playing out on a digital interface, an argument over physical versus digital art. That's going to be more and more the argument as younger audiences exist in a digital realm, in ways that we can't even imagine but will be happening very soon. In one of our first shows Amy Webb talked about that, this idea that we're going to be having hybrid reality soon. That's the vision part of the art world. How is the art world coming to grips with that? Or is it yet, or is it in denial?

Allan Schwartzman: 

Well, there are many ways in which the art world is actually quite old fashioned. You can go back more than 60 years to see works of art that seemed to be stating the end of painting. And yet painting is not at an end. At the end of the day, there is demand for the experience of the object, even if a greater number of those objects get sold and acquired initially by people who haven't actually seen them in person. There will always be visitors to the museum. The museums, certainly pre-COVID, were at their highest levels in terms of attendance. So, this idea of the object losing its aura and the necessity of the direct experience of it is something of a riddle, more than a reality.

There was a time in Medieval times where sculpture was considered far more significant than painting, and that changed in the Renaissance. And it changed with a painting being signed by an artist. That act therein shifted a whole perception of a medium. Does that happen again in reverse? 

I think we are very far from the conditions under which the digital eclipses, the actual object in real space. It's still a very elusive thing to define what makes art great, but I do think, at the end of the day, what sustains unknowingness about an artwork, about however many times you look at it that your perception of what you're seeing or what it means to you or of what it means in a wider historical context is always either changing or it's never fully knowable. That sense of mystery, that sense of there being a power of vision beyond what it is that you can readily see or translate into words is shared by, whether it's the most exquisite da Vinci or Titian, or the most seemingly markless Ad Reinhardt or Barnett Newman.

Charlotte Burns:

I agree with you. I mean I'm in the same church, essentially. And we've discussed it in this show, this idea that what art can do is create a space for ambiguity. And in an increasingly efficiency-focused world, that's a reprieve and a relief. I believe that. I'm of the generation to be object focused. 

But the reality of museums, yes, museums are packed, but the most packed museums are the Van Gogh Experience and these things that, in the art world, are sort of ridiculed, but that's how a lot of people are seeing art. And that's a reality. That's how a lot of kids are going to see art. That's how they're experiencing it. It's their introduction.

Allan Schwartzman: 

But that's not a van Gogh. That is taking the image of a van Gogh and turning it into a very active and engaging environmental experience. It's simply something else. Even without judging it; it's something else.

Charlotte Burns:

Agree, but it has an impact on the object, because if you are taking your family to go see that, you're not taking your family to the Modern (Museum of Modern Art) or whatever it is.

Allan Schwartzman: 

And the person who is going to pay $250m for the next great van Gogh that comes to market will not, at least under the current conditions, see that as any less valuable. They'll probably see it as even that much more valuable because of the popularity of such experiences.

The market for NFTs has certainly exploded, and there is tremendous interest and curiosity on the part of very serious art collectors as to where they fit in within that and to learn more in order to be at the forefront of the development of a new market. Thus far what we have is, for the most part, a market where there's a huge gap between the quality of the work and the prices assigned to them. Most of the work that has gained great attention in the marketplace is by graphic designers; it's by people who come from the digital world, not from an aesthetic perspective or from a sculptural perspective, but from a technological one. So this is where value has been created where it didn't exist prior to that. Whether or not that has lasting value is what has to be tested. 

Thus far the most compelling artists I know who have dependable art markets who have entered into NFTs have either done so because it's a natural continuation of the digital work they were making before there were NFTs, or they are attempts to benefit from what seems to be a very active market that's willing to spend very high numbers for NFTs that might not spend it for the paintings. 

But most of the artists that I know of who are, let’s say, painters who have turned to NFTs to see where that might lead them have not done particularly well commercially.

Charlotte Burns:

It's really interesting to think of that idea of this being just a new media, which of course it is as well. And I was walking around the Modern yesterday and there's a whole room on Plexiglas and all these artists who are like, "Woo, Plexiglas, so exciting," and started making great work with Plexiglas. 

And I was thinking about that, the context of digital futures within the rehang of the Modern. And that shift away from the chronological sequential display of things, that more authorial sense of things, is also a little bit like the internet. Things are put alongside each other. You might go for van Gogh's Starry Night, but next to it you’re going to see something else. It's sort of like web browsing. And I thought that was really interesting, that that display seems more successful than most other museums at feeling relevant because it feels more like what it means to exist in a digital world, which we do on our phones and computers all the time. Our screens are different.

Allan Schwartzman:

And I think you put your finger on something critical to art moving forward, which is context. I think that we are just starting to see, or we've known for a while, that there are certain collections where the value of the collection is greater than the sum of its parts, because the collection has a kind of vision that positions most of the works within it within a frame of reference that gives them a larger cultural or historical presence. 

Similarly, we are seeing museums that are turning away from the historical chronological arrangement of art and separation of cultures to be looking much more across cultures, across time, across themes. In many ways we're in the infancy of that. I think that there's certainly a lot more to explore. 

Charlotte Burns:

It's dawning on me as you're talking, that this talk about the object is in a way an extension of the conversation we were having in the more museum-focused episodes, because you could reduce that and say that's also a conversation about the value of the object, that shift from hyper-focus on the objects and its value that you see in that relationship between trustees and curators, and that sort of power tussle with educators coming in now and talking about relevance. 

That power struggle over the object, over the display of the object, over the reverence given to the object is playing out in the institutions even while the market is at once hyper focused on the object and also spending money on a crypto future that's quite uncertain. 

And I guess what I want to ask you is something you've mentioned to me before. So we're seeing this growth in so many ways, and you'd said to me earlier in the week that you weren't sure that we were seeing things that were challenging taste in the market right now. So can you expand on that a little bit?

Allan Schwartzman: 

There's almost always in the history of Modern art a connection between Contemporary art and the Avant-Garde, the idea that the contemporary artist is seeing beyond what most people can see, and that they're challenging either taste or assumptions about what art can be, or they are moving into territory that has not yet been at the center of what an artwork could be. We're in a different period now. 

I mean, this is a very indirect way of answering your question, but what I've been thinking about a lot lately is that in so many ways, this language of Modern art essentially came to a conclusion or to a completion point somewhere in the 1960s, when you had Reinhardt painting the Last Paintings, where Minimalism had reduced a painting to an object, from something handmade to something machine-made, and where it even went one more step with Conceptual art and the object no longer need be. It doesn't mean that there aren't other things that could be done with the mind of the modern artist, but essentially that brought it to the end. 

In the late 1960s, early 1970s, you have a massive, extraordinary period of experimentation, especially with sculpture. It was also linked to the Anti-war movement, the Civil Rights movement, the feminist movement. It was linked to a younger generation within a culture that was rebelling against norms and that was seeking new values, more often than not seeking values that they saw as more enlightened. 

It became a very difficult period for an art market because you didn't have predominant styles. You didn't have iconic works. You didn't have front-running artists. It was the nature of that time that it was truly experimental. It was a world in search of testing its values, testing its materials, seeing where art could go. 

Once the market kicked in, circa 1980, you then saw a whole shutting down again, of a new canon of artists emerging, and as that market grew in the 80s, the bigger and showier the work, the more desirable and more expensive it became. And the 70s then was relegated to this bracketed period that was very hard to understand and communicate, and certainly very hard, if not impossible, for a market to attach itself to. 

Today, I think we're in a very similar period. The work is very different, but I think we are in a period that once again, where we are questioning the fundamental values by which we judge art and value art. And it's linked to a much larger cultural shift. It's linked to demands for the kind of inclusion and diversity that was fought for in the 1960s, but didn't really change that much when you actually sit down and look at the details of it across decades. 

This signals a number of things. Number one, to me it signals that yes, in truth, Modern art, we're way past that. It's sort of like the moment to reexamine the thing that we understood, but we didn't really know how to absorb. So much of the attention today on the work of Black artists in this country I think is linked to that.

So, I think one thing that's going on is we're at the beginning of, somewhere at the beginning of a massive epochal shift, which ultimately goes beyond art. I do think in art, it will be as significant as the shift from the Medieval to the Renaissance or from the artisan to the artist, but it's going to be cultural.

I mean, that entire world of Modern art could only exist because of industrialization, which could only have been built—and brought in a large leisure class—because of slavery. So, you have a much longer colonial history that we've been rooted in, that the present is now pushing against. I think clearly we're moving out of, which is why the conflicts can be as dire as they sometimes appear. Power doesn't give up power easily. 

Charlotte Burns:

We've seen this huge expansion of art fairs through this period of neoliberal globalism, and this internationalism that happened, which also coincided with the growth of the museums, the growth of the market and all these new buyers coming in. There was this sense, this kind of naive belief that, that would be almost unilateral, that it would exist in one direction, it would be a Western-imposed perspective on these other worlds, and that sense of value would spread, which obviously hasn't happened. 

So, listening to two fair directors in Singapore saying: "Well, obviously you can't bring certain works to this new promising market of the future." Obviously if you're going into the Middle East, you can't show naked bodies, you can't talk about gay rights. You can't talk about anything like that. 

So, these new markets have values within their societies that are at odds with Western values, and even amongst themselves. Hong Kong was a period of growth. Now, Hong Kong isn't because the position of China has changed more quickly than people investing in Hong Kong imagined it would. People are looking at Seoul. That's also tied to the property market in Seoul and how people have to spend their money. 

We're looking at Britain, you're seeing, we discussed in episode two, the UK government imposing more controls over culture. And yet, the culture there looks increasingly isolated and a little parochial. Europe essentially looked dated immediately after the 2008 economic collapse. 

Meanwhile in America, you're seeing lots of people opening up in Los Angeles. Rich people in their 30s in LA, the kind of influencer economy is enormous. You have the crypto wealth. Meanwhile in New York, as a dealer said to me, "I'm more money than ever, but I leave and I go down, catch a subway, and I'm literally stepping over bodies." 

So, it's a moment of massive tension, completely clashing values. And the places that we're sort of looking for the market to grow don't necessarily have values that align with the typical values that the art world sees itself as representing. Where do we go from here, Allan?

Allan Schwartzman:

I mean a) I don't know. But firstly, however much the art market is centered in New York, the buying is truly international. The geographic area in which there's been the greatest shift in presence in the market is in Asia. That spans a number of different countries where the demand for art collecting has increased. 

Honestly, I think that's what makes this time exciting in a way. I mean, five years ago, 10 years ago, 15 years ago, I was saying that this is really not such an interesting time for new art. In the last few years, my mind has been completely flipped.

And so we're in a time of possibility. I think we don't know what it's going to be until we go through it. That's part of what makes it exciting, but we also know that because of the market, this system is highly challenged. There can be a lot of art that could be really interesting and promising that may not make it through because of the pressures of the art market, which are far higher than they've ever been. I do think the whole enterprise is more likely to change than at any time within the last few hundred years.

I still think it is inevitable that we're going to see a lot more opportunity and possibility emerge within the market. I mean, some things will get killed a lot faster and some things will take a lot longer to grow.

Charlotte Burns:

It's essentially a moment of really conflicting and conflicted opinions about what's going to happen. And you're seeing that in the structures that support the market. The auction houses used to have a fairly standardized job-for-life sort of role in the art market. Now you have three auction houses with completely different staff, experiences, visions, business models.

Gallery models have completely shifted. You have these enormous brands now and then sort of everything else with a slightly suffocated middle. You have the new collectors, you have all these new centers. So, it's very kaleidoscopic right now.

Allan Schwartzman: 

It is. And I would also say at the same time, that it reinforced something you said at the beginning of this conversation, which is that there is so much activity that feels focused on the short-term, on the quick buck, on a lack of a sense of a confidence in a future. I think that seems like a natural reaction to people recognizing, however unconsciously, that culture and values are on the precipice of significant change.

Charlotte Burns:

We're in a moment of epochal shift, as our Astrologer Phyllis Mitz, told us; we just have to get through the old to get to the new. Allan, a question for you then, do you feel hope or dread?

Allan Schwartzman: 

Total hope. I think there's going to be a lot of collisions along the way, but I have total hope in where we get to on the other side.

Charlotte Burns:

Thank you so much. 

Tune into Hope & Dread every second Wednesday and subscribe wherever you find your podcasts. 

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Hope & Dread is brought to you by Art&, the new editorial platform created by Schwartzman&.

The executive producer is Allan Schwartzman, who co-hosts the show together with me, Charlotte Burns of Studio Burns, which produces the series. 

Robert Bound is our associate editor. 

Holly Fisher mixed and edited the sound. 

Additional research and support has been provided by Julia Hernandez and Ali Nemerov. 

Theme music by the inimitable Philip Glass.

Podcast Art: Jeppe Hein, Semicircular Space (2016). Courtesy: KÖNIG GALERIE, Berlin, 303 GALLERY, New York, and Galleri Nicolai Wallner, Copenhagen; Installed at National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia; Photo credits: National Gallery of Victoria