Last Sunday morning, there was a collective groan in the art market when The New York Times told the stories of four artists who saw their auction sales pop in the post-pandemic art boom, only to see their prices dramatically plummet over the last year and a half. None of this is surprising considering the fact that the Times has always taken an ambivalent stance toward the art world. Its highly educated and liberal-ish readership cares about art and artists, but they are also easily put off by the idea that art is also a business. For some reason, the Times views the buying and selling of art with great suspicion and believes those who buy and sell art must be up to no good. Much of the space in the Times profile is given over to the four artists complaining about what they considered unfair treatment, mostly by offstage speculators. (One of the artists, Amani Lewis, went so far as to attack one of her collectors, who sold a work for pretty much what he had paid for it.) The problem wasn’t so much that the collector sold the work but that, in trying to sell for significant profit, the collector had inadvertently revealed that there was little demand for Lewis’s work at the moment.
The quartet of artists—Lewis, Emmanuel Taku, Isshaq Ismail, and Allison Zuckerman—each have a different story, but the Times tried to flatten their experiences into one story of exploitation. The real head-scratcher, however, is how any of these artists expect to emerge from this blip in their careers unscathed. When demand for an artist evaporates, we usually see no market activity at all. Over time, an artist can eventually make bad auction results irrelevant. Complaining about your market going south in The New York Times leaves a lasting record of an event best left unmentioned, and attacking your collectors is the sort of thing that’s harder to live down.
