5.9.25 — Boom, Bust, and Renewal
If you stayed with me last week, you know what I am thinking these days, stuck indoors with an injury and too little else on my mind: should I cut back sharply, even as I regain full mobility? Have I simply run out of things to say?
Then, too, has art itself run out of things to say? And no, for once I am not talking about the “anything goes” spirit in painting, with old stories and familiar brushwork to match. Eclecticism has its rewards, after all, especially when it means discarding old divisions between the personal and the political, mythmaking and making art. Especially, too, when it translates into diversity, with more room for nonwhites and women. Rather, I mean lassitude on the business side, as galleries find it harder and harder to survive. I have given up counting just how many went under that seemed like permanent fixtures and how many dealers saw 2024 as a good time to retire. 
Not that the two issues, what to say and how to pay for it, are unconnected. Quite the contrary. When art turns to new ideas and new energy, artists and collectors alike rush to share in the possibilities. It happened with Abstract Expressionism, and galleries are still turning up forgotten painters and neglected sculptors—or convinced that they should. It happened again with the millennium, when this Web site was still young. I set out with the belief that painting was not at all dead, thank you, and art history still matters. I was rewarded with a gallery boom, museum growth, and larger audiences for both.
Not that the boom is over yet either. The expanded Frick Collection reopens to high praise this very month, with the New Museum, the Studio Museum in Harlem, and the Princeton University art museum on their way. And, however many have gone under, dealers trying. Who would have imagined the clean lines of a full building in Chinatown for Magenta Plains, the sprawl across Chelsea and Tribeca for David Zwirner, or seven stories for Pace gallery, with another branch just up the street—or the nonstop art fairs? And yet the losses are inescapable. More to the point, what if loss is the new normal?
Art has a way of renewing itself in the face of failure, because that pretty much defines the making of art. I my own writing a single painting each by Jan Vermeer, Jan van Eyck, and Giovanni Bellini because I could not get them out of mind. I started, too, with the first signs of a shift in galleries from Soho to Chelsea. I followed galleries to Williamsburg, Dumbo, and Bushwick—and watched them die. A gallery scene leads to gentrification, but art moves on. Can a shrinking Lower East Side and the new concentration of galleries in Tribeca fare otherwise?
Regardless, I can always learn something each step of the way—and not just from the dozens of niche art markets that remain. With Asian art alone, last year brought me face to face with calligraphy, mandalas, aboriginal art, heaven and hell, and the hell we are creating a climate of coal and ice. Buddhism aside, though, what if there is more to the story than cycles of renewal? What if thirty years of growth were the exception all along? What if attrition remains when the stars of the show pass? What is left at the end of the day?
Part is sheer economics. The cheap rents that brought past spurts (and allowed me to get by) are not coming back. Collectors have proved difficult to lure too far downtown or out of Manhattan. You know the old lines that the market can stay irrational longer than you can wait? As Dumbo proved, real estate interests can hold onto vacant property longer than you can afford it. Art develops in an agonizing parallel to inequality in a market economy as a whole, as the wealthy take up more space and more spaces, like art worlds all to themselves.
To see what that means for the future, it helps to look back. Yes, I followed the cycle of boom and bust for thirty years, with the emphasis on the boom. And yes, I watched as a hurricane closed Chelsea and recessions took their toll. I watched, too, as Covid-19 shuttered museums, galleries, and art fairs entirely. But that still leaves the perils of business as usual, and I do mean business. Consider, then, an alternative history of contemporary art—and I pick up next time with just that.
Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.