Today the art market is a glittering international pageant, an endless parade of art fairs, openings, biennales, ever more eye-popping auction prices and galleries that drop their artists as soon as they fall out of fashion. Art is an asset, an investment and a security — and you might never hang it on the wall. It wasn’t always so mercenary.
“We’re much more self-conscious today and we think much harder about what’s going to happen in the future,” he reckons. “I think primarily because people are money-orientated today, so they want to know that it’s going to be worth more tomorrow. But that wasn’t an issue in the art world [of the Sixties] because it wasn’t a money world.”
Yet paintings today are bought to order. Findlay describes a typical phone call. “An art adviser will call me with a specific request like a pastrami on rye toasted with mayonnaise: a work of art by an artist in a certain colour.” If Findlay has something he thinks will fit the bill, the art adviser will ask for a high-resolution image. They’ll ask him to take a video.
“A moving video of a still painting,” he says with some exasperation. They’ll ask for a condition report. The adviser then forwards these to the prospective buyer. For a fortnight they go back and forth. “Is it that red? Does it look that red? There seems to be a spot on the edge, what’s that?”
“Their client is four blocks from where I’m sitting in my gallery,” Findlay says. “I’m tempted to say why doesn’t your client put a pair of shoes on? People used to do this. Titans of industry did this.” He mentions the collector, major museum donor and uranium-mining magnate Joseph Hirshhorn who used to come to a gallery with his family.
“They enjoyed it. It was fun.” In the early days of Findlay’s career even the busiest plutocrats would come in, ask to see a Dubuffet and end up buying a Miró. In the meantime, they’d have spent two hours chatting. “They’ve educated themselves. I’ve educated myself about their taste. That’s how it used to work.”
Even odder than not seeing a painting in the flesh before you buy it is what super-rich buyers do with paintings once they’ve bought them. Suppose I buy a Jackson Pollock or a painting by a hot and covetable artist such as Sarah Sze or Jadé Fadojutimi, I’d want to hang it above the sofa in my hypothetical Park Avenue apartment.
Findlay says there are plenty of buyers who send their prize paintings straight to storage and only show their friends a jpeg. “So when they go out to dinner and they sit next to like-minded collectors, they compare collections on their phones. ‘I just bought this … I only paid that …’”
The director of Sotheby’s, Peregrine Pollen, published a post-sale statement that quipped: “Good art holds up even in a bad market.” You might add that good art looks even better on the wall and like nothing much at all in a vault.
In the Sixties, a young artist with no family money, working as a waiter or waitress, could get a cold-water loft in Soho. It might not have had a bathroom but it was “a place to work, crash, live. That doesn’t exist now.” Artists moved on to Brooklyn, which is now “very fancy”. Today “New York” artists have studios in Detroit, a post-industrial city with a surplus of disused warehouse space.