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Many years ago, at a friend’s wedding in the Cotswolds, I found myself seated next to a celebrated artist. I loathed the man’s work, but at the time I was just a baby art dealer. I remember feeling starstruck in the way one might be meeting a disgraced former politician: impressed, but not sure that I should be.
The artist told me about an enormous and unwieldy installation he had made that had been sold to a wealthy collector. The installation was eventually moved to a private island belonging to the collector where it was displayed in a purpose-built gallery. On the evening of the grand unveiling, as he made small talk with hedge fund managers, arms dealers and oil executives — the kinds of people who have their own art islands — the artist experienced a moment of panic. Suddenly it was as if he were still a little boy making colourful drawings and Plasticine sculptures. Surrounded by these Masters of the Universe, he felt profoundly insecure. It was, he told me, the adult equivalent of showing your parents’ friends a particular praiseworthy finger painting.
The art world is funny about money. There are many reasons for this, but I think at its root it has something to do with what the artist experienced on that island. Art is something which we all do as children. It feels like something we all began by sharing, only for it to be formalised and commodified, first by art schools and then by the market. (This might also explain why people are so quick to criticise artworks — conceptual, performance — which don’t fit into those categories of art — painting, drawing, sculpture — we make as children.) But nostalgia doesn’t explain it all.
When it comes to commercial galleries, you’re unlikely to see a price on the wall next to an artwork. These days, even little red dots — stickers indicating works sold — have been outlawed. (When I opened my gallery, my father arrived with a sheet of red dots; they are still in my desk drawer.) In fact, you can almost gauge the seriousness of a gallery by whether it displays prices: if they do, you’re probably in the wrong place.
In New York, it has been mandatory for galleries to display prices since the early 1970s. But if you went today to a gallery in Chelsea or the Upper East Side, there wouldn’t be a dollar sign in sight (unless, of course, it’s a Warhol painting of a dollar sign). This is by design: if you want to know how much an artwork is, you will be forced to talk to a member of staff. But this person almost certainly won’t give you the information you desire; instead, your details will probably be passed to a sales person who will check you against the gallery database, as well as the trifecta of Google, Instagram and X, before emailing you coyly with something along the lines of, “We are thrilled to hear you’re interested in A. N. Artist’s work. Could you tell me a little about how their practice fits in with the rest of your collection?”
There could be several more such layers between you and finding out how much something costs — before the gallery decides if it will deign to sell you something. If this sounds like snobbery, you’d be right. The art world thrives on snobbery (though it’s often referred to as “taste”) as a way of continuing to raise itself above the fray of luxury goods or simply a decorative asset class.
After all, this isn’t retail, this is culture, and nothing enforces that notion like having to prove your eligibility as a collector to a 25-year-old art history graduate. Just because you’re rich doesn’t mean you can simply go ahead and buy it. This is also reflected in the art world’s distinctive idiolect: “acquire” in place of “buy”, for example. The language is meant to elevate the very nature of your purchase — sorry, “acquisition” — so that you don’t stop to think about it too much. This is in stark contrast to how many dealers talk about their wares behind the scenes: it is not uncommon to hear of masterpieces referred to as “inventory” or simply as “kit”. (The art world is a very upstairs-downstairs environment.)
There are times, however, when politesse can be discarded. At art fairs, if something is sold on a booth one day the gallery will often remove it overnight, swiftly replacing it with another work. At Frieze London, earlier this year, I overheard a conversation: “They’re, like, everywhere,” one collector said of a particularly popular artist. “They swap them out like football substitutes.”
The dance around price tags can cause confusion for collectors. Still, it’s important to understand one important distinction. As Damien Hirst once observed, “art is about life and the art world is about money”. People who genuinely love art forget this at their peril.
Orlando Whitfield is a failed art dealer and the author of ‘All That Glitters: A Story of Friendship, Fraud and Fine Art’ (Profile)
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