Judith Dobrzynski covers The Art Show for The Daily Beast. There’s a new trope emerging from art fair coverage where dealers say they’re fine but others are flailing:

The mood at the 2009 Art Show was more sedate than it was in the early-1990s recession and the year after 9/11. “We did OK in January,” said Hildegard Bachert, a director of Galerie St. Etienne, which specializes in German & Austrian Expressionist and outsider art, an area that has suffered far less than contemporary art. “But some of our colleagues here are telling us gloom-and-doom stories.” As another dealer put it, “it’s dead.”

Well, not quite. At the gala, David Tunick sold a $250,000 etching by Winslow Homer, and Per Skarstedt sold a photograph by Cindy Sherman priced at $600,000. At the booth of Acquavella Galleries, director Michael Findlay proudly said, “I sold a painting”—and pointed to a 2008 work by James Rosenquist. The asking price was $550,000, and Finlay says he got nearly that from a New York collector.

Re-Framing the Art Market (The Daily Beast)