Michael Findlay is a New York art dealer whose career spans the range of the art market from Madison Avenue to Soho in the late 60s and early 70s to Christie’s at the height of the Japanese art boom to the depths of 1990s art recession and, finally, more than a decade at Acquavella Galleries as the super dealers have come to dominate the top end of the market and host museum quality shows to rival their academic cousins.
He has just published a remarkable book called The Value of Art in which he attempts to explain to the initiated and the un-initiated why and how paintings come by their prices. We sat down a week or so ago with Mr. Findlay to talk about his career and the art market.
In this clip, he explains how he came to be in New York from Britain and the accidental path he took into the art world:
I spent two semesters at York University in Toronto in 1962-63 on a scholarship from a traditional English boarding school. I found out that Toronto in the early 1960s was much like Manchester in the Dickensian era. It was very bleak. I returned my scholarship . . . with thanks.
Let’s let Michael pick it up from there:
Findlay may not have had luck anywhere else on Madison Avenue but he only needed one break and he got that with Richard Feigen:
