Gallery owner and blogger Ed Winkelman muses on the prospect of a less money-driven art market. He sees Larry Gagosian’s musings at ArtBasel Miami Beach that the event had become overrun with marketers over shadowing the art dealing; Tobias Meyer’s departure looking for a calmer life; and Amy Cappellazzo’s announcement yesterday as harbingers:
‘They say good (or bad) things come in threes, and so it was when I saw the third successive, unexpected change among these titans of contemporary art in about as many weeks, I began to wonder whether it might be pointing toward a kinder, gentler contemporary art world. Whether these “sharks” known to have laser beam-like focus on the next deal might not have all woken up one day to realize there were other, sometimes really interesting things in life beyond money and evermore power.
That may be so. But there’s another way to look at this: the expanding art marketplace has the potential to grown by an order of magnitude putting stress on the individual practitioners and demanding a further “corporatization” of art selling.