The New Yorker has covered the art market before with varying degrees of success. Today Nick Paumgarten has an excellent profile of David Zwirner which is more of  profile art dealing in the 21st Century. Here are just a few of the interesting paragraphs:

1. Zwirner, the son of a famous German dealer, opened his first gallery in 1993, in SoHo. Since then, he has risen to be one of the most prominent dealers in the world. He is not really a pioneer, in terms of the art he has championed, or the style in which he has presented it, or the people he has sold it to. He is, in many respects, one more boat on a rising tide. Still, the brightwork gleams. People often say that he’s angling to be his generation’s Larry Gagosian—every era has its dealer-king—but his approach is really nothing like Gagosian’s, or anyone else’s. He brings the calculating eye of an efficiency expert to the historically improvised hustle of buying and selling art objects.
2. The sales staff are paid on commission, so technically they were competing with each other, although at Zwirner’s gallery, to stave off conflict, they are bound by a written code of conduct, which Zwirner guards as a trade secret.
3. “One of the reasons there’s so much talk about money is that it’s so much easier to talk about than the art,” Zwirner told me one day. You meet a lot of people in the art world who are exhausted and dismayed by the focus on money, and by its dominance. It distracts from the work, they say. It distorts curatorial instincts, critical appraisals, and young artists’ careers. It scares away civilians, who begin to lump art in with other symptoms of excess and dismiss it as another garish plaything of the rich. Of course, many of those who complain—dealers, artists, curators—are complicit. The culture industry, which supports them in one way or another, and which hardly existed a generation ago, subsists on all that money—mostly on the largesse and folly of wealthy art lovers, whether their motivations are lofty or base.
4. Art is transportable, unregulated, glamorous, arcane, beautiful, difficult. It is easier to store than oil, more esoteric than diamonds, more durable than political influence. Its elusive valuation makes it conducive to extremely creative tax accounting.
5. Auctions, in theory anyway, determine price and possession in accordance with the laws of supply and demand, and adhere, again in theory, to some measure of transparency: if you want something, you just pay more for it than anyone else will, and the price—but not the purchaser—will be a matter of public record. Gallerists, by contrast, unilaterally determine a sale price, and then anoint a buyer, based on their own arcane calculations of what’s best for their artists, their clients, or themselves. They rarely reveal the buyer or the sale price, making that information almost as valuable as the work itself. There are few industries with information as asymmetrical as that of the art business.

Why Are So Many People Paying So Much for Art?  (The New Yorker)

David Zwirner complains about the narrowing prospects for mid-size, local-based galleries to Josh Spero of Spears’, the asset management news outlet:

‘I think it’s a problem. I’ve been reading some articles where mid-size galleries are really complaining about how difficult it is to compete. The big galleries serve a very serious function but they can only serve so many artists.

‘Those [mid-size] galleries have to be strong. That’s a little bit on the local communities to support them. When I was a mid-size gallery and a small gallery, I really got my support from New York.

‘It seems that the audience seems to gravitate towards the galleries that have a little glory attached to their name. That’s too bad.’

David Zwirner: The art world must save smaller galleries (Spear’s)

Phillips de Pury isn’t the only auction house willing to offer up its infrastructure for a dealer to hold an auction. Georgina Adam reports that Christie’s will host David Zwirner’s sale of primary market works to raise money for Haitian relief.

Leading New York dealer David Zwirner has teamed up with the film producer and actor Ben Stiller to organise a star-studded charity auction in New York in September, to benefit schools in Haiti. “We are hoping to raise at least $10m,” says Zwirner. “We already have works from 21 leading artists – primary market works for which there are waiting lists.” The project started after collector and actor Steve Martin sent Stiller, who had been involved in building schools in Haiti, to Zwirner’s gallery.

“Haiti is just an hour by plane from Miami, but it’s a different world, there is no sanitation, no running water, no work and no schools,” says Zwirner. Among the artists on board are Marlene Dumas, Paul McCarthy, Raymond Pettibon, Luc Tuymans and Jeff Koons, and Zwirner notes the help he has had from dealers such as Hauser & Wirth, Pace, Matthew Marks and Gagosian. The sale will be on September 22 at Christie’s, which is waiving all its fees.

“And I intend to micromanage the grants, to make sure the money goes to the right places,” says Zwirner.

The Art Market: Gathering Pace (Financial Times)