Cue the Future

I met a fellow dealer walking down Madison Avenue a few days ago. When we first met, 20 years back, he had a gallery on the Upper East Side. Since his primary focus was contemporary, he had followed the migration of contemporary dealers to Chelsea and opened a new...

Dead Cat Bounce

Thirty-five years ago, I was working for a New York gallery that ran frequent ads in national publications. Our high profile meant that we received inquiries seeking advice about art. One day I received a call from a man who had recently returned from a vacation in...

Light ‘Em Up

The first time Roberta and I visited the Barnes Collection, we could tell why it was world-famous. The museum was at that time in its old digs in Merion, Pennsylvania, and they didn’t make a visit easy. This quiet suburb of Philadelphia did not want a lot of traffic,...

Inside Outsider Art

The end to my days as an outsider artist occurred in the second grade. My classmates and I were making crayon drawings the way children do today – a strip of green along the bottom for the grass, with a child and a tree standing against the white of the paper, and a...

New Year Resolutions

It’s the time of year for vows of changed behavior in the year to come. Take these art-related resolutions with me — they should be easier to keep than losing 30 pounds or quitting smoking. Explore something new: Museum curators of American art, not to mention dealers...

Fits and Starts

Unless you’ve been living someplace without newspapers, TV, or Wi-Fi, you have doubtless heard about the painting by Leonardo da Vinci, discussed in this blog last January (Selling Mona Lisa), that sold for $450,312,500, including buyer’s premium, at Christie’s New...