Keeping up with the Gagosians

ifteen years ago, the artist and writer Walter Robinson wrote “we don’t have art movements any more … we have market movements”. Michael Shnayerson’s Boom, a history of the art world money-go-round since the Second World War, reads like a confirmation of his thesis. It illuminates a world in which a coterie of “mega dealers” may “goose” the market in the artists they favour, increasing their prices substantially in a short period of time. Because of the clout of these galleries, commercial spectacle reverberates in discourse, on the museum circuit and in the auction rooms: the artist is suddenly important. Broadly, Boom describes a New York-centric art world which has seen the contemporary market explode beyond anyone’s imagining. In the late 1940s, from a pioneering dealer such as Betty Parsons, you could buy any work you liked by the leading Abstract Expressionists for a very few thousand dollars. In 2015, David Geffen made a package-deal sale to Ken Griffin: one Pollock and one De Kooning for $500 million.