The art world has expanded dramatically, but the gallery system that supports it has struggled to keep pace, with a growing number of wealthy potential collectors but a comparatively stagnant art market. At the same time, younger collectors are less interested in owning objects, while the traditional Castelli model of discovering and nurturing artists over decades has given way to a more competitive, consolidated system. I think galleries will need to rethink how they attract and engage collectors, shifting from selling objects toward creating richer cultural experiences and communities. The danger is not that the art market disappears, but that it becomes increasingly consolidated—and ultimately, much more boring. ***
I met Marc Spiegler, who would go on to helm Art Basel for fifteen years, during his days as a journalist. In 2005, he applied to a fellowship program for arts writers at Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism, where I was working at the time. Despite my best efforts, he did not get accepted. He sometimes still jokes, "It's my favorite failure." That first encounter notwithstanding, we became, and have remained, great friends. In 2007, we even launched a publication together, a pioneering art blog called Artworldsalon. It was short-lived. Spiegler was soon recruited to be one of three co-directors of Art Basel, eventually becoming its global director in 2012. In that role, he presided over a major expansion of the world's leading art-fair organizers, including new outposts in Hong Kong and Paris. Through it all, our collaborations continued. Along the way, he has had a catbird's seat and a direct impact on a world he previously covered as an observer.
ANDRÁS SZÁNTÓ You entered the art world sideways, as a journal-ist. Can you describe your trajectory? MARC SPIEGLER My personal history in art goes back to my mother. She was taught paper cutting, or scherenschnitte, in 1940s Alsace by her grandmother; she then discovered Surre-alism in 1960s Paris and joined the Chicago Surrealists scene in the 1970s. She even showed and sold with a gallery-to my knowledge, she's art history's only Surrealist paper-cutter. Generally speaking, my parents moved in circles of intellectuals and artists as I grew up in Chicago, with summers in France. My best friend from that time, Ellen, was a painter. When I moved to New York in my early 20s, I had another great friend, Yoni, who was also a painter. So I was going to Midtown openings and kicking around the Lower East Side. Then I went back to Chicago to become a journalist and lived in Wicker Park, which at the time was like an Art Institute dorm. My career in art journalism began with a 1997 Chicago Magazine story that I wrote about controversies at the MCA Chicago. Bruce Wolmer, editor-in-chief of Art+Auction, read it and recruited me to be his Chicago reporter. A year later I moved to Switzerland, following my future wife. I started freelancing for Art + Auction, ArtNews, The Art Newspaper, ArtReview, and Monopol. Simultaneously, I was writing about the booming digital economy for magazines such as The Industry Standard, which collapsed in 2001 alongside much of the "new economy." So I brought to the art world a perspective learned from covering an industry that, much like the art world, was driven primarily by perception and hype cycles. Let's pause here, because you're using a key term. What do you mean when you say "art world"? Here's a funny story. In 2005, I was invited to speak at the ARCOmadrid fair. Asked how I should be introduced, I sponta-neously suggested "art world journalist." That's how I thought of myself not as a market tracker or art critic. Being the child of two social scientists, I was interested in how this world was evolving, how the players fit together. To answer your question: I think of the art world as a global ecosystem, with people playing very different roles, driven by very different motivations, yet all operating within a very small environment. Let's not forget our own foray into art world journalism, Artworldsalon. A few months after it launched, you became co-director of Art Basel. In the decades since, what would you say, morphologically, have been the biggest changes in the art world? When I arrived, the art world was already emerging from its "NATO" stage, when it was viewed as being principally located in western Europe and North America. To give you a picture of how small it once was: Giancarlo Politi, founder of Flash Art, used to put out an annual art world phone book; you would open it up, and there would be Gerhard Richter's or Marian Goodman's direct phone number and address. And it was small enough to fit in a jacket pocket. At the time, Latin America, Asia, and the Middle East were not considered significant in terms of galleries and collectors. Globalization changed that. The other huge change came with the internet-and, most radically, Instagram. I remember the Loewe fashion designer Jonathan W. Anderson telling me that creators today simply can't launch new work quickly enough to counter the speed with which people feel like they've overdosed on that work, because they see it all over their social-media feeds. It's a very different art world when you first encounter an artwork on a screen 99.9 percent of the time. We all suffer from digital affluenza. Since the 1980s, when the art world exploded into a commercialized cultural industry, a business logic has embedded itself more deeply. What do you think about that vector of change? Those decades witnessed a dramatic escalation of wealth globally. It's not just the quantity of the super-wealthy. It's also their outlook. Today's super-wealthy are not Thorstein Veblen's leisure class-European aristocrats or the scions of American robber barons. They are running companies and leading very intense lives. That combination of a super-busy collector class and a globalized, fast-evolving art scene meant that people needed a faster way to get their art world overview. Which in turn led to a greater prominence of global events, especially art fairs and biennials, as a way to get those tours d'horizon.
Are we still in a disruptive phase, or have we settled in at a new cruising altitude? First off, let's acknowledge that this has not been a period only of joyous growth. There's also been enormous consolidation and breakneck acceleration. On the commercial side, you are now trapped in a 24/7/365 sales process, whether you work at an auction house, answer to a mega-gallery owner, or are trying to keep your smaller gallery afloat. Aesthetically speaking, the rising importance of art fairs spawned "art-fair art." And let me be careful with my wording here. Yes, it's truly rewarding when I take time to systematically go through the booths of a strong fair and discover so much great art. But there's also a kind of art world merch-domestic-size, bright-colored, less-expensive versions of artists' better works. Simultaneously, a somewhat homogeneous International Style has emerged, like those lounge bars that feel the same the world over and always play the Hôtel Costes soundtrack. As the late art collector and author Harald Falckenberg taught me, bad markets make good art-and good markets make bad art. We've seen it a million times. A hot artist starts to sell well and, consciously or not, gets stuck in a creative rut, servicing their waitlist. Overheated markets oversupply bad work-and tend to shorten artists' careers. Names arrive quickly and disappear just as fast, as with streetwear brands and social-media influencers. We've seen this melancholia of affluence in other moments of accel-eration. In 1989, at the peak of the '80s boom, Arthur Danto, citing the critic Elizabeth Frank, published an article in Modern Painters titled "Bad Aesthetic Times," in which he lamented that "an awful lot of high art seems flagrantly bad, aesthetically." The irony was that by objective measures-interest in art, number of artists earn-ing money, et cetera-these were good times for art. Is today's art market well adapted to the moment? Statistics starkly suggest the answer is no. Let me break it down: An exponentially larger number of ultra-high-net-worth individuals exist today than in 2010. The luxury market has grown dramatically as a result. The revenue of LVMH has nearly quadrupled since 2010, and its 2023 reve-nues are 30 percent greater than that of the entire art market. By contrast, the art market's growth has been basically flat across the last ten years. And it remains economically minus-cule: Its total global revenue is comparable to that of Ford's F-150 pickup truck. To me, that suggests that the art market, despite its protagonists positing themselves as avant-garde, has not really adapted to new consumer realities. Worse yet, I fear this problem is about to intensify. A vast generational wealth transfer is underway. An estimated 50 to 100 trillion dollars is passing from the baby boomers to their chil-dren, and when we look at the millennial mentality, we don't see the sense of guilt about wealth or the obligation for giving back that drove so much art patronage in the past. We also don't see the same attachment to objects. In fact, younger people seem wary of possessions. Many millionaires now don't own cars or homes. An art advisor once told me that after months spent cultivating a wealthy young potential client, the guy told him flatly, "I've really thought about it. And I think that buying art is a great way to turn my money into problems." In short, to be successful in the future, I think galleries will need to radically rethink the way in which they identify, educate, inspire, and transact with the collectors of tomorrow. So we get to the gist of our conversation-galleries. We've begun to see consolidation, with the rise of mega-galleries. Previously, the system absorbed growth by fractalizing into a huge network of smaller galleries. This may be an odd way to run a global cultural industry. Well, in the past ten years, even that fractalized structure has been gradually eroding. Rather than new galleries emerging constantly, there was first an equilibrium and then a decline in the number of new galleries opening versus those closing. By now, if the art world were a country, we would be suffering a negative-natality crisis. Why is this happening? Here's one reason, pointed out to me by the legendary Berlin gallerist Esther Schipper: In the old days, gallery teams were small. If you wanted even a decent middle-class existence, you had to eventually open your own gallery. Today, established gal-leries have dozens if not hundreds of employees, offering many possibilities to rise in the ranks. A smart young person might say, "Starting a gallery is risky. Why do it, when I can build a safer career at Hauser & Wirth, or White Cube, or Zwirner?" There has also been a consolidation in the art-fair land-scape, for which I am partly responsible. The top ten fairs today are owned by two organizations: Art Basel/MCH and Frieze/Endeavor. Meanwhile, the auction world has for decades been essentially a duopoly. So yes, the art system is consolidating. Just like every other industry. Any other reasons why the gallery world is struggling? One is the end of the generational "Castelli model," named after legendary dealer Leo Castelli, in which a younger gallerist iden-tifies great artists, brings them into the program, builds them up, and works with them over their whole careers. That's almost never the case anymore. As the market grew and got competi-tive, artists started to jump between galleries, which often insti-gated those moves. People call this "poaching.” But the artists choose to change galleries. When a gallery's artist starts to sell well nowadays, it is both a blessing and a curse for the gallery, because it puts a target on the artist's back. Other dealers start to come calling. Most galleries survive from the sales of their top three artists, so this dynamic creates an endlessly insecure, high-stress existence. The Castelli model started to collapse at the turn of the twenty-first century, as auction houses started selling much more recent work, taking away essential secondary-market revenue from galleries, generally the most successful ones. Those major galleries compensated by recruiting mid-tier artists whose prices were often already soaring at auction. In turn, the mid-tier galleries started reaching down one tier below, for strong-selling emerging artists. The counterpoint, which I think is positive, is that the smarter smaller galleries started to look further afield to build, and rebuild, their rosters. They sought out the heroes of their younger artists, leading to a wave of rediscoveries. So this new model involves a non-generational program built around coher-ent aesthetics and intellectual throughlines, with potential patrons worldwide-because with even a half-dozen supportive collectors, a small gallery can stay in business. Even so, there's a squeeze in the middle. Oh, yeah. It generally sucks to be a mid-level gallerist. Your costs are high. Your top-earning artists are being recruited by larger galleries and getting invited to museum and biennial exhibitions. And guess who's paying for that exhibition? You, the gallery. I remember a conversation at a dinner with a young Berlin gallerist and a very established NYC gallerist, someone who worked with great artists. The younger gallerist said, "I feel like if I have three bad months, everything could collapse." And the older gallerist said, "You know what? We feel the same." I'll never forget the look of despair on the younger gallerist's face... Let's look ahead to 2050. Given these changes, will this status quo hold, or will the gallery business dissipate into, for example, digital platforms? 2050 is so far out, it's like science fiction... But I'll game out both the best-case and the worst-case scenario. In the best case, galleries will figure out how to sell to millennials. Performance, installation art, immersive art, et cetera, will be more important, because such works are going to be more attractive to people seeking experience over objects. But even acquiring a painting or sculpture will feel like an inspirational experience. Yet one thing will stay constant in the art world: What you're selling is magic. If you make it too transparent, too much of a marketplace, then you destroy the magic. The art market, to function, has to not feel like a market. My worst-case scenario is pretty dark. It starts with the premise that the art market of today is radically tipped in favor of collectors. That super-dominance creates a fear-completely justified-that trying anything new will undermine deals. And this blocks the adaptations that are essential for smaller and mid-tier galleries to thrive. So the worst-case art market of 2050 is radically consolidated-a smaller number of galleries speculatively selling a small number of artists. The only people starting galleries are those who don't need to make money. Being a mid-tier gallery becomes a hobby for the super-wealthy, like playing polo. Just to be clear: My concern about the art market of 2050 is not that it won't exist. My concern is that it will be extremely boring. For about 150 years the essential components of the art world more or less held steady, despite wars, economic setbacks, and the onset of the digital age. In the middle stood the art gallery, where the first version of art history was written, and where art intersected with money. Do you foresee a paradigm shift in these relations? Cultural industries have experienced radical shifts before. The film industry has been repeatedly disrupted-first by television, then by cable, then by video, lately by streaming. The Leo Castelli of 1970 would hardly recognize today's art world. It would feel chaotic and overwhelming to him, transactional and unethical. It would frankly seem completely barbaric to the genteel European Castelli, who passed off secondary-market dealing to Larry Gagosian because he found it so unsavory, launching Larry's career in the process. I mean, can you imagine Leo Castelli at the opening day of an art fair, where a ton of the action has taken place beforehand, and deals are being closed with text messages rather than handshakes? But of course, that shift happened in stages. It's like the proverbial frog in water that doesn't notice anything until it's cooked. Even so, if Castelli walked into an auction house today, he would understand what was going on. Well, it might be surprising to him that all the people buying the big-ticket works are not in the room. Even there, it's a much less personal business. Fair point. The frog is substantially boiled. There are counter-movements, however. Some gallerists are now refusing to sell work at Art Basel to people who haven't come to the fair, at least not on the opening day. The existence of many more gatekeepers and many more paths to validation also means that the art world is more open, diverse, and fluid than in Castelli's time. Those are welcome developments. In that sense, there is much to celebrate about how far the world of art has come. After I left Art Basel, I had great conversations about the future of the art world with Arthur Jafa and Doug Aitken. Both these artists described seeing two parallel art markets: one around painting and sculpture, which sell at auctions and fairs and drive speculation; the other around performance, film, dig-ital, video, and installations, et cetera, each with different fund-ing mechanisms, from foundations to private benefactors to DAOS. And many artists are engaging agents rather than work-ing with their galleries on these non-object projects. Because so many artists are also working with a new model. Think of all these artists now making feature films: Julian Schnabel, Titus Kaphar, Amalia Ulman, Steve McQueen, Rashid Johnson... Last question. We're a few decades out in the future. You've woken up on a beautiful spring day. You want to tap into what's new and exciting in art. Are you going to a gallery? Do you head to a museum? Are you strapping on a headset? Again, we're talking sci-fi. Maybe Future Marc is going into a VR room and co-creating a dreamlike experience. I imagine scenes and narratives, and they manifest in front of me and other peo-ple in that virtual space, like real-time world-building, and we're all God. Or maybe a single artist plays God, conducting this AI symphony, and we watch in wonder. Is that progress? Kind of. Let's keep in mind that you and I-and all this book's interviewees, alongside probably many of its readers-enjoy lives of enormous privilege when it comes to cul-tural access. We travel to museums, biennials, and galleries to see great art in person. Most people can't do that. So when the most compelling art by the most innovative creators becomes available to anybody with a headset and internet access, then perhaps overall-culture will be much more vibrant, and access to it more democratic, than today. But frankly, that vision sounds a lot less exciting to me than seeing art with my friends.
