The late critic Dave Hickey, who lived in Las Vegas, spent much of his time traveling to serve on art panels and participate in seminars. It paid the bills, but he hated it. “I must regularly venture out of Vegas onto the bleak savannahs of high culture, and there, like an aging gigolo, generate bodily responses to increasingly abject objects of desire,” he lamented.
Hickey’s metaphor came to mind as I attended the 2025 Armory Show in New York. I wanted to see new art, keep abreast of the contemporary market, register trends, and talk with dealers about what’s happening. I came away less than impressed. There were very few works that made me sit up and say “Wow!” Some dealers told me things were slower than last year. Others said that the crowds were the same as last year, though the show certainly wasn’t that crowded when I was there. No dealers were bubbling with excitement, the way they are when they’ve sold several things and have others on hold.
I ran into Kenny Schachter, a noted artworld journalist, sometime artist, and general gadfly, and asked him how he found the situation. He said that the contemporary artworld is in a state of confusion due to the general economy and widespread concern about the near term. He could not predict with any certainty. I suspect his feelings were shared by many collectors these days.
Wanting a more nuanced analysis of the situation, though, I called up a collector friend after I got home. He has acquired a wide range of art over the last 30 years – American Impressionism, Cleveland artists, American Scene works from the 1930s and 1940s, Black art, contemporary art, and Native American art. While he once told me that he’d gotten “a $500,000 education” on the first things he bought when he later sold them, he learned quickly and became a great collector, one of the shrewdest I know. While he never bought a painting intending to flip it quickly, he has always been willing to take a good profit, and his finger on the pulse of the market is unrivaled.
Here’s my friend’s take on the American art market today. The current slump began about two years ago. While political changes have certainly affected the economy, the art market itself moves in its own cycles, with certain artists or styles coming into favor, rising quickly in price (what Alan Greenspan, in another context, once called “irrational exuberance”), and then falling, as art speculators take their profits and cash out.
Nowhere has this trend been more pronounced than in the market for artists of color. Museums have rushed to make up for their exclusion of such artists, and the commercial market has kept pace. A notable example of this trend has been the art of Winfred Rembert (1945-2021), born to a poor Black family in rural Georgia. Rembert grew up picking cotton and had a very limited education, although he early evinced a talent for drawing. In prison for car theft as a young man, Rembert worked on a chain gang, but he also learned leatherworking, making wallets and shoulder bags. Upon his release, he married and moved to New Haven, Connecticut, working as a longshoreman. It was with his wife’s encouragement that Rembert began making art by carving designs on leather and then staining them with shoe polish and other dyes.
Rembert’s work was noticed by collectors of Outsider Art and began to be exhibited in such fairs. The rise was swift: Rembert had his first one-person show at the York Square Cinema in New Haven in 1998. Two years later, he had an exhibition at the Yale University Art Gallery. A documentary on him appeared in 2011, and a traveling exhibition of his work was organized by the Hudson River Museum in 2012.
