Separating price and value with art market journalist Marion Manecker

I am thrilled to share this conversation with journalist Marion Manecker. We discuss how the art market is really a distribution market. Marion suggests dumping the idea that the most expensive art is the best art. He also shares his clarifying ideas about speculators, alchemy, and about the real flex that underlies all art purchases.

A longtime art world columnist and auction house insider, Marion Maneker is the founder of Artelligence, a leading source of information on the global arts market. He was formerly the president of ARTnews, a publisher at HarperCollins, and features editor at New York magazine. He currently writes Wall Power, the daily art market email for Puck. 

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Notes:

Puck

Michael Findlay, “The Value of Art”

Alfred Taubman trial

Alfred Taubman, “Threshold Resistance”

The Macklowe Collection at Sotheby's

Coverage of the Macklowe auction in the New York Times

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Transcript

Lisa Cooley 00:04 
Welcome to Oko, a podcast for collectors and other art lovers. I'm Lisa Cooley, your host. I have 25 years experience working in art, and I want to share it all with you. For our first season, I'm taking you on a tour through the power centers of the art world. We're talking to artists, journalists, gallerists, critics, auctioneers, curators and art fair directors about what defines our role right now and how we got to this moment.

Today, I'm talking with journalist and author Marion Manecker. Welcome, Marion. 

Marion Maneker 00:36 
Thank you for having me, Lisa. 

Lisa Cooley 00:37 
Thank you so much for being here. Why don't you introduce yourself for our listeners? 

Marion Maneker 00:41 
Sure. My name's Marion Manecker. I write a four times a week newsletter for Puck called Wall Power, that is about the art world broadly defined. My colleague, Julie Davich, just joined us and is adding more coverage of galleries and we hope the broader world of what we call cultural property. There's a whole boom in ceramics and memorabilia and luxury goods. These are obviously very different things from art, but they trade in similar ways to the way people both attach themselves, value them, and distribute them. One of my big beliefs is that we misunderstand the way the art market works. It is understandable that people think the numbers are an indication of innate value, but the art market is a distribution market. The numbers are really just a way of seeing who wants something more and watching goods, pieces of cultural property, I should say, move from one place to another where they are more valued. Price is not the best way to distribute things, but it's better than all the other options that we have, at least in the broadest market. That's the world we're trying to cover.

At Puck, we are a collection of different newsletters focused on verticals, the business of fashion, the business of entertainment, business of the media, Wall Street. We have a number of people who write about politics. We will probably be expanding into other categories in the future, but that's the enterprise and a big overview of our goals. 

Lisa Cooley 02:45 
That is all exactly why I wanted to talk to you. You have such a clear view of the market and a very unique way of quantifying it, and as an aside, I have been fascinated by Puck and I will put a link to Puck in the show notes.

Can you say more about the art market as a distribution model market? 

Marion Maneker 03:09 
Oh, sure. Sure. So just I know you would want me to give my backstory. Oh, yes. And and I can do that and accomplish that because they're not disconnected. Right. So I became adult life as a aspiring academic. I wanted to be a cultural historian. I had studied in college with one of the great intellectual and cultural historians of the 20th century. And I had, you know, as an impressionable Christopher Lash. OK. And I not just Christopher Lash, but Eugene Genovese and another people, but but Genovese and Lash were were were two giants of their fields in the the 70s and 80s, 60s, 70s and 80s. And I went to graduate school at Columbia and studied with Eric Foner, who is also an enormous figure in the history of 19th century America, especially reconstruction. But really, you know, how we came to be as a nation governed by the free markets. And through that kind of study, you know, education, I came to the realization that one, I didn't particularly love teaching. I was teaching in a number of colleges and it wasn't that exciting. The third or fourth time you taught a lecture, you're like, you know, on autopilot. And I also, you know, the future of academia didn't look so great. And in the I don't want to tell you how many years since then, the job market has gotten far worse, not better.

So I happened to go and work in book publishing because it was a combination of running a business and engaging in ideas. And I worked for a number of fascinating publishers. I either said something about my politics or that I have not, you know, a clear mind, but I worked for Andre Shifrin at Pantheon, who was one of the great left wing publishers of his time, published a lot of those social historians. You know, really, his publishing program was rooted in his politics. And then a few years later, I worked for Erwin Glickis, who was the great right wing publisher of his time. Again, I hope you don't aren't able to tell my politics from my writing, but they were both very, very different persons and very different points of view, but both fascinating figures. And at some point, I had published a couple of people who were at New York magazine, and they asked me to go work there as an editor. And at New York magazine, one of the things we were doing was covering the industries. And my boss at the time had wanted sort of coverage of the auction houses. And it just so happens that my stepmother had been the head of communications at Christie's in the late 80s and into the early 90s during the height of the Japanese impressionism boom. Now, I would love to tell you that meant that I spent a lot of time there and got great insights and like all young people in New York. I thought that was very old fashioned and boring. And in those days, no one wanted to go above 14th Street. It just wasn't cool. And though my stepmother off invited me to a number of things that now I wish I had attended. I got it mostly, you know, second and third hand from her. But while working at New York, because I had some entree into that world, we began to cover the auction market. 

Marion Maneker 07:22 
And while we were doing that, the price fixing scandal broke at Christie's and Sotheby's, and we did a couple of cover stories on that. And then Al Taubman's trial took place right after 9-11, which meant there was a whole crisis in magazine publishing about what advertisers were going to do. So we were all pressed into service as editors to go out and actually do the reporting and writing. I covered the trial.

And through that, and some relationships with that, a few years later when Al Taubman got out of jail, they wanted to write a memoir. And I happened to be the publisher of Harper Business, the business books publishing house at, an imprint at Harper Collins. And so through publishing Alfred's book, which is called Threshold Resistance, which is his whole worldview, how he became an innovator in luxury malls and what he was trying to do when he owned Sotheby's, we got into some discussions about what was changing in the art market then. And I had suggested that what they needed was something like a investment banks research department for the art market. And Alfred liked that idea. And Bill Ruprecht, who was the CEO at the time, liked that idea. And so we basically went into business together. And as part of being able to say that we were doing something independent, I created a website. In those days, it was very popular to do what were called aggregator blogs, which you pulled in all the news on the web in a particular subject called Art Market Monitor. And those two things sort of worked in tandem. The global financial crisis ended the relationship with Sotheby's, they cut all their marketing expenses. And I was surprised that the website continued to grow and that a lot of the people who were using it were people in the industry. And I won't bore you with the travails of trying to run a media business in the... 

Lisa Cooley 09:47 
Ever? 

Marion Maneker 09:48 
in the teens, as we tried to figure things out. But eventually, that business was bought by Jay Penske, who had bought Art News and Art in America. And for several years, I worked for Jay, running those, helping acquire Artforum. At some point, Jay and I had slightly different views on strategically where to take things. And he was an absolute prince and said, you know, you should take your stuff and you're welcome to have it back and go do what you think best.

I then partnered with some people who were building an art data company. And as we built that, we built a large newsletter. And then they went and, became an NFT company. And the newsletter continued to grow. And about a year ago, you know, having run independent media businesses in various formats over the years, I had a straight conversation with John Kelly, the founder of Puck, about something else connected but not joining Puck. And John looked at me and said, you know, that's nice, but we're not really, you know, ready to do something like that. But what about all these subscribers you have? And I said, what about them? And in the end, it was, it was something I was, I wouldn't say hesitant to do. But you know, I've been around the blocking companies and all. And I've been pleasantly surprised as far as worked out far better than I imagined. Amazing. Puck is an extraordinary place. John and Liz, who are the founders, have done, you know, an extraordinary job and found a really particular formula. Our new CEO, Sarah, is an inspiring figure. She went from having something like 2,500, 3,000 people reporting to her Twitter to, I think, having 35 people when she showed up at Puck. But she's a very talented, you know, media technology executive who has taken what, you know, is really just a tiny thing compared to what she, you know, she previously worked at Facebook, Twitter. in the advertising agency business for both Facebook and Twitter. She was head of the customer experience, I believe, or I don't know how they defined it at Twitter, but, you know, the audience at Twitter. And so, you know, there's a lot for us to figure out. But so far, it has gone very well.

I promised you that I would answer that question about the, the reason I tell you all the story is, when I started on the web, in 2008, nobody wanted to talk about prices. The art market was always, "we don't talk about prices, we're above that". And yet, there was this booming art market. It really began to take off in 2005, 6, and 7. And it always struck me that talking about prices was fundamental, a dimension that was important to understanding what goes on. What I still don't agree with, and now what's this, you know, 18 years later or 17 years later, I find that there's too much talk about prices. And I'm the one who's often saying, you know, price is the least interesting thing about either this lot or this trend or so on. And what I did come to realize is, and like I said, this is human nature. We tend to think and by the way, the auction houses for their own reasons have contributed to it. The idea that the most expensive art is the best art is nonsensical. 

Marion Maneker 14:03 
The most expensive art is the most expensive art. The best art is highly subjective. And then how you graph the two on top of each other, you know, you don't get to buy, select from every work of art by an artist to choose which one you're going to pay the most for. It's not a consumer item.

And even consumer items, you don't get to do that. You price things on the margin based on your opportunity, the supply, what you think something is worth to you. So the other thing about the art market is there's often two people who are valuing something, but their means are very different. So what's cheap to someone is dear to another. Yes. And that that makes it sometimes the person with more money gets the object that the person who loves it more does not. And life is cruel, unfortunately. But there's no better way that we know of yet of distributing these things. I see. And the other issue with the distribution market is when prices drop, it doesn't mean art is worse, it hasn't changed. It means there are fewer people competing for it, there's less demand. And what we often have as a problem in the art market is people are worried that falling prices are a bad thing, but falling prices often generate new demand. And demand in the art market isn't just price because it's not an object, it's not a thing you need. A barrel of oil is something you need, that you have to refine it and you need it to do lots of things. Food is something you need, shelter, all the things. Art is something that you elect to own and your choices are not determined by we absolutely have to have this. So, understanding that these price fluctuations aren't about need, they're about desire and this distribution phenomenon to me is sort of fundamental in making better sense of what the art market is, rather than treating it like, oh, this thing must be good because it's expensive. 

Lisa Cooley 16:26 
Amazing. I try to tell people the same thing but in a different way - just that the art market, I always think of it as like a matching market where people buy and sell things just to get secondary benefits, that it's not so much about price.

They're just additional things that they can get, like access, or loyalty, or and I think the way you outlined that just says it in a far more eloquent way. 

Marion Maneker 16:55 
We're saying the same thing. My in-laws used to talk about how they worked in a role that people often talked about psychic income, meaning they were not terribly well paid, but they had fairly prestigious roles and you got things that were you know, psychic income rather than dollars and I think that's the thing that people forget, you know.

Michael Findley likes to say that the value of all art is social and and I think that is true though there I think there's an underlying personal element to it. Michael had wrote a book many years ago that was called I think, "The Value of Art" but it contained these stories which the publisher took out because they were fiction and they were squeamish about mixing fiction and non-fiction but they they were this this brilliant dramatization of the life cycle of a collector and what Findley was trying to show in that is that when people were younger they may have been acquiring art for status reasons you know social reasons and over time the art became more personal to them and less about what other people thought and and I you know it's a shame people can't read it but I thought he did it in a in a very artful and elegant way. But I think this is you know one of the great stories - the Macklow collection is a fantastic example. It was sold by court order and the divorce I do not think Linda Macklow really really ever wanted to see that uh uh sold and the money is small compensation to her that the collection was dispersed so you know it art means different things to different people I tried to write something recently about the LA fires uh you know it's a little tricky to write because you didn't want to sit there and say oh my god what about all the art that's being destroyed when people's lives are but I but what I wanted to show

Lisa Cooley 19:03 
It's their life, like in some cases. It's like for the artists, the musicians, all the creative people, like their output IS their life or for the collectors, like it IS their life.

It is part of a whole ecosystem in a community and the objects are these objects that move through the ecosystem that like sort of facilitate this community coming together. 

Marion Maneker 19:26 
And whether you think those objects are expensive or have little value on the market, they are valuable to someone. And that was the point, is the emotional attachment that people have far outweighs the asset value of the art.

Though many times the asset value is quite great. 

Lisa Cooley 19:47 
This is all another reason why I wanted to talk to you. Because I also agree that there's too much talk about prices right now and I think that's one of the reasons why the art market is kind of maybe not bad but like floppy. It's just a little soft because I think that there's so many people, so many new people have come into the market in the last five years, 10 years, almost like seems like exponentially, throughout the 21st century, with different economic and political liberalizations around the world. You have whole new continents coming online, and then everybody being connected through the internet, and a new art fair, in a new city and in a new hemisphere. And I think all that is good, more participation is great, but there's an education element has sort of been left by the wayside.

And I think what has sort of filled the vacuum is this talk about prices. And a lot of arts coverage, in my mind, that I've seen it's like Artforum, which some people find not the easiest to read or welcoming maybe. And then on the other side, like art business coverage, which is just about like, oh my God, this big price, this big price, this big price, this big price. And it just becomes almost like a spectator sport of like, how high is it going to go? But then that has sort of has filled, in my opinion, the void. And so all these new people are coming to the market and they think like, oh, well, I should buy art because of investment. And there's such little that's like the least interesting part of it to me, like if you want an investment, there are so many other ways you can do it. 

Marion Maneker 21:35 
Look for the people who have been very successful in buying art for not a lot of money and selling it for extraordinary amounts of money, it is almost in every case that the money is a byproduct of something else. It's a way of keeping score. Many people, what they care about is the validation in our society. We validate things through through money. So status equals: sold for a lot of money. It confers. "I was right. I saw this this this painter when nobody cared, and now everyone wants it and they're gonna pay me a million dollars for it." That is human nature.

It's totally understandable. But trying to replicate it is not the same thing, especially from the outside without understanding how it came to pass. You know, many of the people who've done extraordinary well as art collectors have put an enormous amount of time into it. What people don't see is all the works that they either viewed and didn't buy, or bought and didn't go up in value. Right and and so You know, it's a little bit of this looking and from the outside drawing the wrong conclusion. But it's important that people value this stuff and to see it valued and that translates into the popularity of art and how much that has grown. You can, you know, measure it mostly through things like museum attendance, and anecdotally through people's familiarity with certain artists, even the artists collaborations with brands, all those things, but art has never been more relevant to the broader culture than it is today. And that's a danger by the way, you know art has been one of the last refuges of high culture. You know, where real serious ideas are worked out, not always but in many cases. You know, as someone who's a former publisher, I can tell you that that great works of history don't sell the way they used to. Novels really, you know, literary novels, don't necessarily sell. They never sold. The numbers were always shocking to people when you told them how much, you know, a really successful book had sold. It would be in a few thousand, and they think really!? And then you know, occasionally they turn into movies or bestsellers, and you think oh all these literary novels sell like that, and they don't. Being an artist, like being a writer, doesn't require Much.

I mean, we have a lot of artists now who have practices that, you know, involve lots of expensive things to make what they do. But you know, it at bottom a writer sits alone in a room and comes up with a story and that can move millions of people if it's published well and becomes a huge hit. An artist, you know, has some canvas, stretchers, and oil paints and can do extraordinary things. Over time if they have artistic vision, you know, and hits a nerve and gets leverage. I think that is one of the things that fascinates people. But also allows it to be a place where real cultural ideas can be worked out.

Lisa Cooley 25:06 
Yeah, amazing what you can do with some colored dirt and a hairy stick! Okay, so what do you think defines the art market right now at this moment? 

Marion Maneker 25:17 
Well, you just put your finger on it earlier. I think the last two years or so, we've trying to think the metaphor. I'm a sailor, so we talk about sometimes outrunning the wind. I think we the success of the art market got to a point where I think it hit a wall.

There was this rise of interest rates in the end of twenty twenty two. There was a sense that we had a fairly long cycle of what I referred to. And I totally understand the objections to this sort of grab bag term of identity artists. But it's not meant to denigrate them individually as artists. It just made me from like twenty eighteen to twenty twenty two, actually a little bit longer. A lot of attention was paid on artists who were personally representative of more diverse backgrounds that says that does not, you know, reduce their art to their personalities or their identities. But there's there were so many of them. We refer to them as the identity artists.

So that had somewhat run its course and the art world goes in cycles. It's human nature. When you see lots of the same thing, you start getting bored of them and say, what's new, what's next? And I think we've been in a bit of a doldrums. There was a there was an issue with the primary market and a lot of galleries raised their prices on the primary market, justifiably, so that the artists in the gallery could capture value that had been sort of slipping out to other players. And I think all of that kind of created a break on the market.

I don't think it stopped people from buying. I think people just said, I want, you know, we can see this in the numbers. There's a lot more lower value works, still not cheap. You know, works under one hundred thousand dollars under five hundred thousand dollars, but there's a lot more, sometimes even under fifty thousand dollars, but, you know, still tens of thousands of dollars is real money to anyone. A lot more of that work has been selling. And so we we can see there's demand. Otherwise, that would be falling off, too. But I think what it hasn't coalesced, women surrealists agree, you know, there's isolated stories that are still sort of gaining momentum, but there hasn't been a general thematic turn.

And, you know, look, in the art world, we we denigrate people who buy with their ears, not with their eyes. Everyone says that. But if we're being honest, most of us buy with our ears. That's about art being social. And so I think we tend to, you know, we talk about speculators in the art market, the people who pay high prices for things, usually because there's some sort of squeeze, those aren't speculators. A speculator is someone who buys low and sells high. The person who buys at the top is a you could call them a fellow traveler, an end user. There's someone who's getting sucked in by the excitement who wants to join that. 

Lisa Cooley 28:40 
the urgency, the FOMO of it. 

Marion Maneker 28:42 
Yes, and everyone wants to separate themselves from that, but that's actually what generates and brings people in. And those people are the ones who are taking the biggest risk, you know, they're spending a lot of money and most likely they won't get their money out because, you know, they're already over the top of what prices other people are willing to pay.

Now, 15 years from now, they may look like they were brilliant and that artist and those works will be worth a lot more, but they're taking a real risk that, you know, 15 years from now, someone will walk in their house and go, who, what, why would, why would you ever own that? And that's one of those speculating on it. 

Lisa Cooley 29:23 
ideas. 

Marion Maneker 29:24 
Yes. Well, we're all speculating ideas.

Exactly. You know, when you buy an art collection or work by an artist, you're saying this is important and you want to be recognized for later for having seen the importance before others. That's the essence of speculation. 

Lisa Cooley 29:42 
Yep, so well said. This is exactly why I wanted to talk to you.

What do you see about this upcoming generation that seems... Do you see any generational differences in how people are building their collections? One of the reasons why I'm doing this podcast is that I just see that the way Gen X and Younger are accessing information about collecting art is just so different than previous generations, and so I'm just curious if other people see any other kind of generational differences. 

Marion Maneker 30:18 
Look, I would love to tell you, I'm so plugged in that I can, you know, in a minute, say this is how everyone's doing it. I think you and certainly people who are who buy and sell art and work with collectors, advisors and dealers would have a much better sense than than I.

I do speak to some people, but, you know, there's a there's a selection bias. I'm talking to people who are who are very active traders. So, I mean, it's a different generation. 

Lisa Cooley 30:46 
Right.

Marion Maneker 30:47 
Yeah, so well, and I can tell you a little bit about how, but there I think they are not representative of people. So I don't know, and I would love to know more. And that's one of our goals is like, how do we really get out there and get a better sense of what people are buying and collecting?

Why? And how do they live with these things? I do think what I said earlier, just to bracket the fine art for a second, I do think people are much more interested in objects of cultural property that resonate with them, the comic books, the baseball cards, the guitars, you know, all of these things that make you feel excited and special and connected to something that was emotionally important to you. You know, as a kid, I had a Jeff Beck album that I played a lot, and they just sold the guitar that was on the cover of the album. Someone paid a million pounds for it. I'm not the guy to do that. But I kind of get it. If you've got a million pounds lying around, and this connects you back to your youth, I get that.

It's no different from the guy buying the Ferrari, who grew up thinking those cars were cool and never thought he'd be able to have one. And there's this sort of time travel, emotional thing where you're finally settling old scores or, you know, showing yourself that you've made it. I mean, people are motivated by lots of different things. By the same token, there are people who are out there as collectors who are documenting things that they find fascinating and important that they think are neglected. I think one of the things we forget, especially about museums, is museums in and of themselves are not great acquirers of art for certain institutional reasons. Many museums are either founded on or given fantastic collections by persons who saw the value that nobody else did. You know, the Crazy Barnes collection is a good example. He was able to buy all of that art because at the time, not a lot of people wanted it. And he could basically back up the truck and with the help of his printer, you know, buy a lot of this art because it was accessible to him. And there wasn't a lot of competition for it. And it's only later that we see the value because someone took that risk and had the freedom because it was his own money.

There was no committee involved. To be forward-looking is very difficult. And I think that, you know, not everyone's building a museum collection, but many people are building collections of things that they think are important that other people should recognize.

And who's doing that now? Who has interesting collections? You know, I'd love to tell you, I know I see some of them. There's always the danger that the ones you see are not necessarily the ones who are going to be important in the future. You know, it's just like, you know, the great works of literature sometimes were failures when they were first written and became popular later. 

Lisa Cooley 34:07 
So even going back to what you were seeing earlier is that I tell my clients that symbolic value or historical value will eventually line up with financial value, but it may take a hundred years. It requires history, it requires time, it requires being able to look backward and understand the context and the moment which is constantly changing. 

Marion Maneker 34:32 
Look the all art collecting is putting money at risk and what you're saying is The art is more important to me than the money so one of the reasons it's a Prestige play a flex is if you're spending a hundred million dollars on a work of art you're saying oh, this is this is not that important to me This is stuff. I you know, I think I could lose if I can spend a hundred million dollars on a painting Imagine how much money I actually have right, that's

Lisa Cooley 35:07 
I never thought about it that way. 

Marion Maneker 35:09 
That's well, that's part of it. I mean, you hope! I don't have millions of dollars yet. Look, we we're all economic beings. We all make choices.

I think this is the fundamental problem with the art market is people treat it as if it's run by different creatures. Human beings are human beings. If you sit there and try and decide, am I going to go out to that restaurant because I feel great and want to celebrate? And then you say to yourself, but you know, I don't really have the money for that and choose to do something else. You're making an economic decision. If you do that, because, hey, I haven't spent that much money and I got plenty. Let's splurge. Let's go to the spa. Let's take a vacation. You're not doing something fundamentally different. You're making economic choices based on things that have no value as goods. If you blow money on a vacation, you don't come back and think, okay, now I've invested in X or Y. The money's gone. A lot of time with art, most people I think who are buying art view it that way. "Hey, the money's gone." If later turns out, you know, you can get money back, that's great. And by the way, I do think that one of the things about art dealing is good art dealers give the people they sell to the confidence that I'll be back for this if you want to sell it sometime in the future. They don't always do that. 

Lisa Cooley 36:46 
In my experience, a lot of the works that dealers try to resell, this is a whole other conversation, but they're, they at least try, like they want to even if they're not able to. 

Marion Maneker 36:57 
Right. Well, that's that's called making a market and it gives people confidence that there's someone there. And by the way, the auction houses have been concentrating on that in recent years, raising the sell-through rates as a way of building confidence in the objects that they sell. When the auction houses were more focused on distributing works among dealers, the sell-through rates were much lower because if it didn't sell fine, it didn't sell.

Now we're very concerned because we see the results and all about things being offered and burned. But the reason the sell-through rates are up is not on the painting so much as it is on the luxury objects. So that people think, oh, if I spent good money here, this thing, I'll be able to sell it in five years and get some of my money out, if not make a profit. 

Lisa Cooley 37:53 
Could you define sell-through rates for the listeners who may not know? 

Marion Maneker 37:58 
Sure. Broadly, they tally up all of the lots they've offered for the year, and then they run the number that have sold against it, and that percentage is called the sell-through rate.

It can be done on an individual sale level, it can be done on a department level, it can be done on the sell-through rate just tells you is the level of demand. Because people, if they didn't buy this, they might buy that, but if they're very selective and they only want certain things, generally the sell-through rate falls lower. One of the things that we don't think about enough is the goal of a good auction house is to select the right property to sell and suppress or reject the works that won't. 

Lisa Cooley 38:59 
To produce better auction overall auction results. 

Marion Maneker 39:02 
Just to give people more confidence in you. I come and shop from you because you only give me the good stuff, which is why do you go to an antique dealer or any sort of dealer in something is you want their level of discernment, taste and market knowledge that if I buy from you, I'm getting the good stuff. 

Lisa Cooley 39:25 
so well said. I want to go back to something just that we were talking about earlier about the like sort of what makes the market right now because I just recently realized that so yeah we have just gone through a period where there has been a lot of focus on the identity of certain artists and sort of reevaluating artists of color and native artists and women and trying to maybe bring them more into the marketplace and that was definitely a cycle of interest.

There have been other similar cycles one of like abstraction and the and conceptual art maybe in 2005 and then another sort of wave of zombie abstraction. I don't even remember. I tried to block that out of my mind. I don't remember when that was exactly but um 2014

Marion Maneker 40:12 
Zombie Forum, Melissa, we're 24T'ing. 

Lisa Cooley 40:15 
So there are these cycles that happen and then we've just recently had one article in particular which I don't want to dwell on that was a bit reactionary sort of saying like that all sucked art was so much better in 2013 but just also sort of saying like we're like this one writer is like I'm done with this like I think it's bad I'm grossly generalizing but one thing I and I've seen a lot of responses to that but one thing nobody has ever I've seen picked up on is that like you know lots of people were buying that art it's not you know like I think those writers are really referring to like biennials and and curators but like one of the reason that that art kept selling is because the marketplace was so strong and the marketplace drives a lot of those conversations and you have just such an explosion of buyers from Brazil, from Singapore, from Korea, from China and even I've had so many conversations with young collectors that are like I'm Singaporean American and I want to buy artists of my generation and my backgrounds and I want to support them and I want to see myself reflected in the art that I hang in my house and yeah I just I just realized that like two or three days ago when I was reading one of these responses yeah well

Marion Maneker 41:39 
I don't want to discuss that article. No, we're not going to. 

Lisa Cooley 41:43 
Don't worry, it's gonna be coming. No, no, no, I- 

Marion Maneker 41:46 
I do want to comment on it, not because I'm not equipped to, because I haven't read it. I do want to point something out, all articles, I'm a writer, you're always trying to stand out and get attention. So there's always you want to overdraw something to really get it. And we're living in a political and cultural moment where there is this backlash against what people consider all of that, woke-ism for a lack of a better term. And yes, people can do things in a way that is trite and becomes exhausting.

And that is always the cultural process. We produce far more than we consider lasting. And that's actually the dynamic. We can't do it without seeing good stuff and seeing not so great stuff. And as a recently canceled artist once said, you know, "By definition, most art is mediocre". That's Chuck Close, you know. And sometimes there's very good art, but it is just not new. There's a -  I won't mention the painter - but there's a great painter I love. But it is very much using the materials of a much more famous painter from 50, 60 years ago. And I compare that. I always think of that painter as Green Day, you know, really accomplished at someone else's genre. And maybe, you know, we think great. Well, we like the genre and we're going to follow it. But I think trying to graph too much onto the artists themselves is unfair to the artists. Yes, you can use them as examples of something. Yes, we're many people buying artists post 2020. But even before then, because they wanted to show that they were aware of the lack of representation and wanted to be associated with I'm, you know, I'm bored with giving people more representation. Yes, that's exactly what happens. And it's not necessarily a bad thing, but it can get turned into something that feels rote or even insincere. And all I can say is, like I said, is that's a process. The zombie formalists, there were many interesting painters there. Yeah. And I think some of them, if you saw those things available, there will be people who want to buy them. Jacob Kassay had a great show recently in Chelsea, and he was sort of one of the poster children for all that. Yeah, I thought, when he did those silver paintings, I thought those were good works of art. Not that my opinion matters. And I thought his recent show was nice, just as someone who goes and see shows. I wouldn't mind having one of those hanging up my wall. 

Lisa Cooley 44:41 
Perfect example. 

Marion Maneker 44:44 
Yeah, so, you know, there are artists out there who get swept up and then get dropped and with luck one hopes they get rediscovered or that they keep working, That is really the important part so that there's a reason to rediscover them. 

Lisa Cooley 45:00 
Excellent. You were talking about how auction houses are moving more into selling cultural items like sneakers or memorabilia and I've seen people talking about how that's a sign that interest in art is waning, but I also sort of suspect it's just that people need a window or a doorway to enter into auctions or to enter into buying art and maybe that's it's really smart because it's a more comfortable way for them to begin.

Everybody needs a way to begin and the art world is traditionally I think very unwelcoming. 

Marion Maneker 45:44 
Oh, well, we can have a whole podcast on the unwelcome nature of the art world. And I was just recently talking to someone who runs a major gallery about exactly that paradox that everyone wants new clients. But when they show up, they treat them terribly in one form or another.

They won't speak to them. They make them buy stuff that no one else wants. But it means that, you know, look, but there are understandable reasons for why those things happen. And it's up to the person who runs their individual business. It's like totally a job to identify the good clients.

Lisa Cooley 46:20 
And seeking secondary benefits!

Marion Maneker 46:23 
None of this is easy. That's the thing. I mean, I think everyone does a lot of finger pointing acting like it's easy. It is not easy to make something that is not necessary into something that is valuable.

There is literally alchemy going on. We are turning dross into gold. This is one of the hardest things. This is the philosopher's stone. We have been trying to figure out for thousands of years how you take something that is not valuable and make it of great value. Straw led to gold, whatever way you want to. But it is alchemy and alchemy should be hard, by the way. Two different things. One, the auction houses are businesses. Their primary goal is to grow as a business. They need to generate profits, whatever their owner's goals are. They are always looking for new markets. I would not say that the increase in luxury items and cultural property is a sign that art is waning. It's that these businesses are looking to grow where they can see themselves grow profitably.

A lot of that stuff was, I wouldn't say abandoned, but the auction houses have dramatically changed the composition of what they sell over the last 20 years. One of the things that, and I wish I could quantify this better, and it's a goal of mine to do this research, but they gave up on the antiques and works of art or collectibles market, and I mean that, the old sort of collectibles curios, if you will. But my sense is that stuff is still selling, and that people are making good businesses out of it, just not necessarily on scale. And then we have the massive success of Heritage in Dallas, built starting in the coin business, but expanding aggressively into comic books and baseball cards and sports memorabilia and Hollywood memorabilia and illustration and comic book art. They are the great success in the cultural property realm, and they had record sales this year, which build upon record sales the year before, and the year before that, they are on a huge roll. So I think that cultural property thing is a thing in and of itself, and it's a function of the way our economic system works.

We skew towards a lot of people. More money ends up in fewer hands, and so people have a lot of excess income, and so they value these things. It gives their lives a sense of connection and meaning. And then on the other side of it, we've lived through a growth of popular culture over the last 75 years longer, and the objects as part of that popular culture are now valued in the way that art and literature previously were. So I think that's an addition to art. I don't think that the interest in art is necessarily waning.

I think things got very expensive, and it gave people pause. Do I really want to buy one more of these people? Do I want to spend $150,000 on this artist? That's real money. Maybe I don't need that artist. Maybe I'd be more excited spending $30,000 on this ceramic pot from this really cool potter I found. And we're seeing more the whole thing that's going on with ceramics is fascinating. 

Marion Maneker 50:15 
So I think the definition of art is expanding. I don't think that necessarily means people don't like art.

I think there have been, like I said, some structural problems with people's confidence in what they could buy, and that seemed to, like I said, hit this moment in 2022. Some of it is also maybe masked by because the high end of the market is so lumpy, and no one wants to sell their art these days. I mean, one of the things we don't know is, is this a demand issue? We don't think so. It seems to be a supply issue. I mean, the Warhol market shut off eight or ten years ago, and it's not because people don't like Warhol because they're spending a fortune on Warhol prints. 

Lisa Cooley 50:58 
Right. 

Marion Maneker 50:59 
it's because the people who own really great Warhols won't sell them. Now, maybe that will kill the demand for it eventually.

The funny thing is that's just happened, begun to happen to Picasso too. In the last year, the volume of Picasso sales has dropped. And again, a really great Picasso is going to sell for enormous amounts of money. So the problem with the asset aspect of this is people hold on to their assets. They don't want to sell their assets. One thing I will add to that is remember, there was a rapid rise in the price of art from about 2010 to 2015. Since then, the price level has been pretty much straightforward. So if you bought anything from 2015, you've got no good reason to sell it unless you really need the money. So there's a lot of people sitting on art. Until inflation has this effect, where suddenly things look really cheap and prices go up again, that's more likely what we're dealing with than that there's no demand or interest in art. 

Lisa Cooley 52:14 
I'm so happy I asked you to be a guest. This idea was going to be incredible. 

Marion Maneker 52:20 
Well, I'm sorry that I do have to go. I have one. I'm happy to. 

Lisa Cooley 52:23 
Can I ask you one really quick question? Is there, do you, do you recall having an experience with art that was transcendent and made you feel something very deeply? 

Marion Maneker 52:34 
I have always wondered about the Stendhal effect and, you know, having never experienced it myself. Now, that may be a personal failing that I've never experienced something transcendent with the work of art.

I tend to say, and I always think, you know, art is an experience and the luxury that the wealthy have who own art is not the luxury of owning it per se. It's, they're not required to schedule their experience with art. If you go to a museum or a gallery, you go at this particular moment of time, you're there briefly, even if you spend a long time in front of a work of art, it's really not very long. You can't schedule those experiences. If you live with something, there will be a moment, I don't know, late at night you come down and turn on the light. You're on the phone with a loved one. There's a tragic or an ecstatic, you know, thing that's happened. I don't know what creates those moments with the work of art, but I think they tend to be more happenstance and experience and require time for them to happen.

Then I'm going to go see the Sienna show at the Met. And while I'm standing there, I'm going to have a revelatory experience. God love you if that works for you. I always feel like I often have to go to see things multiple times because I almost get antsy in a show and I have to come back and I often will go to a show and walk through and then later walk through again because, you know, even a museum show, I'll walk through backwards now that I've seen the stuff once because looking at stuff a second time is often where you really begin to see it. But no, I would say I'm a bit of a dry analytic person and I'm not, you know, given to flights of ecstasy. 

Lisa Cooley 54:35 
I'm sure there's something in there somewhere. I know you have to go. 

Marion Maneker 54:40 
Still hoping it happens. 

Lisa Cooley 54:43 
You were incredible. Thank you so much. I'd love to talk to you again in the future and check in with you. And I always want to hear what you have to say. Thank you so much, Marion. 

Marion Maneker 54:53 
It's my pleasure, Lisa, and I'd be happy to do it again. 

Lisa Cooley 54:55 
Okay, thank you. That's our show!

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