In 'BOOM,' Author Michael Shnayerson Explores The Big Business Of Contemporary Art

When author and journalist Michael Shnayerson set out to write a book about the big business of contemporary art, he admits that he approached the topic not as an expert, but as a relative neophyte.

“I could tell a Pollock from a de Kooning,” Mr. Shnayerson said during a recent interview in Sag Harbor where he lives, “but didn’t know more than that.”

What he did know, however, was that the buying and selling of art had become big business over the course of the previous seven years or so.

“I was struck by how dramatic this new market was,” he admitted.

In fact, you could say the market was booming.

“BOOM: Mad Money, Mega Dealers, and the Rise of Contemporary Art” is the name of Mr. Shnayerson’s new book which delves into the business of the art world over the course of the last seven decades. It’s a period that was first dominated by people like Peggy Guggenheim—dealers who were strong advocates for up-and-coming artists—followed by dealers like Leo Castelli who paid stipends to artists they believed in until they caught the eye of collectors. Finally, Mr. Shnayerson explores the art business through the more recent decades and the realm of mega-dealers like David Zirner, Arne and Marc Glimcher, and, the most mega of them all, Larry Gagosian, who has no fewer than 17 galleries in a dozen countries around the world and every one of them selling work by the hottest names in contemporary art.

On Thursday, August 1, at 5 p.m., Mr. Shnayerson will be at the Parrish Art Museum where he will join museum director Terrie Sultan for a conversation about the meteoric rise of the largest unregulated financial market in the world, namely the contemporary art market.

For Mr. Shnayerson, like many of the topics he has written about in the past as a contributing editor to Vanity Fair and as the author of seven non-fiction books, this project grew out of his innate interest to learn more about a subject that intrigued him.

“I approached this not as an art critic or someone who really knows very much about art, but because I was curious,” he said. “I had a naïve idea that a journalist is allowed to look into anything, which is sort of true. But sometimes it’s more challenging than you anticipate.”

And by all accounts, he says, this was a challenging book to write.

Initially, Mr. Shnayerson envisioned telling the whole story of contemporary art from the post war years through today, but soon realized that was too broad a subject. He realized he would need to narrow it down in order for it to be manageable.

“That's when I looked at dealers as the arbiters of the art world. You can’t have art without artists, but you can’t have it without dealers either,” he said. “Dealers have always been in the center of the arena and that dovetailed well with my desire to make Larry Gagosian a very central character.”

But long before there was Larry Gagogsian, there was Peggy Guggenheim who famously championed Jackson Pollock, taking him from obscurity to fame.

“In the beginning it’s Betty Parsons, Guggenheim and [Sidney] Janis. They were the ones who scooped up this new art that came to be known as Abstract Expressionism,” said Mr. Shnayerson. “The irony was, there was no art market at this time. The dealers were art lovers and good friends of the artists they were trying to promote. The artists didn’t expect more than $1,000 or $1,500 for a piece of work. Everything modest then.”

“Yet by the end of the ’50s, the market was already changing.”

Mr. Shnayerson explains that in 1959 when Guggenheim returned to New York from Venice, where she had been living, she was shocked to find that people had begun purchasing art as if they were buying shares of stock.

It was the mentality of art as investment that would continue to inform the contemporary art market for decades to come.

“That’s also when Leo Castelli came in the picture and changed the market profoundly,” Mr. Shnayerson said.

Castelli was an Italian émigré who got into contemporary art out of curiosity. He became acquainted with artists and dealers, and among the young artists he took on was Jasper Johns, an upstairs neighbor of Robert Rauschenberg.

“Castelli paid stipends to his artists and kept them going. Later on, he ushered in the Pop Art era, but it was still not huge in the way of money,” Mr. Shnayerson said.

All that would soon change and Mr. Shnayerson points to the famous 1973 Scull Auction at Sotheby Parke Bernet as the turning point. Robert Scull, a wealthy taxicab business owner, was a collector of Abstract Expressionist and Pop Art.

“He and his wife were crazed art collectors and through the ’60s they bought from Castelli and a lot of other dealers, including Arne Glimcher, who is still with us and overseeing the Pace Gallery,” Mr. Shnayerson said. “But the Sculls were notorious for bargaining, and Castelli would sell work for half the price. He’d say, ‘I think it would fit well in their collection.’”

“The auction in ’73 absolutely shocked the art world. The Sculls were getting divorced, Pieces went for $100,000 that had been only $1,000,” he explained. “It revved up the market and those prices started to define the market. It was really exciting.”

It was the beginning of the new active market in art and a whole generation of collectors who were mindful of its growing value. By the ’80s, the art world revved up that much more, noted Mr. Shnayerson.

“You began seeing art sold for $10 million,” he said. “By the ’80s, there was a sense of giddiness about the market. Jim Jacobs who became an art trader sometimes sold the same Warhols twice in the span of a day.”

By the 1990s, Leo Castelli was an old man and Larry Gagosian had become the biggest dealer in the business. An aggressive young dealer, Mr. Shnayerson explained that Mr. Gagosian understood how to match buyers and sellers, even if the two parties initially had no intention of being either. In 1986, “Rabbit,” a giant sculpture of an inflatable bunny by Gagosian artist Jeff Koons, sold for more than $91 million at Christie’s. It was a new auction record for a work by a living artist.

Interviewing Mr. Gagosian was a vital part of Mr. Shnayerson’s book and he said he spent three years working to convince the dealer to agree to an interview.

“It was only when I interviewed three other mega dealers that he decided maybe it would be good to be in that community,” he said, noting that he was granted two, one-hour sessions with the dealer. During those sessions, he learned that Mr. Gagosian had realized early on that rather than taking on artists just starting out in their career, it made more sense to represent artists who were already halfway up the ladder.

“Sometimes he had to restrain himself,” Mr. Shanyerson said. “He’d see a young artist who had not yet gotten far enough. People disdained Gagosian for that, but they also saw he was a great dealer.”

While Larry Gagosian is a pivotal figure in Mr. Shnayerson’s book, he isn’t the only mega dealer in its pages. Other figures in the art world such as David Zwirner and Iwan Wirth also figure prominently in its pages.

“I didn’t want to write a biography of Gagosian, even though one had not be done, but in fact I wanted to cover as many important dealers as I could find,” said Mr. Shnayerson. “I was also really not motivated by any search for the dark side of contemporary art.

“I just wanted to tell the story of these very interesting characters.”

And with “BOOM,” there are certainly plenty of stories to tell about the big business of art.

Michael Shnayerson discusses “BOOM: Mad Money Mega Dealers, and the Rise of Contemporary Art” with Parrish Director Terrie Sultan on Thursday, August 1, at 5 p.m. Admission is $12 (free for members and students with ID). The Parrish Art Museum is at 279 Montauk Highway in Water Mill. For information visit parrishaart.org.