True Colors: MoMA PS1’s Greater New York, the New Museum Triennial, and the Price of the Now!

Last week, I was speaking to Alain Servais, a jet-setting collector who during the Before Times–era peak of globetrotting madness attended roughly 30 fairs a year, when he brought up something of an open secret among art dealers and their clients. At surveys of new art such as Greater New York and the New Museum Triennial, if the wall text says that the work is courtesy of the artist and their commercial gallery, that means, more often than not, the work is for sale.

“My favorite place to see art and even to buy art is at museums and biennials,” Servais said on air as I interviewed him for a podcast. “People are shocked sometimes when I say that.… Rather than going to art fairs and getting the second- or the third-quality works—because normally the artists will keep the best for the museums—you go to MoMA PS1 or go to the New Museum and the works are sometimes available, even if some know this trick. This is the best place to buy.”

Until recently, this would be considered a pretty niche approach—Greater New York could never be confused with an art fair. Held in MoMA PS1’s former schoolhouse digs in Long Island City and put together just once every five years, the show is a scaled-back, NYC–minded version of, say, Documenta, the quinquennial survey of contemporary art that goes down next year in the sleepy town of Kassel, Germany. It’s a methodical show where artists are picked following years of studio visits, and market buzz takes a back seat to curatorial crit-speak.

But the thirst for fresh material among the world’s collecting class is such that any high-profile exhibition of new work by institution-appointed artists is greeted with a feeding frenzy. Greater New York—and, later this month, the New Museum Triennial, another few-times-per-decade survey that attempts to take the cultural temperature—comes at a time when the demand for whisked-from-the-studio work is hitting an apex. Mega-galleries such as Hauser & Wirth have priced works by their art stars at unheard of prices, putting off collectors with medium-sized pocketbooks. Last month that very gallery sold out a show of new work by Avery Singer for as much as $1.2 million per painting. In February 2020, similarly sized works were going for just under $500,000. It’s not just Singer. Hauser & Wirth also sold a new painting by Rashid Johnson for $975,000 in September. In the months before lockdown, a larger work by Johnson sold from the gallery for $595,000.

And the gold rush has spurred on change in real time. The hiring of art-fair guru Noah Horowitz at Sotheby’s (reported by True Colors in August) was apparently spurred on partially by the hope that he could convince galleries that he worked with at Art Basel to consign new work to the auction house instead. The online endeavour Platform is essentially an eternal digital art fair backed by David Zwirner where smaller galleries can offer works by their lesser-known artists to the ever-ravenous clientele.

And this week, Sotheby’s announced that it would whip up out of thin air an entirely new evening sale called The Now, devoted to work by emerging artists, who previously were relegated to the minor-league auctions that happen during the daytime.The demand for new work, the house suggested, was simply too much to ignore.

“We are seeing the rapid emergence of a new generation of collectors who feel a real connection with the art of their own time,” said Brooke Lampley, Sotheby’s worldwide head of sales for global fine art, in a press release, by way of explaining the creation of an entirely new category of art that’s more contemporary than Contemporary.

Which brings us to Greater New York, which opened to the public Thursday after a couple days of preview for press and patrons. I visited Tuesday morning, arriving at the still-scrappy art space to find a thorough, impressive survey of 47 artists and collectives, from millennial discoveries to older artists with work placed in a new context—a show that, in curator-ese, “offers new insights and opens up geographic and historical boundaries by pinpointing both specific and expanded narratives of the local in a city that provokes a multitude of perspectives.” Um, sure!

But the careful observer was able to read between the lines when it came to how these works will eventually go from institution to collection. (It’s worth noting that MoMA PS1, unlike its big sister in Manhattan, is not a collecting institution, and thus does not acquire any works itself.) On the second floor, an installation by Steffani Jemison consisted of a series of polished stones on a platform, and rumbling next to the platform were three rock tumblers, smoothing over the rough products of geology that would eventually be turned into a work, the churn of art-making laid bare in the museum.

The wall text was revealing. Jemison had exhibited at the small but influential New York art space run by Kai Matsumiya, but the work was “courtesy the artist and Greene Naftali,” referring to the Chelsea stalwart that represents global artists such as Alex Israel, Haegue Yang, and Cory Arcangel. Indeed, the gallery’s website confirms that they had taken on the rising star, and will open a show next month, apparently to take advantage of the propulsion caused by the show in Queens.

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