Brace yourselves, kiddos, this is a long one, but it’s an interesting and timely topic, especially to those of us who have kicked around the art world or its fringes for decades.
I picked up the current issue of Vanity Fair with a certain curiosity and trepidation. It is headlined on the cover as “Special Package: State of the Art World” and promises “the season’s messiest art scandal” and “the new blue chip.” (If you ask why I subscribe to this rag, the answer is it used to have pretty good political coverage and costs only $12 a year).
As to the contents, what we used to call the front matter in print publishing includes a full-page gusher about Kate Capshaw’s oversized photorealist portrait of her husband, director Steven Spielberg, and a couple of paragraphs about textile artist Sheila Hicks’s collaboration with Dior on the Lady Dior handbag (which retails for $3,900 to $7,000, though this is not mentioned in the piece). A kind of star map of who’s who in the art world immediately set my teeth on edge with its “Media Shower” that includes Sarah Douglas (editor of an ever shrinking art magazine empire), Roberta Smith (who retired from The New York Times as chief art critic in 2024), and Dodie Kazanjian and Calvin Tomkins (who both write for journals that are part of the same Condé Nast stable as Vanity Fair). Then there are feature-length stories about Richard Prince (does anyone still care?) and the nasty feud between art advisers Barbara Guggenheim and Abigail Asher (really, really old news), along with what appears to be an interesting profile of a sketch artist in federal immigration court (though I haven’t read it yet and am wondering what this has to do with the “art world”) and then14 pages devoted to a “new wave” of artists whose work “will hang on the walls of our institutions—and break records at auction—for decades to come.” I must be really out of it because the only names I’ve heard before are Anna Weyant (former girlfriend of megadealer Larry Gagosian, who is featured in the “Proust Questionnaire” on the back page) and Amy Sillman (wait a minute, folks—how is the 70-year-old Sillman, featured in countless museum shows, part of a “new wave”?)
But nonetheless VF may be on to something—the unstoppable nexus of art, money, and celebrity, Witness LACMA’s huge gala for “Art + Film” a few weeks ago, a star-studded event attended by Demi Moore, Paris Hilton, Amy Sherald, Kehinde Wiley, and Leonardo di Caprio. And the buckets of ink recently spilled on the auction of a staggeringly mediocre Gustav Klimt portrait at a hammer price of $236.4 million (the late, highly esteemed critic Peter Schjeldahl once judged a similar Klimt portrait “too incoherent to qualify as good painting or even as good decoration.” I wonder what he would say about this one). Maurizio Cattelan’s solid-gold toilet was also up for grabs and sold for $12 million (well, what the heck, it is fully functioning!) But note that works by Kerry James Marshall and Barkley Hendricks at this same auction failed to find buyers.
Granted I am no longer in New York, at the white-hot center of the art world, but I’m finding the trends as recounted in the news increasingly disheartening. I started reporting in the mid-1990s, at a time when artists could afford a studio in Brooklyn, mid-level galleries were thriving, and there were at least seven major print publications devoted to art on the newsstands. I’ve already commented on the demise of art criticism, but I am still digesting the celebrity aspects of the art business. It’s vexing to me, for instance, to read that Cecelia Allemani, organizer of this year’s garage-sale biennial at Site Santa Fe, is a “celebrity curator.” What does that mean?
I should note here that I’m not a big believer in the media’s definition of the “art world” as some monolithic organism, when plenty of artists are making their way just fine outside the major culture capitals of, say, Los Angeles and New York. But I do find the changes noted above kind of sad and alarming. So I reached out to several colleagues—curators, artists, critics—to get their views from the trenches over the last several decades, angling for their take on the good, the bad, and the inexplicable.
Dan Cameron: When I began working in galleries in the 1980s, the financial deal-making that fueled the art world was not so visible, in the sense that gallery owners were applauded for their taste-making and collectors were lionized for their risk-taking, but overall interest in the market rarely went much deeper, nor did discussion of that part of the art world really penetrate the realm where the all-important critical debates were taking place. There was a reason why galleries had back rooms, and art critics wouldn’t stoop to writing about money because it was simply too crass.
The first big change happened in the second half of the 1980s, particularly with the rise of Mary Boone and her star artist, Julian Schnabel. Whereas Schnabel had earned some critical bona fides the old-fashioned way, far more public and media interest was generated by the market machinations that kept his prices ascending at a meteoric rate never seen before. The archetype of the art dealer as a flashy power broker, as worthy of magazine covers as her artists, emerged alongside the media starting to do more stirring of the pot about auction results.
The second huge change was the rise of the art fair in the early 2000s, with Art Basel Miami being the prime motivator, and the busy, public weekend event supplanting the quiet, solitary art gallery as the premier site where art happened. With this shift, the transaction began to replace the object as the main topic of interest, and a new breed of financier, motivated by the potential of art as an asset class, moved in to take the reins.
Unless someone steps in with a plan to revitalize the critical discourse surrounding art, it appears we’re stuck in that loop for the foreseeable future.
Dan Cameron has been a curator and critic since the 1980s, when he organized groundbreaking shows for the New Museum in New York, which later hired him as senior curator. He organized career retrospectives of numerous artists, including Faith Ringgold, David Wojnarowicz, , Carolee Schneemann, Paul McCarthy, Cildo Meireles, William Kentridge, and Carroll Dunham. From 2006 to 2011 Cameron founded and served as artistic director of the first two editions of the Prospect New Orleans triennial, which recently completed its sixth edition. Since early 2022, Cameron has been the co-founder and co-curator of La Capilla Azul, an independent exhibition space on the island of Chiloé, in the Los Lagos region of Chile.
Laurie Fendrich: At the top of my list of the changes that I’ve seen over my artistic and art writing career is the commercialization of art. When I started out as an artist (omg!—over half a century ago), I knew dealers needed to be in the business of making money but thought both they and their collectors valued art way above money.
Things changed in the 1970s when investors with no interest in contemporary art began seeing it as an asset to flesh out their portfolios. It wasn’t long before owning contemporary art carried a social cachet that made even staid bankers look cool. In the ‘80s and ‘90s, art with the highest prices succumbed to being totally commodified. Meanwhile, at the bottom rung (where I perched), where prices were reasonable for people who bought art because they liked it and wanted it in their home, art continued to seem (at least to me) as if it mattered more than money.
Today, the splendiferousness of some of the top contemporary art galleries staggers my little artist’s imagination—huge, gorgeous, cathedral-sized spaces, showing art priced at hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of dollars, made by well-known national and international artists. Meanwhile, auction houses sell works by contemporary artists whose prices can be upward of $100 million dollars. Oh, and not to forget: Museums validify this by endlessly exhibiting this art. The result is the whole endeavor resembles the pork bellies futures market.
The second biggest change I’ve witnessed is the collapse of art criticism. Full-time, salaried art critics regularly reviewing gallery exhibitions and offering their judgment about the quality of the art they were reviewing have gone the way of the dodo bird. There are still critics writing reviews of museum exhibitions, but even that’s shrunk to almost nothing. Granted, art blogs and Substacks have replaced newspapers and journals, but they add up to a cacophony of voices, many of them timid and bloodless, and none of them standing out as a cultural force in the way, say, the Meidas Touch Substack stands out as a political force. The argumentative voices that lent excitement to much of the art writing in the 20th century and early 21st century are gone.
The last change I’ll mention is the ever-increasing professionalization of artists, which I see as anathema to art. The idea of artists having a “studio practice”—as if they’re like doctors or lawyers—is patently ridiculous. How this came about is complicated, but it’s connected to the rise of the MFA degree as the sine qua non for serious artists. The topic is explored in Howard Singerman’s Art Subjects: Making Artists in the American University, published more than 25 years ago, a book that still resonates.
Laurie Fendrich is a painter and critic, a professor emerita of Hofstra University, and the recipient of grants from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. She is also a regular contributor to the popular online newsletter Two Coats of Paint, where she publishes both fiction and essays. To quote Wikipedia: “Critics identify Fendrich as an artist whose work makes a case for the viability of geometric abstraction and the modernist tradition, while simultaneously taking a knowing jab at its quest for purity.”
Melissa Stern: ‘Tis a daunting assignment to answer the question “How has the art world changed?” I’ll begin my saying I can’t speak for the “art world” at large, I can only speak from my niche, which is a decidedly different place from that of others who may be answering this. I am not a painter. I am a sculptor who for many years made objects primarily out of clay (I now work in a wide variety of materials). Not pots, but sculptures using clay, paint and mixed materials. I came to the art world at a time when there was furious debate about “craft” and could “craft” be art. It was and continues to be a tiresome conversation but one which affected the careers of many artists like me who were straddling, if you will, the boundaries of these categories.
In New York City galleries would look at my work and sniff- “They’re fired clay. Ceramics? Go to a craft gallery.” Craft galleries would sniff and say “They’re painted, not glazed!? They have shards of steel and paper on them Go to an art gallery.” I’m being dramatic of course, but that was the crux of the issue. I showed at a wonderful gallery in the East Village called Clodough, Ross, Williams, whose three women founders showed things in any and every medium, as long as it fit into their eclectic vision. They were amazing. Sadly, they closed after being repeatedly robbed in their then pretty sketchy East Village location. I found much more sympathetic and open-minded galleries on the West Coast, which had a long history of blurring the “craft/art” distinction and was generally a much more open-minded art scene than the shockingly provincial one in New York. I had a thriving career, showing in galleries from LA to Seattle.
Moving back to New York in the ‘90s was a professional challenge, but cracks had formed and were widening in the New York art world with regard to materials and genres. Galleries and collectors were broadening their vision and galleries began to show work in more diverse media. A welcome change. However, it continues to be a roller coaster. Right now Fiber is IN! Ceramics were IN, but now they’re out again. Maybe they’ll be IN again soon! The fickle fashion of the New York art world continues apace.
Obviously the biggest changes revolve around money--the increased commodification of art and the centralization of art world power. None of this is news, but there was a time when it was easier to be a scrappy young gallery in the East Village or Williamsburg, with little money but loads of moxie. Real estate prices have driven all but a very few of those types of venues out of business. It’s very hard to be a small gallery these days without a trust fund or some other sort of consistent revenue source.
The model has just fundamentally changed on all levels. Art schools, which up until the pandemic, were factories, churning out aspiring artists into a world where there simply was never going to be an economy to support them all. (Art school enrollment has been down since 2020 and many of them are cancelling programs that they can’t monetize. It’s too soon to tell what that means in the big picture.)
The big-name galleries have gotten super big, with multiple real estate spaces (often in multiple countries) and big staff numbers to support. They are obliviously feeling the market constrict in big dramatic ways.
There are lots of unknowns right now in the art world (speaking only of New York). And legions of us who have been steadfastly working away for decades often bemoan the changes. But it’s an organic system and one inextricably tied to fashion, entertainment and finance. I just put my head down and keep on trying to make the best work I can. I mean, that’s all we artists can really do, right?
Melissa Stern has worked in sculpture, photography and drawing for more than 30 years, exhibiting throughout the U.S., as well as in Europe and Asia. Her multi-media installation exhibition, “The Talking Cure,” has been traveling to museums around the States. since 2012, and her work is featured in a number of prominent corporate and museum collections including News Corporation, JP Morgan, The Arkansas Art Center, the American Museum of Ceramic Art, Racine Art Museum, and the Weisman Art Museum in Minneapolis. With a background in anthropology, Stern’s work reflects both non-Western and outsider-art influences. Her drawings, collages, and figurative sculptures are richly drawn and deeply layered, with quirky, often dark humor.
David S. Rubin: In my roles as a curator and a writer I have been active in the contemporary art world since the 1970s, so, yes, I have seen many changes and two immediately come to mind: the rise of wokeness in terms of what is being exhibited, and the technological changes that have affected us all.
When I began my career, it was rare to see museum shows or gallery exhibitions dedicated to female artists. Today, by contrast, the antiestablishment feminist collective The Guerrilla Girls are exhibiting at the Tate Modern and the Getty Research Institute. Similarly, Black artists like Kerry James Marshall, Kara Walker, Carrie Mae Weems, and numerous others have had major retrospectives in mainstream museums. I remember the late 1980s being a real turning point for curatorial attention being given to Latinx artists. There was even a grant that Metropolitan Life awarded specifically for that purpose, and I secured one for my exhibition “Contemporary Hispanic Shrines” at Albright College’s Freedman Gallery in 1989. At around the same time, Act Up launched the “Day Without Art” AIDS initiative. More than two decades have passed and LGBTQ+ themed exhibitions have become ubiquitous. Additionally, SoHo is now home to the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art, which is specifically dedicated to collecting and exhibiting Queer art.
Like others of the boomer generation, I wrote my first articles and reviews on a typewriter—who remembers carbon paper and correction tape? For every revision, I had to start from scratch. With the advent of digital technology and the internet, everything became a little bit easier and more expedient. When doing graduate research I would spend hours at the New York Public Library, combing through the card catalog or looking up articles in bulky indices. Today, I can just check Google, WorldCat, or Amazon. No longer do I have to fiddle with slides or projectors, as I can download jpegs from a website or photograph a work on my own with my phone.
So, while wokeness is under attack from right-wing politicians and the internet has received a fair amount of blame for many of today’s social ills, the art world has not given up on empathy, and digital tools have significantly improved the lives of curators, writers, and anyone else with a quest for knowledge.
David S. Rubin is a Los Angeles-based curator, writer, and artist. He has held curatorial positions at the San Francisco Art Institute, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Phoenix Art Museum, the Contemporary Arts Center New Orleans, and the San Antonio Museum of Art. As an art critic, Rubin has written for Arts Magazine, Art in America, Visual Art Source, Artillery, Hyperallergic, and other art journals. As an artist, Rubin is known for automatic drawing, and his works have been exhibited at California State University Northridge Art Galleries, Blue Star Contemporary, San Antonio, and the Bradbury Art Museum at Arkansas State University and are in the collections of the Ogden Museum of Contemporary Art and the Bradbury Art Museum.
The best art is everywhere and exists on its own. The great urban centers of art have long given in to the global pandemic of Consumerist Capitalism on steroids. Some critics have now become online "influencers", often behaving like clowns, which for me fairly defines the nature of the "Art World" in 2025. There is too much of everything now. After a lifetime of making art, I continue in quiet studio devotion and try to ignore how ridiculous the circuses have become.
You describe our contemporary culture and the fixation on economics.