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“I Bought Andy Warhol”
Author Richard Polsky Publishes a Sequel
By Kelly Crow for The Wall Street Journal Online
Six years ago, Pop art dealer Richard Polsky caused a stir in the art world with his gossipy memoir about the art business, “I Bought Andy Warhol.” Yesterday, he published a follow-up, “I Sold Andy Warhol (too soon),” which chronicles his days of chasing art deals during the height of the buying boom.
Speakeasy called Mr. Polsky at his home in Sausalito, Calif., to see how he and the gallery crowd are holding up during the recession. Here is the edited excerpt.
Speakeasy: In your book, your say the business of buying and selling art is a lot like “high school with money.” How’s the mood in the cafeteria these days?
RP: It’s like grade school with money now. I feel like we’ve all digressed. People become art dealers because they can afford to become art dealers, but it’s not a business so much as a lifestyle. You’re attracted to the life of going to art fairs, hanging out at artists’ studios and taking collectors out to eat. The whole trip of it. And it’s very hard to treat it like a business because you’re dealing with crazy behavior.
A dealer once told me he paid $150,000 for a painting and sold it five years later for $175,000. He was bragging to me about his profit, but I had to wonder what the carrying costs of owning that painting were all those years and what the interest might have been on his line of credit for paying it off. You do the math and he lost money on that deal. People in this field don’t understand Business 101.
During the boom era, you said your role evolved from selling artworks to working as a “financial art advisor” for collectors. How’s that line of work holding up?
I’m helping a collector put a painting up for auction this fall, and what I’m noticing is that Sotheby’s and Christie’s are becoming more detail-oriented. You no longer get this sweeping “Yes” to whatever you want to sell. The vibe is, “We’ve got to really pay attention here.” Every deal counts now, and every million dollars matters to these auction houses. In 2007, they wanted the $10 million paintings, but now they’re willing to talk. The bottom line has shifted.
Your first book revolves around your quest to buy a silkscreen self-portrait of Andy Warhol wearing his spiky silver wig, a portrait often called his “Fright Wig” series. You paid $47,500 for a green version in 1998, which you auctioned off three years ago for $375,000. The profit looked good until you watched a similar “Fright Wig” sell for $2.6 million in 2007 during the market’s height. What’s the going rate for a “Fright Wig” these days?
I hate to say it, but it’s probably back down to about $400,000. There were a group of three “Fright Wigs” that were sold as one lot for $1.2 million this February at Sotheby’s, so I can base it on that.
Heading into the fall art season, which artists seem to be faring well?
In general, prices are off by about a third. Certain artists are holding up better that others, like Roy Lichtenstein and Alexander Calder. Warhol’s market is solidifying.
Who’s becoming a tougher sell?
Anyone whose market saw a lot of speculation, like Ed Ruscha. Richard Prince’s “Nurse” paintings also peaked a little over $8 million and they’re under $3 million now. Damien Hirst is also taking a hit.
Have you checked out the galleries in Chelsea lately?
There’s a lot less foot traffic. If you don’t have a street-level space, you’re screwed. People don’t want to climb stairs or wait for the elevator –- they have too many other options. So it’s about high visibility, showing fewer artists and leaving your shows up longer to keep your overhead down.
Is there any good news?
The upside is that if you’re a great artist, you might be getting treated better because the dealers are realizing they only have a few long-term prospects, so they want to really give their best artists the promotion they need.
The White House wants to reform Wall Street –- how would you fix the art market?
This may sound radical, but I wouldn’t mind if the art market was regulated. My colleagues would kill me for saying it, but it wouldn’t be such a bad thing if dealers had to pass an exam to sell art, a test on art history, on the history of the profession and how to price art.
People trade million-dollar paintings with a handshake, and it’s all built on trust. When anyone betrays that trust, there’s little recourse and no SEC to come charging in and checking licenses.
In the art world, values are set when I say a painting is good and you say a painting is great and whoever is right makes the most money. You can’t teach that easily, but I do think we can ask for more due diligence.
What’s the best thing a collector can do this season?
Go to New York, see as many shows at the galleries and museums that you have the patience for, and have a conversation about what you like. Insist on meeting the gallery director and sit down for 10 minutes and listen to their pitch. Don’t just look at the art -– hear about it and try to discern the difference between the propaganda and the truth.
What’s the worst thing a collector could do now?
Ignore things.
Looking back through the annals of art-world power, you say that collectors called the shots in the 1950s, artists ruled the 1960s, and dealers owned the 1980s. The auction houses took over during the past few years, but who’s on top now?
Collectors. When there’s a real shake-up, we always go back to connoisseurship, to the ones who decide which art will stand the test of time. Most art that I see is a one-liner -– you see it, you nod, you get it, you move on and forget it. The good stuff that will be worth money makes you go back a second time. Collectors are going after art that’s well-executed and seems to have a soul. The rest? Forget it. It’s not getting sold now.
Which art sales or fairs are you hitting or skipping this fall?
I will go to auctions in New York in November and Basel Miami in December, just to see what changes are afoot. But the art fairs are becoming less important. Their model is all about cash and carry. The auction houses are also getting less important, and the galleries are getting more important. It’s not a party atmosphere, and that’s what art fairs are all about.
Everyone is a lot more sober –- they still want to buy art, but they want to be thoughtful about what they’re doing. No one is frantic because they haven’t bought any paintings yet today. I wish they were, but that feeling is over.
When prices started freefalling last fall, did you ever reconsider the title of your book to something like “I sold Andy Warhol (I swear)?”
I’ve had a few friends tell me I ought to just drop the “(too soon)” part of it, and but that’s how I felt in the moment a couple years when that other “Fright Wig” sold for $2.6 million. That was my brief moment when I could’ve sold my painting and become a millionaire, but it was like watching someone else win the lottery. There’s no use beating myself up over it now. No one can time a market perfectly every time.
A Competitive Frame of Mind
Scenes from the art-dealer world: venal, volatile, infantile . . . and fun.
By ALEXANDRA PEERS for The Wall Street Journal
When Richard Polsky got his start as an art dealer on the West Coast in the 1980s, it was a time of easy money. He neatly captures the moment "I Sold Andy Warhol (Too Soon)": "Armed with $500,000 in credit from Santa Monica Bank, I spent every penny buying inventory, sold everything, reloaded and did it all over again. . . My income was the equivalent of a good orthopedic surgeon's. The embarrassing thing was that almost anyone with a bankroll could do what I did."
And they did. The 1980s were the era of the dealer, Mr. Polsky notes. In the 1950s, power had lain with collectors they were scarce, and the ones who bought modern art were considered eccentrics. Power shifted to the artists in the 1960s as demand for their work grew. By the 1980s, investors flush with Wall Street riches had flooded into the marketplace. Soon there were waiting lists for the latest pieces of certain artists; buyers began collecting a dealer's entire "stable." Over the past decade or so the industry has been roiled yet again: Auction houses have begun buying contemporary artwork wholesale from the manufacturer, so to speak and cutting out the dealer middleman.
Mr. Polsky has witnessed much of this art-world evolution from his perch as a private dealer in San Francisco. In "I Sold Andy Warhol (Too Soon)," he weaves his personal story into the story of a business culture that has grown more venal and volatile in recent years.
The book takes its title from an episode in Mr. Polsky's life: Newly married in 2005, short on cash and eager to please his bride, who has a taste for pricey designer clothing, he ignores the advice of his mother and indulges his wife's request that he sell his favorite piece of art, Andy Warhol's "Fright Wig" self-portrait. (Mr. Polsky's 12-year campaign to buy the picture in the first place was the subject of his 2003 memoir, "I Bought Andy Warhol.") The sale brings in $304,000 enough to purchase more than a few frocks. But Mr. Polsky begins to miss the Warhol. He watches, sickened, as Pop Art prices skyrocket and paintings similar to his own begin selling for 10 times the price fetched by "Fright Wig."
And Mr. Polsky doesn't just watch the multimillion-dollar deals going down: Sometimes he brokers them, or tries to. In one instance, he calls a client excited to report that, a week after having bought a painting, the collector can turn right round and sell it for a quick $250,000 profit. The collector declines the offer. Worse, he is right to do so: At auction, the collector soon sells the painting for a profit of nearly $500,000.
Such trading-up was typical of the time. Mr. Polsky describes how newly minted collectors, once bitten by the art bug, start flipping works to buy better ones, climbing "the art world pyramid" gaining access to the most desired work, raising their profile in the hot-house world of collectors and feeding what often appears to be an addiction.
Art dealers have played a pivotal role in this pricey shuffle, and Mr. Polsky paints them as an entertainingly infantile, manipulative bunch. A spat between a dealer and collector in a Waldorf-Astoria hotel room ends with the visiting collector, certain that he has been overcharged for art, spitefully ripping open the most expensive item in the mini-bar. Call it an $11.95 macadamia-nut revenge. A prominent dealer whom Mr. Polsky runs into on an airplane takes pains to point out that he is reading Salman Rushdie in first class while Mr. Polsky is reading about baseball in coach.
"The nature of the art business is that it's filled with pettiness and jealousy," Mr. Polsky writes. "That's because anyone can become an art dealer . . . so everyone is insecure about their accomplishments, which often leads to a lot of bad behavior." But the business, he notes, is still one of handshake deals. "Contracts are meaningless. If someone reneges on a deal, the whole art world finds out and the dealer is effectively excommunicated."
That Mr. Polsky operates at the periphery of the art world, and knows it, is an appealing aspect of "I Sold Andy Warhol (Too Soon)." He acknowledges that he won't even try to negotiate a better price for a client if he is doing a deal with one of the more influential galleries. Meanwhile, he is routinely snubbed by more powerful colleagues ("the big guys"). At Sotheby's one night, "the room resembled a herd of ostriches as people strained their necks looking for the most worthwhile person to talk to." It is clear from his account that no one in the room was straining an ostrich neck to look for him.
When Mr. Polsky carries his self-deprecation beyond the art world itself, his story flags. Sad-sack descriptions of his love life are not likely win much sympathy from readers. We need to know less, not more, about the quick meltdown of his marriage and about his bitterness over another woman who, in his telling, led him on but didn't close the deal in bed.
In Mr. Polsky's view, art dealers have turned into investment advisers and intermediaries, taking positions in artists rather than supporting their careers. Dealers today, he suggests, negotiate for shrinking percentages and find themselves reduced to wheedling "finder's fees" from auctioneers for simply pointing a client in the right direction. But he still makes it all sound a bit like fun. As hard as he hustles, Mr. Polsky says, he always feels as if he is on vacation.
The economic downturn has been brutal for the art business, but Mr. Polsky predicts that the bad times will be short-lived. Soon art sellers may reach a point, he says, where they will throw up their hands "and shout 'I'll take whatever I can get!,' buyers will step in and the whole cycle will begin anew." At that point, he will probably buy Andy Warhol again.
