Another heads up from Dear Art Dealer…
According to a Chelsea Art Galleries announcement, "the sales for the three main contemporary art auctions in New York, May 15-18th, totalled $871 million."
Of the top twenty highest grossing artists, I recognized eight (Richter and Wesselman news to me). I'm too lazy to do the research, but they're all dead, aren't they? Supply and demand at work here. I recognized only one between 11-20, Richard Diebenkorn, and only because I remembered that someone had tried to auction off a fake Diebenkorn on Ebay and created a big scandal a couple of years ago. There are two women between 11-20, none among the top ten.
Among the top twenty biggest surprises (the artists with the highest sales-to-estimate ratios; none of who I recognized), I see one Japanese name and one what appears to be an African name. I assume all the rest are white, since I don't see a single recognizably African, Asian, or Hispanic name. In any case, they were dwarfed in absolute terms by the top twenty.
My conclusion is that if you're an artist, it still pays to be dead, white, and male. Now I am a man, and I can always die, if that's what it takes. So, if I could only...
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