A small request to buyers: please stop asking what the $12 million square means

I was finishing my poached halibut at Le Bernardin last Tuesday when my dining companion, a prominent Chelsea gallerist who shall remain nameless to protect his dignity, began to openly weep into his Sancerre. It was not a quiet, dignified weeping. It was the frantic, existential sobbing of a man who had just spent four hours trying to convince a mid-tier private equity partner that a canvas painted entirely with Vantablack was a safer store of value than a municipal bond.

He looked at me with red, swollen eyes and confessed something that chilled me to the bone: he is beginning to question the fundamentals of his business. It is as if the art world he knows has fallen completely off its axis.

I have sat on enough panels at Art Basel to know a crisis when I see one. For the last twenty years, the fundamentals of the contemporary art market were beautiful in their elegant simplicity. A young, troubled creative would channel their generational angst into a large-scale mixed-media installation. A gallery would harvest that angst, place it in a white room in Manhattan, and sell it to a Russian oligarch or an American tech founder for fourteen million dollars. The buyer would immediately crate the installation and ship it to a tax-free, climate-controlled bunker in Geneva, where it would sit in perfect darkness, appreciating at a reliable eight percent annually.

Nobody had to look at the art. Nobody had to understand the art. Most importantly, nobody had to talk to the public about the art. The system worked perfectly for everyone who mattered.

Now, because of Jerome Powell and the absolute tyranny of high interest rates, this sacred social contract is being ripped to shreds. With treasury yields hovering around five percent, the world’s billionaires are suddenly demanding that their art purchases offer something beyond a guaranteed return on investment. They are asking questions. They are bringing art advisors who want to discuss provenance. Some of the newer, crasser buyers are even asking if the paintings match their dining room furniture.

I ask you, the reading public: is this the society we want to live in? A society where a highly educated curator, a person holding a master’s degree in critical theory from Yale, is reduced to acting like a common retail associate?

The indignities my friend has suffered this quarter alone would break a lesser man. Just last week, he told me, a prospective buyer stood in front of a minimalist masterwork—a single, flawless blue square that previously changed hands for twelve million dollars in 2019—and asked, out loud, what it meant. My friend was forced to invent a narrative about post-industrial isolation on the spot. He is a gallerist, for heaven's sake, not a performing monkey.

We keep hearing populist complaints that the art market is broken, usually from people who have never even tried to offset the capital gains on a corporate merger by donating a Jeff Koons balloon dog to a regional museum. These critics fundamentally misunderstand the purpose of the industry. They think art is meant to be looked at by the masses in crowded, poorly lit municipal buildings. They do not understand that the true purpose of a contemporary masterpiece is to act as collateral for a massive line of credit from JPMorgan Chase.

When we force galleries to lower their prices, we are not just hurting the dealers. We are hurting the ecosystem. We are hurting the luxury shipping companies that transport the crates between freeports. We are hurting the bespoke insurance brokers in London. We are hurting the private wealth managers who rely on these inflated valuations to keep their clients' portfolios looking robust ahead of quarterly reporting.

And yes, I suppose we are hurting the artists too, though frankly, artists have always been the least important part of the art market. A good artist is merely a ticker symbol with a pulse. It is the gallery that creates the value. It is the gallery that decides a splatter of industrial latex is worth the gross domestic product of a small island nation.

If we allow the art market to fall further off its axis, we risk returning to the dark ages of the twentieth century, when people bought paintings simply because they liked looking at them. I, for one, refuse to live in a world where aesthetic pleasure is prioritized over aggressive tax optimization.

We must do our part to correct this course. I am not asking for a government bailout of the Chelsea gallery district, though I believe a strong case could be made for one. I am simply asking those of you with significant liquid capital to stop being so terribly practical. The next time you find yourself with eight to ten million dollars of undeclared liquidity, do not put it in an index fund. Go to a white cube gallery, point to the most incomprehensible pile of debris on the floor, and pay full asking price. Do it for the culture. Do it for the gallerists. Do it so my friend can finally finish his halibut in peace.